nature

This is butterfly season; you must have noticed these beautiful creatures fluttering past you, in the gardens and even on the roads, everywhere in the city. If you observe them carefully, you will find many moments of drama and tension! One lesser-known fact about butterflies is that they hatch out of the pupa (it's called eclosing) as fully mature adults; something I had to think about and accept, being only used to a progression of living beings from infanthood onwards to adulthood. Because of this fact, sometimes, male butterflies try to mate with a female as soon as she's emerged…

On the butterfly group that I belong to, one member told us about the Bear Rescue Centre (BRC) at Bannerghatta, and asked for volunteers.It was then decided that several of us would visit the Centre and then decide on who would be able to volunteer. Since the Centre personnel wanted only 15 participants in each group, two groups of 15 members each were constituted. One group visited on Saturday, the 16th of March, and the other on Saturday, the 23rd of March. I was with the second group, and my anticipation was not disappointed. The visit to the Centre, which…

Since all of us are becoming so polarized by caste these days, I thought I would take a tongue-in-cheek look at the four varnas, or castes, into which I can categorize the living beings around us. No offence meant, this is a light-hearted classification, intended to drive home the point that dividing ourselves by "caste" is not a good thing to do! The Brahmins of the "upper caste" is easily represented as there are several creatures with the word in their name. Here is the Brahminy Kite: See the beauty of the Brahminy Skink: There is also the Brahminy Myna…

For a while now, the world of insects and spiders has begun to be revealed to everyone, through the medium of photography. As the micro-sized creatures are captured through macro photography, stunningly weird-looking creatures appear on social media feeds, making us feel that these, surely, are beings from a different planet! No, these creatures are not "out of this world" at all. It's just that their tiny size prevents us from seeing them in detail. Another reason why we know little about them is that they are often so well camouflaged, as leaves, bark, or other natural phenomena, that we…

A Mushroom... (or toadstool) is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or on its food source. In this post, I'd like to share the variety of mushrooms I've been seeing in the monsoon season, in and around the city!   The terms "mushroom" and "toadstool" go back centuries and were never precisely defined, nor was there consensus on application. Between 1400 and 1600 AD, the terms mushrom, mushrum, muscheron, mousheroms, mussheron, or musserouns were used. Puffball Mushroom Black Puffball Many species of mushrooms seemingly appear overnight, growing or expanding rapidly. This phenomenon is the…

Birds know no borders; the ones that we go to see in Karnataka fly off and can be seen once we cross over into Kerala! So when the birders of Kasargod announced the second Kidoor Bird Fest, to celebrate both the first sighting of the Orange-breasted Green Pigeon Photo credit: Sarala Jeevanthi Gamage and the birthday of Dr Salim Ali, the noted ornithologist, it was clear that this would be a productive birding weekend. The participants and the organizers. The festival was a bigger event than it was in 2017, because this time, birders from all over Karnataka (see featured…

I was about to write something about this event for my blog, and realized my official report for the Karnataka Forest Dept would do just as well! The founder-members of Bangalore Butterfly Club (BBC), from Nagraj's slide presentation: The Karwar Swift, not very common. The second Butterfly Festival at Doresanipalya Forest Research Station, celebrated on 17th November, 2018, was very successful. These ladies, making the rangoli, brought as much of colour as the butterflies did, to the event. Though limitations on the space available at the venue, in terms of the hall for presentations, resulted in the event not being…

Animal rescue is not always a matter of birds and mammals...today, we assisted in a difficult birth, and hope we saved a life which would otherwise have ended. In the case of mammals, we talk about "breech birth", where the head is not delivered or brought out to the outside world first, and where, consequently, complications develop. As we were doing a butterfly walk in Doresanipalya Forest Research Station on 3rd November '18, Rohit Girotra called me and showed me how, in emerging from the pupa (a process called eclosing), a Three-spot Grass Yellow had got into a very tough…

Many of us have seen birds depicted in sketches and paintings, but Vidhya Sundar of Bangalore decided that her passion for birdwatching would find expression in another traditional art form...that of rangoli. Last year, Vidhya had made rangolis of birds for the month of Margazhi (Dec 15 to Jan 15) when all kinds of rangolis and kolams are created. Her success with the art encouraged her, this year, to follow the colour chart prescribed traditionally for the nine days of the festival. She selected the birds that would follow the colour scheme, and also chose elements from various photographs from…

On our way back from our nature/birding outing, I suddenly caught sight of a beetle and a snail, on a tiny twig. Seeing these two together isn't very common, so I decided to photograph the scene. I then realized that what was going on was an attack, and a major war! The beetle, like all ground beetles, likes a snail diet, and was attacking this one. This was an amazing drama that we watched for a while. The beetle was attacking the snail, which produced the froth in self-defence. Whenever the beetle approached the snail, it would get caught in…