Birds of Karnataka

As a 12 year old, I was into hobbies. One of them was birdwatching! Well, in the literal sense. No pun intended. I had a pair of binoculars, a book of common birds of India by Dr.Salim Ali and of course, a field guide – to make notes and sketches of my observations on birds found in my locality. I also had subscriptions to Hornbill and the British Wildlife magazine . I could very well call myself an amateur ornithologist.

Today, after almost as many years as I was old then, I find myself a birdwatcher still, though of a different kind. Friends know, I got bored of this aspect of birdwatching too, months back. Recently however, I was inclined to start off with traditional birdwatching again. So, I’ve planned to visit the Banerghatta National Park and Nandi Hills among other places. My area, Whitefield also is home to some interesting species of birds I would love to know about. Here’s a compilation of some of the rare bird species of Karnataka of which I’ve seen only two(Blue-Winged Parakeet and . . )
Four out of the five descriptions presented below are courtesy Ornithological Archives of the Wildlife and Conservation Department of Karnataka/India. And the last one . . . is a work of fiction by Yours truly!

1. Nilgiri Wood-Pigeon

Family : Columbidae

Scientific Name : Columba elphinstonii

Description :

The Nilgiri Woodpigeon (Columba elphinstonii) is a bird endemic to moist deciduous forests and sholas of the Western Ghats in southwestern India. They are identified in the field by the checkerboard pattern on their napes. This pigeon species qualifies as vulnerable owing to its small, declining population, restricted range and widespread destruction of its forest habitat. A few relict populations survive on the high altitude hills of the peninsula outside the Western Ghats formation.

Habitat : Biligirirangan Hills and Nandi Hills near Bangalore.

2. Blue-winged Parakeet

Family : Psittacidae - Parakeets & Hanging-Parrots

Scientific Name : Psittacula columboides

Description :
The Malabar Parakeet also known as the Blue-winged Parakeet, is endemic to the Western Ghats in Southern India. he Malabar Parakeet has beautifully colored plumage. The male's overall color is a bluish-gray with a sometimes reddish-pink tint. One of the things that make this bird so striking is the double ring around the neck of the male. The lower ring is a brilliant light blue, while the top ring is more of a greenish dark gray color. They have green feathers in front of their eyes, which extend towards their beaks. The plumage on their heads is bluer in color than the rest of their bodies, though it gets progressively lighter at the top of the head. Above the nares and on the cheeks the blue color is more distinct. They have a striking bright red beak with a bone colored tip. The female Malabar Parakeets lack the brilliant blue band around their necks. Males generally have a greener casting to the feathers on their foreheads, and female's heads are gray. The bill of the female is black, as opposed to the brilliantly color bill of the male.The average adult Malabar Parakeet measures 38 centimeters in length.

Habitat : Evergreen forest and humid montane forest between 450 m and 1,600 m; occasionally also in humid lowland forest.

3. White-bellied Treepie

Family : Corvidae

Scientific Name : Dendrocitta leucogastra

Description :

The White-bellied Treepie (Dendrocitta leucogastra) is a bird of the crow family found in the forests of the Western Ghats and associated hills. A record from Erimalai near Dharmapuri marks the eastern limit of the species.The species is often seen bowing and lowering its wings as it calls. Several birds may arrive at one tree and call repeatedly during the pre-monsoon breeding season (April-May). The nest is a platform of twigs on a medium sized tree.

Habitat : Western Ghats.

4. Grey-headed Bulbul

Family : Pycnonotidae – Bulbuls and Finchbills

Scientific Name : Pycnonotus priocephalus

Description :

The Grey-headed Bulbul Pycnonotus priocephalus is a member of the bulbul family of passerine birds. It is endemic to the Western Ghats of south-west India, found from Goa south to Tamil Nadu, at altitudes up to 1200m. This bulbul is resident in moist broadleaved evergreen forest with bamboo and dense undergrowth. Its plumage is olive-green, with a medium-grey head, yellow-green forehead, black chin and grey tail. Its bill and irides are pale yellow. The upper rump and lower back has blackish bars. The tail is grey with black outer feathers broadly tipped grey. Both sexes are similar but juveniles have the head dark olive with the yellow on the forehead duller.

Habitat: Moist-deciduous forest, flanked by scrub and acacia monoculture, hills, valleys, ravines, floodplains.

5. Hot-headed Tweetie

Scientific Name: Tweetus Sweetosaurus Sonnacrazium

Brief Description: This bright-eyed, bipedal, chuckling vertebrate is as much an object of
desire, as it is, of research.

Habitat: Usually resides in RaRe Nagar but species originally hails from Dharwad/Bellary region of Karnataka.

Population: Unity.

Built: 'Healthy' & Diminutive.

Colour:

• White in regulated low temperatures
• Red when provoked
• Pink when invoked
• Pale yellow when sick or disturbed

Best features:

• Luscious beak
• Silky mane
• Soft feathers
• 1 inch long eyelashes

Food habits:

• Vegetarian.
• Gorges on beetle leaf
• Glucose based eatables
• and yes, Apples!

Self Defense mechanism:

• Has the knack to turn 'invisible',
• 'block' incompatible species and
• use high-pitch baritone to the effect of tearing apart eardrums.

Flight Capabilities: Knows how to fly in high altitudes but prefers staying 'down to earth'.

Other traits:

• Has affinity for the colour pink
• Repulsive to smoke/pollution
• Cleanliness freak
• Loyal to clan
• Highly sociable with other species
• Aggressive towards migratory bird species from Andhra Pradesh. Interestingly though, prefers their native lingo for recreation.
• Probably the only bird species to migrate 36 kilometres up and down everyday for the sake of alternate livelihood.
• Normally likes warmth but can be 'cold blooded' in rough weather.

Caution:

• For birdwatchers - Once sighted, induces permanent amnesia for other bird species.
• For Pet Keepers - Highly domesticated but can turn wild at the slightest pretext.
• For prospective Males - Has a heart composed of pure Gold, a brittle element. Meant to be handled with care.

-Loo©zar: 5th May, Monday, 5.30 pm.

The Butterfly Effect

There was no power last night and my nerves were getting punctured by blood-thirsty mosquitoes from all sides. It was a drone attack of a miniature kind. The tortoise coil had given up and the tortoise in my arse revolted to uncoil. And so I went out, almost only in my 'bear' essentials. It was 3.30am and drizzling. The Imadihalli Main Road barely had a dog barking or a late-night cab dropping software coolies home. Silence was not golden but pitch-black. I had taken no watch, cell, money or even my house keys with me. They were all safely stacked at a place I could retrieve them from after coming back. After walking for a while, I reached the Kodi bus stop near Forum. Though without a watch, I realized it was 40 minutes since I'd started as it precisely takes that much time for me to reach there from home. The Kodi bus stop is near a circle that leads to two ways, one towards west and the other towards north. I'd always taken the western route as that's the apparent silk route to all amenities, luxuries or whatever you name them to be. Never before did it occur to me to take the visibly unattractive northern route. Except for today.

Due North, as I walked up the Varthur Main road, unraveling uncharted territories, I found there was life there too! By now, it was 4.30 and people had started commuting. People were as busy there as they would have been in any other part of Bangalore. Of course, what a ridiculous thought after all! Up ahead at a distance sometime later, I saw a silver stretch of water, reflecting the suburban lights, all calm and still. My feet were paining by now cause of lack of physical activity lately. So I thought to take a look of the lake up front and then go back home. The road kept taking blinding curves and it always appeared that the lake was very near. But it was only after an achingly long hour that I was able to see the lakeside that appeared so tantalizingly close all this time. Patience paid as the view was absolutely enthralling and somehow rejuvenating. So I meditated on the stillness of the water and felt that it was not still after all. There were faint ripples almost oblivious to the naked eye. And there was a stork, silently waiting by the edge of the lake to catch the odd fish that, with a poor sense of premonition, decided to take a breather. A bike passed by, the rider turning his head towards me. He was probably startled to see a lunatic sitting on a milestone in the middle of nowhere. As if I cared. Nonchalance, which had seeped into my sleeves along with rainwater, fuelled my faculties as I walked further up the acclivity, alone. It was when I'd reached the Varthur Police Station that I found something lying on the road. It was a red Jack out of a pack of cards that someone had probably dropped in a moment of celebration.. or accident. Who would celebrate in this dark and pre-historic part of Bangalore and why? As I contemplated that, sipping tea at a shack nearby, I observed the most obvious of things that had eluded my reasoning in the last few years of self proclaimed sane thoughtfulness.

I saw a vegetable wholesaler disembarking gunny-bags full of fresh vegetables from his truck. Street vendors had assembled in hordes to take away their share for the day that they would later sell to us so that we could get our daily meals. And then there was a frail old man riding a bicycle at breakneck speed, carrying four milk containers, two on each side. He stopped his bicycle with a jolt and very briskly delivered those cans to the local milk booths which still had their shutters half down. Just a couple of minutes had flied by as even the city bus drivers and conductors could be seen in greased khakis, mobilizing themselves for a busy day ahead. They started their daily chores dusting off the buses and garlanding idols usually placed above the gear panels. Soon after, they gathered inside an andhra mess to have breakfast. It was then that I wondered that the breakfast they would be having there must be the usual idli-sambhar or masala dosa which could not have been prepared had the wholesaler not delivered the vegetables to the vendors or the vendors didn't sell it to the mess workers. And if they didn't have their breakfast, the buses might start off late from their respective stops and the commuters - with a majority of them being students and IT professionals would suffer big time. What if I told you this could dent the future of India in a rather invisible way ? Woah, sounds far-far-fetched right ? Well , may be but given that such aberrations are fairly common in our daily lives, each one of them actually amounts to disrupting little cycles of productivity that involve a fair number of stakeholders. And coalesced together, such dropsize disruptions multiply ad infinitum to create socio-economic tsunamis that wreak havoc with our lives without us even getting to know about their existence. Sample this. For every ten minute delay in even an early morning bus ride, at least a dozen people reach their workplaces late. Say, one of them is a banker. It means another ten people at a counter having to wait ten minutes more. One of those at the queue could again be a cop missing out on a few files to be signed at his office and so on. The effect of falling dominoes that’s created out of this reaches far and wide and as a return of favour it comes back to you, in some form or the other. And you need not be a protective cop or a life saving doctor to have an effect on this ecosystem of productivity. You could be a school kid or a house wife or any insignificant nobody, or another brick in the wall. So no matter how much we try to isolate ourselves in cocoons of self-aggrandizement, we remain badly meshed up with one another in strings better left entangled. To come to the end of it, the low-on-glucose jogger in me finally gave up and caught one of those buses back home. Soon, I was under the cozy confines of my hand-woven jaipur quilt, hugging the oft-molested and sweat soaked pillows. The last thought that I had before sleeping was of the little girl on the bus solving a geometry problem with enviable concentration, unaware of the milling crowds and the honking vehicles and heedless of the dampness of the front seat on which she was sitting. I was once like that and more – a compulsive problem solver, bubbling with ideas and energy, passionate about every little thing in life and armored with a killer instinct that once rendered me lethal among friends and "enemies" alike. But today, I was just a disgruntled and disenchanted sloth who had chosen to sleep off the day at the break of the dawn when others were busy breaking even in their respective businesses. I could very well be accused of breaking the same cycle of productivity I had observed earlier and was a part of. And I, my friends am a software engineer – keeper of once, the most admired job in the whole world! Matter-of-factly, this makes for a poor recycled joke nowadays. Nevertheless, even today, the IT sector rakes in astronomical profits that supposedly drive the Indian economy. The aforementioned adjective of supposition is partly inherited because of people like me and possibly like you who choose to break one cycle after another, day after day, causing mass suffrage tantamount to a genocide in a condensed passage of time. At the other end however, it's the lesser mortals we pass by everyday who are creating fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, though not quite the CK Prahlad way. To cut a long story short, what I learned from this random outing of mine is: Life's all about creating values - however infinitesimal they be in scale, for yourself and for others. So wake up Sid, munch a handful of caffeine if that is what helps and sleep off, but never!
-Loo©zar 4pm 17/05/10.

IT MEANS NOTHING

I really needed to write today. It was in July 2008 that I last wrote. It was a blog on the epic Wimbledon final between Federer and Nadal. Times have changed since then. Changed for worse. I recall telling a friend that I prefer writing only when I'm emotionally overwhelmed. That is usually when my adrenalin gets inebriated and flows, as does my pen. Since that day till today, there have been numerous such instances but I never wrote. I wonder why I'm writing today.

Time has unfolded in such a way that has left my emotional quotient fluctuating like a richter on Mars, so much so that it has almost defied its very reason for existence - for a quotient is a parameter with restrictions on how it behaves, or at least shows a trend. My EQ has had no pattern. It's been erratic, chaotic, restless, wayward and what not. Here, the year 2009 'trails by example'. It began with a good friend abruptly snapping all ties, then a car accident that almost killed me, and soon followed by mercy killing of a half-paralyzed relationship that lasted four and a half years, or so I felt..! It was then that I came to understand why euthanasia is banned in most countries. For though one half of you could be paralyzed or dead, the other half could be well alive and kicking, almost oblivious of the numbness prevailing close by. And in this regard, the aforesaid 'act of mercy' was an accident always waiting to happen. So 2009 could well be called the year of accidents. Leave apart the occasional acts of obsessive, compulsive self-harakiri like overboozing at pubs, moping and brooding in air-tight cubby holes, fagging for no reason at all and flirting around - with chicks, with life.

The art of flirting has always come naturally to me. I flirt to enjoy, sometimes to fight boredum or depression, and sometimes to avenge all womankind and vindicate my own stance on it. In due course, I've met several kinds of females: some of them phony, some narcissistic, some beautiful, some too beautiful, some intelligent and some too intelligent. There are countless other types. Variety, as I quip, is the spice of life. With some of them I also pretended to be in love, may be to help me out as a mock-drill for the day I'm actually in love or may be simply because I missed being in love. The best part is, I always knew I was pretending. Almost none of them though emanated the vibes of a prospective soul-mate. Not even close.

To sum it all, I actually didn’t flirt with girls. I flirted with my own life. There are other important things in life - career, health, family ties; I flirted with all of them. And that reminds me telling someone that if ever I happened to write a book the title would be: How to screw up anything - 1000 simple ways to screw up your own life..! Much like how people take smoking, I've always wanted to quit flirting ever since the time I began it. But it never felt brimming and spilling over my head. Today, for reasons more than one, it does. The Tipping Point has just come. And I can very well sense it. Somehow it has just died out by itself. It's ironic that when I used to flirt I never found a soul-mate, but today when I've almost quit, I have found someone worth being one. I'm very certain she doesn't feel the same but if she has read Paul Coelho, she would at least know that "Any woman with the least bit of sensitivity can understand the eyes of a man in love".

She's beautiful and quite logically, she's committed too; whatever in French it is supposed to mean. Men drool for her like workers around a queen bee. May be they get attracted by her visible charm but her ways are beautiful all the more. And so are her little imperfections like her sensitivity to heat, an odd acne on the cheek, parched chocolate-brown lips,geeky specs, short height and love handles near the waist. Somehow I can connect with all of them. Somehow I just wish they remain as they are or I would probably like her less..! As if to say I resemble a greek god myself. By far, I don't. But cathartic is the way she hums or sings, as it almost drains out all the pain from my body and the negativity from my soul. Mesmerizing is the way she looks into my eyes, as when she does I feel like believing. Believing that goodness still exists,and that her eyes understand me like no one else does. It's just the way she does the simplest of things that makes me take a bow. When she prays to God early in the morning, the agnostic in me prays for her. When she hits me naughtily, I want to be hit more. When she pulls my sleeves to cross the road, I wish the tautness remains forever. When she hurts her leg while walking, I feel like giving her a piggyback ride. When she holds my hand, I try clutching hers harder. And when she says nothing at all, I freeze like mercury at absolute zero. It's her. Understand she does. Desire she does not. I wish I could tell her how she has breathed life into a writer who was hibernating like a sloth bear for a year and half. I wish I could tell her what my eyes silently try to. It's hoping against hope for sure and I know it means nothing. But if I haven't got you, it means nothing either.

Looczar: 14 Mar, 2010, 5pm.