The holiness of wide open places -- 2

These wide open places, this surviving patch of wilderness (it's not true forest of course) comprises mostly of scrub and mid-sized trees with a Rain tree and a Silk Cotton here and there. The rest is all wild grass and undergrowth interspersed with a couple of abandoned quarries and a really wide fire trail (the other side of which is military no-man land) encloses it on one side. The other side is an apology (in development terms) of a road, red, red, red.

I stumbled upon these wilds totally by serendipity when I was looking at basically staying off the highways or the traffic choked one's of the colony while taking the little man on one of his much demanded "tirigi vodamu" rides -- if memory serves me right -- some 3 years back.

The little man used to call the wilds "water"; that was his blanket term for that stretch, yet another stretch dominated by a big (again disused / abandoned) quarry and the buffalo wallow that thinks it is a pond, the pond that thinks it is a tank (it even has a bund of sorts) where he once wanted me to jump into the waters and get out fish for him to eat. But then, since the little man's preferred adventure was to throw stones into water we haven't much been into the tree / grass wilds that much, but for slow first and second gear thumping, either on the red road looking out for peacocks and wild rabbits in the summer or going through every single puddle (much to the little man's delight) that had formed on it through the wet season. And of course a number of rides through shoulder high grasses after the first of which I taught him the word "forest".

For the last two years, increasingly the little man's visits have grown lesser and as to be expected, apart from the Cartoon serials on the TV he has got hooked to playing games on mobile phone handsets too. Which means that he has never come birding or butterflying with me (I have been seriously doing it for a bit over one and half years now). I hope I can do something about it this butterfly season, maybe encourage him to go chase one of them, but I know that the chances are remote -- he and the adults in the family will certainly not be enthused by the prospect. And -- in all probability -- being the opportunist he is, the little man will turn the butterflying trip into yet another pizza trip.

Then again, maybe I am running ahead of myself and he is too young to be really interested in what the difference is in between a hawk and a crow and a butterfly and a wildflower. After all he has just turned six.

But then, there is a child in me who consistently finds thrill in these open spaces; not just because of the photographs or the keepers among them. But also for the open spaces themselves, for so many things that register on the mind's eye and are beyond photography. Like the cool gusts of breeze from the quarry / pond waters bearing in them the promise of rain or the silvery flash -- more imagined than seen -- as a fish turns tail, or even the serious (thoughtful child) observations of how the grass grows (even as my hair does) and dries as a more implacable season finds its feet. And yes, I have no shame in saying that I tried shooting butterflies in flight and could have bitten myself in anger when all I could see "captured" were fuzzy blobs of colour where there should have been wings, antennae, proboscis and so on. I also have no shame in saying that I have been awestruck more than once when in some rain-fed green meadow in the wilds, I have seen more butterflies aflutter than I could count and couldn't know which on to concentrate on.

It's yet another thing that I still will chase and try to "capture" a butterfly in flight this season too, but if I fail this time I will laugh and not be piqued. Because now I know butterflies better.

A lust for life and close encounters with the beautiful wilds

Looking back, over the last three years, I have spent a lot
of time outdoors, and most of it is in the "wilds"
near my place, in what is more or less military / government
land that has been left on its own -- crisscrossed by grass-verged
dirt tracks and populated by quite a few trees (though none
are that old or that giant) and interspersed with rocky outcrops
and disused quarries.

And I have been spending a lot more time here than the usual
hour in the morning or hour in the evening in the last two months,
thanks to the fact that I have had plenty of time on my hands and
that the profusion of butterflies and birds that I have found here.

I have seen the most stunning of artists -- mother nature -- at
work here, seen the dusty expanses of sun-scorched grass turn
green and then burst into colour -- with a billion wildflowers --
blue, wine red, yellow, purple and so on. And I have felt like
going down on my knee, overwhelmed by the inherent mystique in
the fluidity with which mother nature transforms what was once
a barren, almost dead landscape into something that calls out
to the Van Gogh in me...

I have agonized over the choice -- on continuous forays into
these wilds, on continuous days -- if to stick to shooting the
landscapes on offer or be led on a dance shooting the birds and
the butterflies. And there have been days when I have kicked
myself for not having both of my lenses with me (while perched
high on the narrow saddle of the Schwinn -- which doesn't have
a carrier or allow for leisurely ATB kind of cycling -- lugging
much gear is a bit tough) or when I have had both with me, I have
agonized over whether to shoot the whole meadow or a close up of
a flower and so on and so forth...

It is another matter that I have already come to the conclusion
that photography cannot be mixed with anything else; even with a
leisurely cycle ride, especially when it is the photography
of birds and butterflies.

Being on the cycle (with the camera zipped up in a bag) means that
by the time I am ready to shoot, the bird has flied off or it means
that there is a limit to the amount of "on foot" chasing that's
possible behind a butterfly, while leaving the Schwinn unguarded.

Which means, I have spent a lot of time afoot in these wilds and
hopefully will spend some more time walking through them.

And while enjoying the feeling that the wilds are my own private
preserve, thrilling in knowing these open expanses first
hand, for having played amateur naturalist and rookie woodsman
and coming across tailor bird nests, conclaves of bee eaters,
shy peacocks and even shyer coucals, pairs of bulbuls, colonies
of weaver birds, trapezing chameleons...

How do I even begin to express the pricelessness -- of the wealth
of all these ramblings in the wilds? It certainly cannot be
measured in terms of the photographs I have taken; I sincerely
feel that peering through a zoom lens is no less "naturalist" and
fieldwork from an ornithologist / lepidopterist point of view
than it would have been if the peering had been through a pair of
binoculars...and the ego boost of a good / perfect capture -- of a
bird or a butterfly is at many times secondary to the joys of seeing
the bird or butterfly with an enraptured eye :-)

And yes, just when I start thinking that I have seen it all, I see
something totally new and wonderful, something that -- yet again --
thrills me with the joy of witnessing and understanding the magic in
the behaviour of yet another "wild" species while simultaneously
humbling me with its beauty and economy of being natural.

I forget I have a camera with me when I see multitudes of small
butterflies like the Anderson's Grass Yellow -- fluttering and
wheeling around, like so many children at play -- preparatory to
settling down to puddle. Or I forget that I am supposed to take
a picture, capture the minute when I see a pair of Pied Kingfishers
bobbing / balancing on a barbed wire (for some reasons these birds
always seem to fish in a pair) while -- with the accompaniment of
a twinkle in the eye -- shitting a pearly white; instead grinning
to myself...

And it still doesn't cease to wonder me when (after having observed
the same countless times) I see weaver birds in their bright yellow
plumage, at work weaving freshly fetched green grass into what is
already a project that is a month long...going on and on...with the
finickiness of the true artists, building masterpieces the same way
countless of their ilk have done before as directed by their genetic
code.

It is more or less the same feeling -- of wonder and awe -- with
which I watch a butterfly pirouette on a lantana flower, preparatory
to going for the nectar the way a kid would for the jam bottle;
somehow the butterfly's greed seems more worthy of respect,
more evolved!

I don't know how long these wilds will survive -- as with most
open spaces within or flanking a concrete jungle called the city
these face the depredations of man too. I found (on my return from
Varanasi) that many weaver bird nests have been knocked down
and in some cases those very branches on which the nests were
have been cut; God only knows why and by whom...and a large
residential colony is already coming up flanking the wilds --
but I do look forward to some more close encounters, some more
peaceful epiphanies like the one I had on this Sunday.

I was cycling through the wilds on the dirt track and I came
across three bee-eaters, their green plumage iridescently
dazzling lying right on the track, beaks and beady red eyes
looking skywards, wings stretched out, something I have never
seen any bird do. Maybe they were sunbathing, or they were
praying.

Whatever they were doing, I did go down on my knee yet again.

And the photographs that resulted were but a bonus.

The fascinating world of my butterflies

Picturise a late morning -- 11ish -- setting, of grass that has a dazzle
that can only be called "green gold", along with a wealth of Lantana,
bramble and scrub and other wildflowers, under a wealth of sunlight
pouring in from dazzling blue skies. *

Amidst this "canvas" for the photographically inclined, now picturise
the flight -- of specks of bright colour -- hither and tither, this way
and that, now soaring up to be lost in the light of the skies, now
dipping down to vanish into the green of the verdure.

If you can follow the speck of bright colour long enough and do it
again and again on a daily basis (and google for it and land up at
places like this) probably you can recognize one of them as an individual "type" as opposed to "hmmm, isn't
that a butterfly?"

Okay, if you are an "old butterfly hand" kindly excuse me for
this whiff of what may appear to be grandstanding (it's delight,
that too childish, in fact) but yes, I have got good enough to
identify some butterflies in flight (and most when they are
basking) and in fact I already have a substantial list (one that
will hopefully grow) of my butterflies.

So hold my camera while I type them down, will you please?

Common Rose
Crimson Rose
Banded Swallowtail / Blue Bottle / Common Jay
Pale Grass Blue
Common Tiger
Striped Albatross
Leopard
Red Helen
Lime Butterfly
Danaid Eggfly (male / female)
Common Jezebel
Blue Pansy
Peacock Pansy
Lemon Pansy
Yellow Pansy
Chocolate Pansy
Striped Tiger
Plain Tiger
Blue Tiger
Tawny Coaster
Common Castor
Anderson's Grass Yellow
Blue Spotted Crow / King Crow (male / female)
Zebra Blue
Pale Grass Blue
Common Cerulean
Grass Demon
Common Gull
The Pioneer
Mottled Emigrant
Common Emigrant
The Baronet
Brown Awl

Yes, many of these butterflies have even resulted in pretty good
captures! Which is like an added joy on top of the fascinating
reward of just seeing and identifying the butterfly.

As I write this, its been almost three months of lots and lots
of painstaking field work, of being scratched in the bushes,
of being led a dance in what one thinks is stalking and the
absolute disregard of time in what is involved in
"chasing a butterfly", but nonetheless it has been worth it.

As has been the tanning of my sun-exposed body and bleaching of
the wilderness of my hair.

Because, for every proper "capture" of a butterfly, there are
countless more that take root in me in the form of poems.

And capture or not, poem or not, its humbling to "see" a
butterfly and both enlightening and delightful to thereafter
read up on it and know it as an individual, as yet another
lovely living thing that makes nature what it is -- a
fascinating world.

Here's to you -- my butterflies, may your tribe(s) increase!

* Sad, but true...it hasn't rained much in Hyderabad this year.
Normally I would tear my hair out and complain and bawl a lot.
But this time I was getting something built, okay? Also, you
cannot do much photography of butterflies. Ask me :-)