The seeds of the silk cotton tree (Ceiba pentandra, formerly Bombax ceiba) are encased in a cocoon of silky fibre that drifts in the winds. The trees pierce the jungle canopy, and, from a height of 50 meters, shed their silk through the Manas National Park.
We’d reached too late to see the cloud of red flowers which would have hung over the canopy a couple of weeks before. The fruits had developed by the time of the spring equinox, and now leaves in the undergrowth were all that stood between the seed and the ground.
Red-breasted parakeets (Psittacula alexandri) are widespread, and common where they live. But in Manas National Park I got my first good photo. I’d first seen them four years ago in Kaziranga. The red beaked individual is the male. These are sightings of the extreme north-western population of a subspecies called Psittacula alexandrifasciata. It can be seen across mainland Asia all the way east to Vietnam and southern China. To see the other subspecies you have to do some island hopping from the Andamans east to Sumatra, Java, and Borneo. I hope to do that some time. Seeing animals, even common birds like crows, in their natural habitat is a beautiful experience. When you pay attention to them you see how they are wonderfully tuned to the surroundings they evolved in. In these surroundings you see not just one species, but a web of life.
Strangely, a friend sees red-breasted parakeets more or less daily from her bedroom window in Mumbai. A feral population has established itself in the city, as well as in a few other cities in India and across Europe. This is a reminder of the illegal wildlife trade that underlies the (unfortunately, legal) “exotic pet” trade. When I searched for this species on the net, most of the hits were from such sites. I was reminded of a book I’d read as a child, Bring ’em Back Alive by a person called Frank Buck, who gave hunting as his profession. The book introduced me to wildlife and opened my eyes to what a wonderful biosphere India and Asia have. But looking at the book again I realized that Buck was just a pet-trader in the times when it was legal. The slave trade was abolished more than two centuries ago, but it took another fifty years to stop slave ships. This animal slavery was banned in 1976 by the CITES treaty. Almost fifty years have passed since then, and the trade is still flourishing.
Green and gold caught my eyes as we drove in the damp heat of the early afternoon through Manas National Park. It may be early spring in astronomical terms, with the days still getting longer, but as seasons are counted in these eastern foothills of Assam, it was high summer. Monsoon was less than a month away. Most trees had already shed their spring leaves, and had begun to flower. But was this the flower of the tree?
I had to tear my eyes away from the lovely flowers to take in a larger picture. Did the leaves and flower actually grow from the tree? They were carried on rather thin woody stalks. But would such thin stalks ever grow directly from the main trunk of a tree? Normally a trunk branches multiple times before you come to leaf-bearing or flower-bearing stalks.
Pull back a little further. It becomes clearer. No the flowers do not belong to the tree. It is a silk cotton tree (Ceiba pentandra, earlier Bombax ceiba). In this place it is late in its flowering season. Some of the smaller trees are still flowering, some are fruiting, some are still releasing their lovely silky parachutes into the air, but giants like this are past all that and are already prepared for the monsoon. The flowers are orchids growing over the tree. A little search, and you find that they are golden-flowered dendrobium (Dendrobium chrysanthum). Orchids are said not to harm the trees they grow on. They have green leaves, so they produce their own sugars. Their roots are said to penetrate only the bark of the tree. It is said that they don’t tap into the wood. I wonder then where they get water from? Roots of plants which grow into soil search widely for water. It seems that orchids specialize in pulling moisture from the air.
I pull back further. The whole jungle is full of trees carrying various kinds of orchids. Many are flowering. Something clicks into place. I’ve seen flowering orchids in the Himalayas during winter, when it often rains. Now, here in the plains below the mountains, I see them just before the monsoon. They flower when the air is damp. Most plants require a lot of stored sugar and water for their flowers and fruits. That’s what is happening here, in this hot damp place. The flowers will fruit and produce their wind-borne seeds at about the time the monsoon winds begin to blow. On this vast scale, I begin to admire the small orchids, the large trees, and the vast jungle and the climate they are in. They shape each other.
Cisticolas are easy to photograph once you have spotted them. Like many other insectivores, they like to perch somewhere and watch for insects in the neighbourhood. When they spot one they spring into action, and then come back to perch. If they change their perch, they’ll alight somewhere nearby, so you don’t have to move to sight them again. They are small birds, 9-12 cms in size. If you are photographing them with a zoom, then with judicious positioning you could try to get a nice bokeh.
Zitting cisticola (Cisticola juncidis) in Tal Chhapar Sanctuary, Rajasthan
Zitting cisticolas (Cisticola juncidis) are quite common across India, and found from southern Europe to northern Australia. I’ve been seeing them for several years, but got photos for the first time in February this year at the arid grasslands of Tal Chhapar in Rajasthan. Previously I’d only seen it near lakes; perhaps there was water somewhere close. The day had dawned cloudy but the sun was out when I spotted it. I noticed that it manoeuvres well in the air even though its tail is short and stubby.
Golden-headed cisticola (Cisticola exilis) in Manas National Park, Assam
My first sighting of a Golden-headed cisticola (Cisticola exilis) came a month later, across the country in the lush green grassland of Manas in Assam. This one is less widespread, but is found right across India, all the way down to southeastern Australia. Like C. juncidis, it is a small and light bird, less than 10 gms in weight, heavily streaked, and breeds in the monsoon. Both lay eggs in nests constructed by tying living leaves together. Off breeding season they are similar in looks, but this one has a golden-yellow band across the back of the neck, and has a significantly longer tail, which has a different shape. I should look out for it in the breeding season, when its head turns golden-yellow.
Jenkins’ dendrobium (Dendrobium jenkinsii) hugged the shady side of a tree trunk, but stood out bright in the hot sun of the early afternoon. It was just a few days past holi, and as always, the hot season had us in its grip. Our open jeeps left us dusty, hot, and terribly uncomfortable. It was high summer in Manas NP; the rains were expected in two or three weeks. I was a little puzzled by this wild orchid of Assam. If this was not D. jenkinsii, it must be D. lindleyii, and both are said to grow at higher altitudes, not at the 50 to 100 meters that we were cruising. The leaves, the details of the flower, the tree-hugging habit were all correct though. If you have a solution to the puzzle, let me know.
On the next tree was another set of blooms: a similar cluster of yellow flowers growing on the shadier side of the tree. But when I looked again, they were different. The leaves were longer, and the flowers were clearly different in form. Also, these were hanging from trees, not hugging them. The leaves were not intermixed with the flowers, but they seemed to grow on opposite sides of the main stem. A search through an index told me that these are Dendrobium chrysanthum (golden-flowered dendrobium). Strangely enough, they are said to grow at an altitude of above 300 meters. I can’t believe that I was on ground that no botanist has ever visited. After all, these were the hunting grounds of the Victorian British plant hunters who transformed the gardens of the western world by almost destroying the natural vegetation of the Himalayas. We live in a world where the destroyers of the environment do not take responsibility for nursing the earth back to health.
A few tens of meters further along the road, hooded orchids (Dendrobium aphyllum) hung in long streamers from a tree, ending a few meters above ground. Fortunately, a tree behind it had not shed all its leaves, and I could get a partially dark background against which I could photograph the blooms. The pale yellow funnel of the labella, with the purple streaks of “runways” leading to the nectar made the identification fairly unambiguous. And fortunately there was no confusion this time; the orchid is said to grow at these heights.
Elsewhere I’d glimpsed a jumble of stems growing out of a tree a few meters above ground, and not realized that I was looking at an orchid. The Family noticed two flowers and realized that they were orchids. It is likely to be the shoe-lip dendrobium (Dendrobium crepidatum), which is again said to grow at an altitude of above 600 meters. Finding these higher altitude orchids at near sea level presents a neat puzzle. The Manas NP of Assam is a continuation of the Royal Manas NP of Bhutan, which starts at a height of 2700 meters above sea level. In our days the extensive old forests of the Himalayas are fragmented into these biosphere reserves. Perhaps plants which would normally have spread laterally at a fixed altitude now are forced to try to spread vertically, and at these lower elevations we see the outliers of a few hardier species which are not strongly restricted by climate. After all, the four orchids that I saw here have been domesticated and are widely available across the world to orchid enthusiasts. We don’t know how many species are completely lost with the loss of forests.
As I was packing for a trip to Guwahati in early December, The Family asked me “Aren’t you packing your camera and binoculars?” I wasn’t planning to. I thought of this as a quick trip and wall-to-wall meetings, fly in for a couple of days of intense discussion and then get back home. No time to visit the wonderful birding spots around Guwahati. How was I to know that I would be living in a wonderful room overlooking a lake full of migratory birds?
Perhaps if I hadn’t spent all of November traveling from one meeting to another I would have paid it some thought. If you spend even a couple of hours outdoors in winter in India you can’t miss migratory birds. If you are fortunate enough to have breakfast at a window overlooking even a little waterhole, let alone a large pond, it’ll be like watching a documentary by a famous narrator. The naked eye and a phone camera are better than nothing, but certainly not adequate. Also, given that several of the birds were unfamiliar, I really wished I’d at least packed my field guide.
The days were pleasant and sunny, the air full of the squawks and trills of birds. My surroundings were beautifully manicured, but lacking the hectic life of Guwahati’s center. The birds which do these long migrations are usually larger creatures. Small songbirds seldom migrate long distances, although they often do local vertical migrations which are specially noticeable in Bihar, Bengal and Assam. No more traveling without all my optics in my backpack, I promised myself.
The Family looked at the photo which is featured in this post and asked “Does this have an interesting caption?” This infant stump-tailed macaque had climbed away from its mother and, when I took the photo, had just stopped climbing and realized how very far it had got. I thought of the Virginia Slims ads from 1969 which had already become the butt of jokes (including this atrocious pun) when I was an undergraduate.
Thinking of it led me to search the tubes and find this compilation. Have fun reliving the glory days of substance abuse.
It never comes as a surprise when you get to a highway eatery and find that the menu features “Chinese” food. This usually means curry with noodles. At this eatery near Golaghat in Assam, somehow chole bhature was included under Chinese. In the true spirit of Punjabi practicality, I did not worry about the classification, but was satisfied by what was served up. More than satisfied, in fact. The chhola was the local ghugni. The batura were luchi writ large. This thriving eatery has discovered marketing: the local luchi-ghugni could be passed off as the more well-known chole bhature without offending anyone.
Never one to pass up familiar food, The Family ordered an onion utthapam, and pronounced it completely edible. In the last sixty years, dosas and utthapam have unmoored themselves from the south of India, and set sail on the sea of pan-Indian food. We love to churn this sea whenever we travel, because it throws up gems more often than poison.
The piece de resistance was the unremarkable looking thing in the photo above. These cubes of chhana mildly sweetened in syrup were the perfect ending to the meal. As I travel in Assam, Bengal and Odisha, I come across more and more varieties of this kind of sweet. This was special, possibly a local invention, since it seemed to be just called chhana. We called for a chai, and a second helping of the chhana.
We had a wonderful sighting of a brown fish owl (Ketupa zeylonensis) sitting in the canopy of a large tree. It would have been invisible from above. As we drove close to the edge of the road, we could look up and see it clearly. It was trying very hard to ignore us and continue to sleep. The fish owl does not have the deep bowl-like face which is so characteristic of many owls. That bowl is acts as an antenna to focus sound, since hearing is very important to most nocturnal hunters. The fish owls are less dependent on sound since they feed on crabs and molluscs. A study in Melghat Tiger Reserve found that they also eat insects and rodents, so hearing cannot be unimportant. I’m sure that they are fairly opportunistic, and will change to fish and frogs if they are abundant.
We have usually sighted this fleetingly at night: on tree stumps or flying about. I had a wonderful view of it sitting in the middle of a lawn in Valparai, but the light was not good enough for a photo. This one, with its head tucked in, looked more squat than the others I’ve seen. One does see the related tawny and buff fish owls in Assam, but this was not one of those rarer birds. As we watched, it opened its eyes. My hand shivered slightly as I saw those sleepy yellow eyes looking at me.
All owls present in the world today diverged from a common ancestor more than 9 million years ago. This was a time when great geological changes were afoot, including the continuous raising of the Himalayas and the closing of the Tethys sea, so changing the global climate. The fish owls (genus Ketua) could have diverged later, but they are so closely related to other owls with prominent ear tufts (genus Bubo), that they are now included in the same genus. There have been contemporary local extinctions of the brown fish owl, notably in Israel where the poisoning of rats led to a local extinction of K. zeylonensis. There are still people alive in Europe who have seen brown fish owls, although they are now extinct. They were spotted again in Anatolia five years ago. It can be found now in a large range from Asian Turkey to south-east Asia. This is the reason it is considered to be not of concern for conservation work.
Don't hold your breath 