soliloquies in the outdoors
Magpies, like most corvidae, bask in an intellectual prowess not readily endowed upon fauna in general… moving around with a professional grump, undeterred by mirrors, audacious enough to ruminate on reflections rather… putting two and two together if need be, humouring the human for easy morsels… yet all that lives must have some folly, and …
Ghats are one of those landscapes that overwhelm the senses, the lush tropical mountains steeped in flora and fauna, many of whom have these regions as their only domicile, defying the quintessential interconnectedness of a world forever in flux, espousing exclusivity instead… whether thrashing through the forests, treading the criss-cross trails amidst tea gardens or …
The dipper tends to send a few shudders down the onlooker’s well-cloaked disposition before one begins to marvel at its foraging, combing the surface of frigid waters emboldened by gravity before diving into their shallow depths for a morsel… seemingly foolhardy but in reality, one of those evolutionary ingenuities… I knew that the brown dipper …
Elephants are such content beings, relishing every morsel, making a difference to every inch of the jungle they trudge through… flummox the blind they might, get agitated by the unceasing fragmentation of their wide expanses they do, but for a creature sharing human lifespan, the tolerance and wisdom in their sombre gait goes way beyond… …
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 …