grey pansy – Don't hold your breath

The magnetic tree

Nirgundi, Indrani, Sambhaloo, and a large number of other names in many Indian languages refer to Vitex negundo. So the English name chaste tree seems quite superfluous. It is also inappropriate, considering the number of different pollinators which visit it. Chest tree might be a better name, because of its clinically proven efficacy against colds, flu, asthma, and pharyngitis.

I must have seen this plant many times, because it is supposed to be very common across Asia and eastern Africa, and invasive as far away as the USA. But when I carry a good camera I’m much more attentive. So this was the first time I had paid much attention to this cross between a tree and a shrub. Most were about two meters tall, although I’m told it can grow as high as seven meters. The numerous flowers on the hairy branches were tiny: a few millimeters long. I thought they were appropriate subjects for my fancy new macro lens. Some of these macros showed spider silk threaded through the plant. I took this as a sign that it was visited by such a large number of insects that their arachnid predators found it a good place to hide out in.

The number of butterflies I saw on the first shrub I stopped at was astounding. Many individuals from a variety of species fluttered around. It seems to be even more of a butterfly magnet than the Lantana. My macro lens is not very good for photographing active butterflies. Still, I managed to capture a glassy tiger (Parantica aglea), a somewhat battered grey pansy (Junonia atlites), one of a spectacular flock of the yellow-orange peacock pansies (Junonia almana), a common gull (Cepora nerissa), and a skipper which I can’t identify. There were also several species of wasps and bees, and at least two different kinds of blow flies.

I tried to find the geographical and temporal origins of this plant. Instead found myself looking at the fascinating literature on its invasive qualities. I suppose that the large variety of its pollinators is an essential quality for invasive plants. It makes it easier to find new pollinators in any new geography. I saw it growing on verges around roads in a high plateau in the Sahyadris. The rocky ground, with meager topsoil where it grew meant that it was hardy. It is also fast growing, another essential quality for an invader. It certainly out-competed Lantana camara in this landscape. The few bushes of Lantana I saw were stunted dwarves barely surviving between thickets of Vitex. Since Lantana is viciously competitive, and has taken over landscapes elsewhere, that’s quite an achievement.

Backwaters by boat

On a morning when others across the Indian Ocean were lugging themselves and their equipment to plac es best suited to view the annular solar eclipse, we decided to drive from Kochi to Vaikom for a morning of boating through the storied backwaters of Kerala. The moon’s shadow had moved away from us by the time we got on to the boat, but the air remained cool for quite a while.

There was activity all around us, but people seemed to have time to stand and chat. Part of the charm of Kerala is this unhurried air, which allows you into interesting conversations. We watched these two boats loaded with cattle feed foraged from the waters. As the two oarsmen went by, they were chatting with each other.

Lives here revolve around the water and its rhythms. We’d started moving south along the broad watercourse at low tide, and would return north as the tide came in. We passed a bunch of people lifting nets full of mussels. The shellfish are separated into meat, to be sold, and shells to be processed. The meat is quickly moved to markets, but the shells are heaped up into pyramids which will be loaded into trucks to yield lime for the building industry.

The waterways of Kerala are places where a natural process has slowly been recovering land from the sea. The mangroves, which you can see all around you, are the central engine driving this generation of land. Around their edges are a variety of aquatic plants which aid in this process by fixing the mud and building it up. Lily pads are the most recognizable of these species, but the ones I couldn’t name are actually more widespread.

One useful plant was pointed out to us. It is called a water pineapple locally. One has to be careful of its uprights serrated leaves as you glide past stands of this inedible plant. The leaves are harvested to make mats. The roof of the covered boat we sat in was made from these leaves. These long covered boats are rare; we sat in one which had sixteen comfortably large cane chairs laid out in two rows. The cover protected us from the sun, and the cool breeze came through the poles which held it up.

These boats are now used only by tourists. These long boats are poled along by two boatmen, one at each end. We stuck to the edge of the broad watercourse we’d started from, until we came to a large island where the course bifurcated. There we were poled across to the other side, and then through narrower and narrower channels (see the featured photo, for example).

A cormorant glided in front of us, occasionally diving down to catch fish. Cormorants have adapted to humans here. They know that in the narrow channel a boat will drive fish ahead of it, giving them an enhanced chance of successful foraging. The boatman told us how in China cormorants are used for fishing. In Kerala everyone reads; everyone has some knowledge of the wider world.

After an hour wending our way through these narrow green channels, we were back in the main watercourse. The air had warmed up and I was very happy to have the mat overhead to protect us from the warmth of the sun. The humidity was intense, and I marveled at how the boatmen could keep pushing us forward at a steady pace for the next half hour.

We stopped once at a little village. In Kerala it is very hard to make out where one village ends and another begins; it is a densely populated, but not fully urbanized countryside. A lady demonstrated the weaving of mats, and the making of ropes. I wandered off to take photos of butterflies. I’d noticed many of the common ones while gliding along the water. I managed to get a photo of the grey pansy (Junonia atlites).

Garden plants abound; every cottage has a little patch of garden around it. To my city-bred eyes this looks totally unnecessary, since all of the backwaters looked like an immense garden to me. As I examined a familiar flower, I saw large red ants crawling over the blooms. I’m no expert at ants, and my identification of these as red fire ants of the species Solenopsis geminata may be entirely mistaken.

The warm and humid air pulled me into a deep nap. When I woke up we were about to pull into our jetty. Some powerlines stretched across the watercourse. As I scanned along it, I had a great sighting of a blue-tailed bee-eater (Merops philippinus). It flitted about, but in true bee-eater style, always returned to its perch. It was time to return to ours.

Butterflies of Kaziranga

Butterflies are my style: they get up late, spend the morning lazing in the sun until they feel awake enough to flutter round, then find a patch of flowers to sip on, find a mate or two, descend to the ground occasionally, and curl up below a leaf in the evening for a long rest. To the lazy eye Kaziranga was full of Indian cabbage whites fluttering around low in the bushes. Large numbers were visible on roadsides, feeding on the flowers which sprout perennially on low weeds. Cabbage whites are common, so I don’t photograph them unless they stop right in front of a camera. One did, so you can find it below.

This part of India is full of butterflies, but you have to stop to watch them. In Kaziranga we spent our time zooming around in jeeps, looking for larger things. It was only when we were parked that I could take a photo. The grey pansy is common here, as are sailers of all kinds. I managed to take a photo of the clear sailer through a gap in a bush while we had stopped to look at birds. The grey pansy came to sun itself on a leaf next to us as we were spotting otters; it was an opportunity too good to be missed. Grass yellows and grass blues are everywhere, but they are small and flighty. I spend time on them only when I have nothing much to do. The photo you see above was taken when I was waiting for my companions to finish breakfast. Kaziranga has much more, but you have to walk if you want to see them.

Butterflies before breakfast

I was trying to trace a persistent error message in my camera and eventually found that it was due to a lost set of photos taken two years ago. I’d taken them during an early morning walk to look for birds inside Nameri national park, on the border between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. On the way back we saw a large number of butterflies in a space of about 15 minutes. I managed to photograph a few of them. This is what biodiversity means!