The landscape of Bera. This is what tendua (leopard) country looks like. Old and weathered granite, interspersed with spiny bushes of thor, and lots of babool (Acacia). It’s a beautiful subject for photography.
Abstract Rock
Tag: Rajasthan
A kite is not a kite is never another kite
There are times when the hyper-connected world really bothers me. I know the bird that you see here as the black-shouldered kite. But I must learn to call it a black-winged kite (Elanus caeruleus). There is a different bird called a black-shouldered kite in Australia, and I rant about the jetset bird-watchers across the world for whom we must change the common name for this bird. Would this coincidence mess up their lists all that much?
This is a misplaced rant, though, because the real reason for this distinction is different. The black-shouldered kite was long thought to range down to Australia and across the Atlantic to the Americas. It was only realized recently that the label hid three distinct species: E. caeruleus, which ranges from the Iberian plateau across Africa and India to Sundaland), the Australian E. axillaris, and the new-world species E. leucurus. The change of names is necessary because of a new discovery. Still, I rant because common names need not change by the fiat of a committee. Tracking species is the domain of the Latin binomials, not of the common tongue.
That morning in Bera when we halted the jeep near this docked tree and watched the bird, we were content just to look at what was in front of us. I had a close look at one after months, and I studied its scaly claws. These scales are distinctive to the genus, and not found in the Milvus kites. In fact, Elanus are thought to be the link between owls and kites. Looking at the recessed eyes, and somewhat flat face, I could imagine it. I waited for it to fly, but when it did it pushed itself back, away from us, and turned instantly away. This manoeuvre was so owlish that I hadn’t expected it, and missed the shot of its take off. Another time. They are common, after all.
Familiars
Once upon a time, the story goes, every part of India was teeming with birds. I’ve heard this story from my grandmother. So it is nice to spend a weekend in a place where this could almost be true. The moment we get out of the village and into the fields around Bera, we began to see birds. There were the passage migrants which we had also seen in the Rann of Kutch, and the utterly familiar endemics.
This was a varied habitat; the edge of the Thar desert, but the dammed river nearby held water. Ibises and herons, wagtails and sandpipers could be seen there. In the thorn bushes we saw francolins, bushchats, and larks, as well as doves, fork-tailed drongos, and bulbuls. The small birds of prey, black-winged kites and shikra, told us of the numerous rodents in the area. Nightjars and owls could be seen at night, flying from the headlights of the jeep. We were told this was early for the winter migrants; they arrive in November.
Bera is known only for its leopards. But it turns out to be a good place for birds too. We did not see anything we hadn’t seen before, but we did spot some passage migrants without really looking for them. I’m sure there is much to discover here.
Change and travel
You cannot change into a leopard: your eyes and nose are not keen enough, and your circadian rhythm is tuned differently. The best you can do on a holiday dedicated to watching leopards in the wild is to change into a creature of dusk and dawn. The trips dedicated to watching wildlife are structured differently. You don’t get to do much people watching. You sleep in the afternoons, have a quick tea, and jump into a jeep to drive into the granite hills where the leopards live. You arrive back at your lair for drinks and a dinner, and have another short bout of sleep. In the mornings you wake before the kitchen staff has stirred from bed, sit in the jeep again and drive out.
You could stop for a chai in the village. One is full of packaged food, the other uses the LED in the phone for lighting the stall after dark. You largely miss contact with the people of Bera. In compensation you have the sunsets and sunrises. Away from city lights they are spectacular.
At dusk we found ourselves in a jeep on top of a granite hill, still watching the next mound intently. We knew that there was a female leopard in that hill, with two cubs to feed. We’d seen the female watching for prey. She didn’t walk around to this side before it became too dark for us. In the deep darkness broken only by the headlights of the jeep we drove down the 45 degree incline. We are lucky to have one of the most experienced drivers in the place. He told us that on the day we leave he will go to the town to get his second shot of the vaccine. The nurse at the local health center wants him to bring along a refrigerated box of vaccines, since she can’t travel that day.
Under other circumstances we would have spent more time exploring the houses that you see rattling by us in the video above. They are big houses for a village that seemed to have little apart from tourists and agriculture. Baljeet, our host, had the answer. People have moved away to the cities, and with the money they have earned there they build these houses. All are in the traditional style, with little verandas running outside, the inside guarded by doors and gates. The houses are large, but the village streets are still the same.
The way of life may be different from a city, but definitely modern. Many people oscillated between a normal city life and the village. Our host talked about traveling on work to Vietnam and Japan before returning to Bera. A train line cuts through the heart of the leopard country. Trains have to slow down and sound a horn continuously as they pass, to warn wildlife of its approach. Trucks and buses pass through the village, bringing industrial consumables. The tailor promises to courier a bespoke Bera jacket to Mumbai. Everyone has a phone, and the young are glued to theirs like anywhere else. I wish social media were subject to the kinds of rules which bind trains. The Family took me on a brief walk through the village, capturing photos of doors and windows, and the rangoli on the road.
Sunrise
At the beginning of Navaratri I watched the moon rise in the east through a thin haze of clouds. The atmosphere affects our view of the sky quite a bit. On the moon, the line of sunrise had just crossed the shores of the Sea of Crisis (Mare Crisium). The same sun that rises over the moon also rises on earth.
The next morning in Bera I watched the sun rise. The sky turned from black to red. And then, as the horizon fell away below the sun, the air turned blue and bright. On the airless moon will you only see the bright yellow sun pop over the horizon in an airless black sky? Interestingly, the sun creates its own drama as it rises over the moon. The solar wind kicks up dust in a narrow 150 km band around the terminator. Diffraction of sunlight through the dust will produce spectacular, albeit dimmer, colours. I can’t wait to see the first photos of the colours of sunrise from the moon.
Landscape with dinosaurs and a shoe
On our last morning in Bera, we woke before sunrise again, and scoured the hills for the sight of a leopard. Alarm calls of peacocks echoed between the rocks as we waited patiently for the animals to appear. But one by one, the clusters of calls fell silent. The leopards had hunkered down to sleep out the day. We were close to the Jawai dam, and I thought a drive down to the lake might be interesting.
The landscape here is interesting. To my untrained eye there is a similarity between the look of this area and parts of Karnataka, for example, around Hampi. But the resemblance is superficial, nothing but the appearance of granite boulders. The rocks here are a respectable 750 million years (or so) old, having been created during the rifting of the ancient supercontinent of Rodinia. The Hampi region contains some of the oldest rocks in the world, perhaps as much as 3.5 billion years old. In parts that Dharwar craton is overlaid by the sprightly young Deccan shield, a slight 65 million year stripling. There is no geological resemblance between these rocks.
White-browed wagtail (Motacilla maderaspatensis) 
Black-winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus) 
Asian open-billed stork (Anastomus oscitans) 
Asian open-billed stork (Anastomus oscitans)
The dinosaurs have not given up on this land that they claimed at birth. They may have evolved into what we call birds, but they still range over the lands from under which people dig out the fossil remains of their ancestral eggs. I saw wagtails and open bills after almost two years. Do they regret the end of the anthropause as much as I loved seeing them again?
A shoe? How could you lose one in this flat land? Did it fall out of a careless jeep? Or did it break during a long walk across these flats? A mystery.
The weird beauty of the tiny
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Max Planck
When I decided to get a new toy, a small camera which is perfectly suitable for taking good macros in all weather, I did not realize that it would change what I saw. Quite by accident I saw that it takes sharp photos of things which are so small that I cannot see them clearly without a magnifying glass. As a result, I’ve taken to pointing it at things which I can barely see. The results are weird and wonderful. Here are some flowers which I would not have seen without this new tool. The four tiny pink petals of the flowers bursting out of their pod that you see in the featured photo is one such.
Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Heisenberg
The Universe is not only queerer than we imagine—it is queerer than we can imagine.
J. B. S. Haldane
When I pointed the camera at these tiny white flowers on a bush, I hadn’t planned on getting anything but a clear photo. All I could see with the naked eye was a pentagon. The photo shows a compound flower, and each of the florets is so tiny that even my little tool is unable to see the petals. Is the universe nudging me to get a better camera? I will resist for a year at least.
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.
Neils Bohr
A mat of vegetation covered the edge of the land around the lake behind the dam on Jawai. Bera is not quite a desert because of this river, but it is still dry enough that the mat did not clear my shoes. I bent to get a photo of these buds. Hairy, aren’t they? But these aren’t hair. At this scale our normal language fails. You can resort to the technical term, trichome, or give up on using language with precision. I will go with the metaphoric hairy. Merriam-Webster reminds me that hairy can also mean difficult to comprehend. This tiny world is certainly that.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars- mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them too. But do I see less or more?
Richard Feynman
With my naked eye I could not really see these beautiful white flowers: the five petals surrounding a yellow center. A variation of colour in a flower is often a signpost to the nectar meant for pollinators. In this bare land what could possibly pollinate such a tiny flower? A bee would break the stem. An ant could crawl up, but would it find such a tiny bead of nectar worth its effort? My camera found a pollinator, just barely, stuck to the web a spider had woven. In this miniature landscape the savage logic of the savannah was repeated: plant, herbivore, predator. How beautiful!
Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him.
Hans Bethe
Several small plants were entangled in a patch of the ground hugging mat I was looking at. I should have done the tedious thing I’ve learnt: tease aside the strands and follow them by separating the leaves of different shapes. But being lazy, I took a simpler route. I pointed my camera at the different flowers that I saw and took photos. I can see three different plants. There may have been more, because some of the plants may not have had flowers that day. Still, I wanted some idea of the variety that there was, not an exact count. Another day, with another tool, I will spend more time on the task.
Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, willfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.
John Bell
Cornflower blue is not really a common colour in nature. So these flowers caught my eye while I was photographing the bush with white pentagonal flowers that you saw in one of the photos before. When I bent down further to look at them, I found another set of pentagons. Again, the flowers are a little too small for my camera to capture a sharper photo. Do I need a better lens or a larger sensor. Or should I invest in a good gorilla pod before jumping to conclusions? When you are looking at something so small, the tiniest movement of your hands can cause a blur.
Never underestimate the joy people derive from hearing something they already know.
Enrico Fermi
Enough of the tiny. Let me end with something easier to see: the false daisy (Eclipta prostrata). At almost a centimeter across, these white flowers are a giant compared to the ones I’ve shown you before. What you see here are a flower in bloom, and another which has gone to seed. Like its enormous cousin, the sunflower, this is a compound flower, many flowers joined together to seem like one. The wiry white petals of the ray flower look quite different from the darker polleny-yellow tubes of the disk flowers. So nice to be able to name at least one of the flowers that I photographed in our last morning in Bera.
Sleepy
There’s a thing about leopards. They are the stealthiest creatures I know. While stalking one in a jeep, on one of my early wildlife experiences, I’d lost track of it after passing through a defile in a ridge. Backtracking to the defile, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I realized from its pug marks that it had slipped into hiding as we passed, and it was now tracking us. Wild looks around yielded no results. Much later we saw it sitting on a rock under a tree high up on the ridge, still keeping an eye on us. So, if you are interested in wildlife, you’ll cherish even the smallest sighting of a leopard.
One evening in Bera, we sat in a jeep below a rock, watching a sleepy female sit on top of it. Not a spectacular view, you say? Maybe not, but majestic. It yawned and put its head down. Then it sat up and looked around, its gaze snagging briefly on our jeep. It put its head down again. Then, like an old man waiting for a morning cuppa tea, it sat on its haunches and dozed. I wish I knew more about the way these animals spend their days. They don’t need to eat as often as us, nor do they need water as frequently. They disappear into their caves during the day, probably to sleep. Human and leopard periods of activity intersect at dusk and dawn, when both are slightly tired, slightly sleepy. I was happy to sit and watch.
Flighty bird
Green bee eaters (Merops orientalis) flitted through the air. One came to perch on a branch so close to us that I had to zoom out to take this photo. You could have captured it with a mobile phone! It was a wonderful send-off from Bera.
These birds have what psychologists would call a theory of mind. By that they mean that the birds can make a guess at what others are thinking. When they see a nest predator on the prowl, they do not visit nests with hatchlings. This is just a response to a stimulus. But the interesting twist is that they modify their response depending on the predator’s actions. If the predator is looking in a different direction, they’ll try to steal home. Or if there is something between the predator and the nest which blocks its view, then they will fly in and out to feed their chicks.
I’ve watched this superb aerial acrobat at work very often. The two long black tail feathers extend its size by almost a quarter. I’m pretty sure that they are important to its flight. By extending them or tucking them in the birds must be changing the turning radius of their flights quite a bit. I like to see slow motion shots of divers or acrobats twisting during their time in the air: the way they extend or retract arms or legs to change direction and speed. I would love to see such videos of these birds in flight.
Comfort
We spent the morning scanning a set of hills which was said to be fairly crowded with leopards (Panthera pardus, tendua in Hindi). Apparently two females had their ranges in these mounds. One of them delivered twins recently, another had triplets a little more than a year ago. Leopards become adults and move away from the mother at about a year and a half, until which time they may still share food. In addition, a male was said to visit the place often. So there could be up to eight leopards in this little range. We had been pretty unsuccessful for about two hours.
Then The Family asked “Isn’t there something on that large rock?” At the same time our driver declared “A leopard has just come out of its cave.” We’d been looking at the hill that you see in the photo above. The Family and the driver had been scanning it with their binoculars while I’d been looking through my camera. Binoculars have their uses. Indeed a sub-adult, one of the cubs which was getting to the point where it would seek its own place in the world, had just walked out to a little hollow in a rock and sat down. Look at the slide show for a zoom into the lazily reclining adolescent.
When you watch an animal in the wild there are long periods when nothing happens. Then all the action gets over in a jiffy. By not seeing it come out of the cave with my camera, I’d missed the initial action. There was a long wait as we watched the leopard. The sun climbed in the sky and shone into the hollow that it had flopped down on. It must have got warm, because it sat up and fidgeted (see the featured photo). If I’d known more about leopards I would have realized it was ready to move. When it did, it quickly bounded up to the top of the rock and I thought I lost it in the thor bush. No, it had moved to the shady side and prepared to find a comfortable spot.
It sat there for an hour longer. The sun was hot, but behind the bush it had a comfortable spot. We kept a close watch on it. Eventually it must have got hot again. It crossed to the sunny side of the rock, inspected the hollow it had sat in first, and then finding it unsuitable, padded down the slope of the rock, turned and was lost in the shadows of its lair.
Don't hold your breath 