Yellow-wattled Lapwing + Bird of the Week Invitation XV

The very first time I managed to take a portrait of a bird was this yellow-wattled lapwing (Vanellus malabaricus). It was on my first trip with a camera to the wild, and it was the first time I learnt to tell a lapwing from other birds. I would later recognize that the sharp looks of this individual meant that it was the breeding season. The clean black cap takes on a more mottled look in non-breeding adults and juveniles. V. malabaricus is a South Asian bird, with a range that covers most of the plains of India, and bits of Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangaldesh. In those early years I used to see these birds fairly often. But when I saw a group again in 2022 I realized that I hadn’t seen them for a while. I cannot verify my impression that they are becoming less common, because I haven’t been going back to the same place over the years. Although they are still classed as being of least concern, their nesting habitat of dry grasslands is being rapidly converted to plantations meant for carbon mitigation. Planting trees is not enough to reach net-zero carbon emission, but cost of even this effort seems to be the loss of ecosystems.

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There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine. It would helpful to give as much information as you can: which bird it is, where and when you saw the bird, any behaviour you found interesting, for example. You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” to help other search for old posts. I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.

Bird of the Week XIV

Somber Saturday

When you visit a national park you expect to see nature in all its aspects. We stopped to look at the remnants of a chital. I suppose it must have been prey to a tiger, and then smaller predators and scavengers would have had their share. The antlers are not of much use to animals. They lay in the open meadow, slowly being bleached in the sun.

Saturday Scape

This is the center of India: a flat dry land with some trees. The grasslands of central India lie on soil that was joined to today’s Antarctica 200 million years ago in a continent called Gondwanaland. That beautiful spreading canopy is of the mahua tree (Madhuca longifolia). It was sprouting new leaves in April, and will give plenty of shade by May.

This post is for Earth Day 2023.

Saturday saplings

A flooded dip in the landscape became a temporary pond in which three trees stood. Since the trees were pretty healthy, I knew that the pond was temporary. The hot April day was relieved by a little breeze which set the reflections shivering. I thought I could not let this sight pass. It has taken me seventeen years to realize that this image would be best in black and white.

Old tree

Trees are fun. Before I started looking at birds, insects, and wildflowers, I was looking at trees. They are enormously interesting, both as individuals, and collectively. As individuals, I love their symmetric growth in the wild, as opposed to the stunted shapes many adopt in cities. These are aspects of their adaptability. When I saw this one in the buffer area outside Pench national park, I first noticed the spread and near-symmetry of its canopy. Then I noticed how the two lowest branches had grown almost parallel to the ground before shooting up vertically, to give the canopy space to grow. The next two start out at right angles to the first pair, again branching out horizontally before growing up. Everything seemed planned for the eventual growth of the canopy.

The old photo gave me an opportunity to play with monochrome images; first the simple black and white, and next the one with inverted shades. This second one shows the branching structure very nicely. Unfortunately, the shape does not really help too much with tree identification. When I see plants with complex flowers, I know they are related; all of them are in the Aster family, Asteraceae. But the three tall spreading trees, mango, jamun, and neem are in three different families. Strangely, a close relative of the mango is the poison ivy. So trees have evolved many times over in different families of plants. So woodiness, longevity, the lack of distinction between seed and soma (trees can be grafted on to each other) are characteristics that can evolve easily in plants, and have evolved in concert many times over.

I played a little with other effects and liked the “pencil sketch” in muted colours on the left, and the “charcoal sketch” on the right. I only use an open source editor, but these are effects which are easy to obtain. A nice thing about this mahua (Madhuca longifolia) tree was that it stood alone, well away from any other tall thing. It was lucky. Trees grow tall because of competition for sunlight, and here this was, with genes which allowed it to grow tall without any competition. It takes time for trees to grow, to produce the mass of wood in the trunk and branches which would support dependent branches and leaves. Mango is productive for more than a century and mahua tree for 60 years or so. So the amount of seed produced more than compensates for the energy spend in non-reproductive maintenance. That’s a strong reason for plants to become trees. I wonder why more of them don’t.

Hot Days

In other years May would be a good time to travel to tigerland. In this hottest part of the year, with temperatures often in excess of 40 Celsius, leaves and small patches of water dry up, and animals come to a few larger ponds and water holes to drink several times a day. That is when you see tigers. Even if you don’t, these burning months of grishma are a good time to travel to jungles. You see flowers blooming in abundance and wildlife of many different varieties.

Whatever doesn’t come out for a drink stays home to avoid heat. A couple of years ago, we spent three days in Pench National Park, near Nagpur. We passed this Indian Scops owl (Otus bakkamoena) several times as it peered out of its hole. I recognize it by the fact that it is the only dark-eyed owl in central India. I like how the head and ear tufts perfectly camouflage it against the broken bark of the tree. The nuchal collar, ie, the ruff around its face, has a noticeable brown edging. This is another way to identify the bird.

This is also nesting time for many birds, like this Oriental Honey Buzzard (Pernis ptilorhynchus). I find it amazing that larger birds make these untidy nests of large twigs, whereas smaller birds can make some amazingly beautiful structures. These simpler nests perch on supporting branches, I suppose because it is hard to make hanging structures which can take the weight of these birds. This simple idea of gets support (couldn’t help the pun) from the fact that larger birds like this buzzard nest at the junction of the trunk and large branches (as in the photo), whereas slightly smaller birds, like crows, find smaller junctions between branches.

On some of these trips you get superlatively lucky. Either you have multiple sightings of tigers, or you have wonderful views of family groups resting in water holes. If you want to see something like this, the tigress called Collarwali with her last brood, then mark down this uncomfortable month for travel through the hottest parts of India.

In a Jungle

Vegetation makes up a jungle. I’ve written extensively about the animals which find a home in Pench National Park. But most of the time I spent in the jungle was spent looking at trees or bushes twined around each other. Here is a record mainly of the trees I saw in the jungle. This was a mixed jungle: mainly sal (Shorea robusta), followed by the crocodile bark tree (Terminalia crenulata), but also many other species, including the so-called Indian Ghost Tree. I end my stories of this hot season’s trip to Pench with photos of its dried up vegetation.

Two Singular Sights

In my penultimate post on Pench National Park, I thought I should show you the first interesting sighting in the park. This is the beautiful heron which used to be called the green-backed earlier, and now is called striated. I saw it at the first waterhole we came to. In the deadly heat this bird sat in the shade of a big log which had fallen across the water. It was not feeding. In fact, on reading about its behaviour, it seems to me that it could be responding to a threat: the outstretched neck and the upward pointing beak are gestures which it has been recorded making when threatened. However, I did not see any threat nearby (unless it was our jeep).

The other photo I wanted to put here was of this lovely antelope: one of the few found in India. The male Nilgai in the photo has a characteristic blue pelt. The white patch on its neck with a tuft of hair below it, and the colour of its muzzle, look extremely elegant. Interestingly, this species exists only in South Asia, although a related fossil species has been found in Africa. DNA studies indicate that it could be one of the primitive ancestors of cattle. The name nilgai (Hindi for blue bull) then may be pretty accurate.

Finally, yes I know what the title of this post is. I’m not going to back down and say a plural sight. No. You can tell that I really meant two singular sights.

The big misses

After all that driving around inside Pench National Park, there were still some major species of mammals that we missed seeing. One of the closest calls was a leopard. We heard a cheetal’s alarm call and then saw the deer. We heard a langur’s alarm call very soon after. Then nothing.

The cheetal was still alert, looking in the direction where it had just sensed the predator. You can see its tail mid-quiver in the featured photo. One movement from the hidden beast and it would go up, sending out a white flash of an alarm signal as it made an alarm call again. But nothing happened. We waited for more than half an hour, and then lost our patience. We weaved our way past the other waiting jeeps. Later, in the hotel, we heard that a minute after we left, the leopard had been sighted. That’s luck for you.

Dusk had fallen. We drove to a nearby water body, and saw nothing there. Later we heard that we had missed a shy two-year old tiger cub which was lying in the water where we went, and moved off as soon as a jeep came by. This happened as we waited for the leopard!

We did not exactly miss seeing wild boars. I managed to take the blurred photo which you can see above. These were part of a sounder which were crossing the road. They got spooked while crossing, and the rest of the group scuttled back into the undergrowth. In Pench wild board come out in such bad light.

We never saw a sloth bear, although there are many in Pench. The only reasonable view I’ve had of these bad tempered creatures was a few years back in Tadoba Tiger Reserve. One of them was demolishing a termite mound behind a copse of trees. I could see it between the trees. The one time I took photos of a sloth bear and its two cubs, they were running away across a meadow well after sunset. A lot of fiddling with the image could give me a recognizable picture.

Another wide miss was the Indian wolf, which apparently had made a minor comeback in this area. We never heard reports of anyone seeing them in the time that we were in Pench. The deer called the Barasingha is in the official checklist, but none of the guides said they had seen one. One of them was quite categorical that there were none here, “Go to Kanha,” he said.

A close miss was a sighting of wild dogs. We kept running into jeeps whose passengers would say, “We saw a pack just minutes back. I’m sure they’ll be back if you wait here.”. They never came back. The jungle is a chancy thing. You can be sure of seeing trees. Everything else is an extra.

Jackals and wolves

The IUCN Red List tells us that the golden jackal (Canis aureus) “is fairly common throughout its range with high densities observed in areas with abundant food and cover. They are opportunistic and will venture into human habitation at night to feed on garbage.” It is true that in small towns and villages you can still hear the call of jackals, and travelling on a highway at night you can see one lope off into the darkness now and then. However, the few times I’ve had good sightings of these shy creatures have been inside protected forests like Pench National Park.

If you go by the call of the jackal, you may be fooled into thinking that they are nocturnal. However, both the jackal sightings I had in Pench were in the middle of the day. The first time was the fight between a jackal and a gray langur, and the second time I just saw one trotting away next to the track our jeep was following (featured photo). A study which tracked many jackals using radio collars explains how this can happen. A jackal is actually diurnal, but also active at dawn and just after dusk.

The Red List says that the jackal’s habitat includes Africa, the middle east (from where it has moved into Europe in modern times) and India. Usually it is fairly reliable and up-to-date on these questions. However, this seems to be an exception. Startling new DNA data published in 2015 showed that these two populations are different species which diverged about a million years ago. It was suggested that the African species, Canis anthus, be called the African golden wolf, whereas the Eurasian jackal continue to be named Canis aureus.

It was the jackal—Tabaqui, the Dish-licker—and the wolves of India despise Tabaqui because he runs about making mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the village rubbish-heaps.

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

An older paper gave me some background to understand this. It turns out that among dog-like animals, the jackal is the basic form, which has differentiated into wolves a few times in history. Dogs, of course, are very closely related to wolves. As a result, dogs easily hybridize with wolves, but crosses with jackals are unviable. The group of jackals, wolves and dogs is sometimes called a species complex, because of their close relationship. In any case, the new finding was so startling that National Geographic called it the first discovery of a new canid species in 150 years.

I enjoyed watching these graceful creatures. Although they may not be immediately threatened, their habitat is slowly disappearing. For some time they may adapt to human presence, but as forests are replaced by parking lots, they will inevitably go the way of the dodo,