pensive are the avifauna that predate… especially at dawn or dusk, when not hunting for food, there’s an expression on their face that is enlightened yet forlorn at the same time… once saturated with crocs, we started scouting the banks of Chambal, and ruminated on a grey heron and an Egyptian vulture that were relatively still as the rest of their brethren carried on with their quintessentially busy bee lifestyles…

why pensive? one wonders watching ‘em wonder… the heron first… from divination to dinner, cultural attributions and culinary uses are aplenty… exuding a sense of gravitas as it stands still, playing a game of patience… graceful and precise in movement, it is what beautiful maidens aspire to become… a harbinger of luck, an ancestor of the dinosaur maybe…

while the heron is cocksure on the ground, the vulture seems rather uncertain, the waddling gait much in contrast to the wader’s calculated canter, and even to its own aplomb in the air… when thermals are home, the relative stasis of terra firma can seem disconcerting… pensive thus?

foraging carries the impression of forbearance, an unrushed, hermitic approach that extrapolates into the wader’s demeanour… the scavenger is an opportunist, as much a loner as it is gregarious, a pointed, direct gaze yet a sly disposition, an amusing oxymoron… the former kills, the latter lets mortality take its course before fastidiously picking off its remains…

this pensive state symbolizes an acknowledgement of the paradox of life… fickle balances of nature, an infinite jigsaw that wears every piece down into a reverent humility… the predator mulls over in deference to the prey, and becomes pensive, intuitively aware of its own little role in the ecosystem yet overwhelmed by it all… the pensive is maybe a gratitude to these infinites then, above us, around us and below us, the heron and the vulture, two pixels on a canvas that has no beginning or end…

musings on birds, banks of Chambal river, Uttar Pradesh…