soliloquies in the outdoors…
Larks have had a distinct section in the canvas of my thoughts in recent times, mostly stuck on to the sub-conscious tapestry since I see a couple of species a lot while running and the Josh Ritter song, so Paul Simon-esque, starts playing in the head almost immediately… they’re part grumpy and part pensive, these …
Cuckoo, harbinger of rains, keeper of time… some resident, some migrant, all parasite… ‘tis a rather intriguing avian, the cuckoo… biologically, culturally, philosophically, or etymologically… at times endearing, at times appalling… ‘Twas a Jacobin cuckoo that we’d spotted, meandering through a rather sultry afternoon in Orchha looking for birds… as is the norm with this …
Vultures, the gore in their subsistence often veils the nobility of their purpose and the mostly dire circumstances they face in this tumultuous phase of the Anthropocene… diclofenac brought that into the limelight for a while (a problem that is now manifesting in other forms), but that’s only for the woke, one reckons, while wondering …
Tahrs, they ruminate… like most of their ungulate brethren, both literally and figuratively… jaws in their slow, perpetual drawl… scuttling along hurriedly to bite the grass and then standing and gazing dreamily as they work on the cud… like most prey, their existence is marked by a stoical acceptance – expecting death at every step, …
Agamas, I somehow tend to find a kind of melancholy in their expression… maybe ‘tis a because of the head being held up high but in edginess rather than pride… or the furious activity one can feel even as they stand stock-still… in their reptilian universe, agamas would be the average Joe (or Jane), a …
Birds, for all their niftiness, can’t find their way around an unrelenting sun at times… ‘tis a leveller of sorts, this heat… you may fly but I can sweat… a feeble attempt at one-upmanship over the avifauna, for when the heat reaches its zenith, every natural adaptation needs a pinch of luck to concoct the …
Birds, the fidgety kind, anyone who likes to stalk them in lush, dense forests is well acquainted with the acoustic delights and visual disappointments… the chirps and rustles spark hope… the human crouches and crawls in a misconception of stealth, the avifauna revels in the foliage… both parties trying to avoid a startle, one looking …
Musings on backyard birds in the monsoons…
Falcons are little assassins that operate rather discreetly as the larger birds of prey hog the (higher perches and the) limelight… eagles and their kin carry an air of regalia, hunting with a pomp that comes with a bulky, imposing gait… hawks prefer to lay an ambush, letting the prey do a bit of the …
Spring in the mountains, a time when the sun is finally emboldened enough to begin scrubbing away the vestiges of winter, the cold begins to lose its bite and the canopy starts humming to the wind… the brooding dark winter is a time to contemplate, whilst on the other side of the vernal equinox, ‘tis …