© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
While 10 am may be a shocking time to set out nature-trailing, it is the time when insects wake up and think of breakfast. Back at the Yamuna Biodiversity Park after a long interval, the first thing that struck me was how lush and green the whole place looked, with the grass fountaining up, some beginning to delicately flower. And, as always, the sense of quiet and tranquility that pervades the place.
The peacocks, alas, with their trains in tatters (they drop the feathers after the breeding season) drifted away, embarrassed, but I wonder if they are also secretly relieved to have gotten rid of those heavy cloaks that make it difficult for a quick getaway from a predator. As we approach the large waterbody, we hear the harsh quacks of ducks, but there’s not one in sight. They are probably spot-billed ducks!
There are no other birds on the water, either. The cormorants have not yet arrived, nor have any of the wintering waterfowl. But on the island there are several juvenile darters striking melodramatic, javelin poses, with their wings and necks outstretched – they must have been born and brought up here. A stately grey heron stands stock still, staring, gimlet-eyed into space and you wonder what it is contemplating.
The tall grasses are ideal habitat for warblers, and sure enough you hear the xylophone-like calls of the yellow-bellied prinia, a little bird, dressed in ash grey, pale yellow and white, that seems to take delight in tormenting birders by blithely calling out to them while remaining invisible. Also invisible and happily trilling are the green bee-eaters, but they, you know, are probably skating high in the heavens snapping up dragonflies and other insects.
This is the best season for dragonflies and they are everywhere. Saffron-gold ones, with shimmering wings, garnet ones, drifting close to the earth, navy and sky blue ones that rest fitfully on leaves and those so well disguised as strips of grass that they seem to appear and disappear like magic. They may look ethereal, and delicate, with eyes like precious stones, but don’t be fooled for a second: they are voracious predators in their own right, not averse to a bit of cannibalism; the best aerial insect attackers around.
Some 300 million years ago, they had wingspans of up to 70 cm (2.5 ft.), and for the last 150 million years have seen no reason to change their basic structure – except that they’ve got (mercifully) smaller since then! Imagine being chased by a squadron flaunting that kind of wingspan, armed with proportionately large spiked baskets (their legs) in which to scoop you up, before chomping your head off!
The bamboo bridge spanning the ‘shallow’ winding waterbody in the park is another ideal place to simply stand and stare. A cool breeze funnels through, and in the water you can see the dark shadows of fish as they twist and swirl just under the surface. Some distance away, hidden among the foliage shrouding the bank, you spot a pair of raptors. They are a little smaller, you think than a shikra, and they flutter from spindly branch to spindly branch, sometimes losing their balance. One of them flutters out over the water: it is beige-brown with a splotchy black and white breast and has the raptor’s fierce, wild eyes – and now seems to be hunting dragonflies. The second bird suddenly flies out of the thicket towards you and over the bridge, with swift shallow wing-beats and already you are arguing with yourself as to what they could be. Sadly, they were too well hidden and too far away to photograph. Back home you check the literature, frowning over possibilities before coming to the conclusion that they were probably juvenile shikras. But I’d never seen a pair of them together: besides, the ladies and gents dress differently (the ladies are dark brown, the gents, silvery-grey and rust and smaller) and these two were seemingly identical. Siblings from the same nest?
If you waited quietly on the bridge during the afternoon, I was told, you could sometimes see bitterns emerge from the reeds: and these are notoriously shy birds, difficult to winkle out.
The bamboo poles that make up the bridge provide ideal nesting sites for the metallic inky-black carpenter bees that thrum around your ears like miniature motors. Apparently, only annoyed lady bees will sting you, so it’s best not to get on their nerves. They look like tough little flying machines, zinging around, but I’ve seen one that was taken down by large black ants in a bed of tori. It must have hovered down for a sip of nectar on a bloom the ants thought was theirs, and they just went for it. They must have first damaged its wings, because try desperately as it did, revving up to the maximum, it could not lift off and just thrummed from one part of the creeper to another. The ants followed ferociously, biting away until the wings (and then legs) came off – and well that was that. These bees are solitary, so there was no way it could have summoned backup like perhaps normal honeybees would have done.
Often, the fewer species you see on a nature ramble, the better it is because you give them more time and attention. And that’s when they reveal their secrets to you. Well, exactly the same holds true for us, too.
