wilderness rocks

Kanha

2009-11-04T02:18:00.000-08:00

"Central Indian Sal forest with extensive meadows, Barasingha and Tigers" was the description everybody gave me when i asked them about Kanha.

It was quite a good description... except that they should have been jumping up and down when they said its a lovely place. I will to whoever asks me about Kanha from now on.
The Sal forest is lovely, not very dense (except towards the Mukki side which is extremely dense)
The Meadows are beautiful and extensive. What amazed me the most is the matrix of forest and grassland in a combination i've never seen before and whose beauty quotient is soaring high.

The early morning scene which i saw as i entered was this BIG grassland, trees only here and there, TALL grasses, and big pools of water, streams here and there in between the grassland, and fog coming out of the water.

will continue!

hello

2008-02-03T06:30:00.000-08:00

hi all,

i know that i REALLY haven't kept my blog updated at all...but I've decided to do so from now on...so here goes....from the past year after exploring a bit more of chamundi betta, I've also been traveling whenever possible, and have managed to go to some very lovely forests like Bandipura, Nagarhole, BR hills, Bhadra, Tadoba,Satkosia Gorge and Eravikulam. apart from that I've been birding like crazy :) I'm with mysore amateur naturalists and we go out almost every Sunday around mysore, to nameless places,along canals, behind villages..anywhere we can do some good birding. I've also been able to volunteer with Wild Orissa, an organization based in Bhubaneswar. and with them i've been able to attend the annual waterfowl count at chilika lake, witness the mating of olive ridley turtles in Rushikulya beach, visit a community which protects black bucks, go to bhitarkanika national park for salt water crocodiles, and satkosia gorge sanctuary for one of the most junglee experiences i've ever had. thanksfully i havent had the need to go as a tourist, and have been able to find something to do in the wild :). i hope i always have something to do in the wild. one thing to cross off my list of things to do before i die is see a wild tiger, which i did in Tadoba , with my friend Aditya Panda and see flamingos which i did in chilika lake, again with adi. The birding every sunday with Mysore Amateur Naturalists (MAN) has been like sunday school to a devotee (only in this case, mother nature is being worshiped), i've seen Some lovely birds of prey like lesser spotted eagle, short toed eagle, bonelly's eagle, marsh, pallid and montague's harriers, kites, osprey, and a list which i hope never ends, i have a LONG list of waterfowl sighting which i got to see on our Sunday outings as well as the waterfowl census which we conduct......i definitely will start writing about my trips...please keep checking the blog for updates :)

stay wild,
Dayani

chamundi hills mysore pics

2006-09-03T05:23:00.000-07:00

i have lived the whole of my life in mysore....i cant believe i took 18 years to discover the beauty and the biodiversity of our very own chamundi hills....betta as we call it....here are a few interesting and beautifull creatures i found there.... SNAIL

i think this is a TREE FROG about an inch and a half in size
GIANT WOOD SPIDER

more photos to be uploaded in future.....

2006-08-27T02:14:00.000-07:00

Pelican at karanji lake, mysore. this pictue was taken using my 3.2 megapixel camera wit no optical zoom....i used my binos instead!!!!! i can never forget this pic cause this was just before we were attacked by the alpha male in the bonnet macaque troop over there.

karanji lake is a man-made lake. built by the maharaja of mysore as a sewage dumpyard, Mysore zoo authority has now converted it into a bird haven and is a very good example for wetland eco-system with darters, cormorants, spoonbills, painted storks,pelicans are just in the begining of a long list of birds which karanji supports........ it also has india's largest aveary

tiger census

2006-08-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

december 2005 might not mean a thing to anybody , but for me, it was my first ever look into the world i dream to be a part of, was my first view of the real situation at hand...

26 december
after a weeks planning and a hundred phone calls, we (me and my co-wildlife freak ipsita) were finally going to volunteer for the tiger census in the forests near valparai. after 12 hours of travel from mysore, we reached iyerpadi post where we met Mr A.K Sharma, a primatologist working on lion tailed macaques around valparai. sharma 'uncle' as we call him turned out to be great company. listening to a wildlifer talk is always something to look forward to, we were all the more thrilled because Mr sharma was the first ever behavioural biologist we had ever met. after discussing a few details about our schedule and lots of details about 'awareness', we retired to our camp cots.

27 december
we leave to korangumudi at a freezing six o clock in the morning after a half an hour wait for the bus in front of the church ( its amazing that there isnt a departmental store, we are almost in the middle of nowhere. but hey you never know when you feel like praying so there is a church!!!!) korangumudi meaning "monkeys hair" was one of the places where Mr sharma did his research....there was a big group of lion tailed macaques ( LTMs as every body calls them) we first mistook a giant squrriel jumping for an LTM, but then the doubt was cleared as we saw the gentle animal. The LTMs were amazing, and as we walked back to our bus stop, we were asked to hurry because our tracker and Sharma smelt elephants.Fortunately, now i can identify that smell too. we had to wait for the bus to take us back to iyerpadi, there wasnt a bus stop as such, so we just sat under a tree, beside the road, this is weher we found some scat on the road.... it was pretty old, Mr sharma then told us that is belonged to dhole- the indian wild dog.
back in iyerpadi, we ate lunch and then the tracker took us to puduthotam, to find more LTM, we found only a solitary LTM, but that didnt bring our spiritd down because we had our first sighting of nilgiri langur, and we found ourselves right in the middle of a gaur herd, and though we were terrified, they didnt really mind us being thre, after alll those stories about gaur charging at you, it was nice to see the gentler side of them, i guess they dont really come into conflict with people there and so arent very aggressive.post dinner, we left iyerpadi to meet the DFO, and then went to the guest house just outside indira gandhi wildlife sanctuary

28th ,29th and 30th december,
We started from the guest house at 9 (though we were supposed to reach our transects by 6) we reached ours by eleven and had absolutely no sightings throught the day, finished the data collection and we came back at around six, just intime for the sunset, and there bittu was waiting for me and she was jumping up and down. because had seen the great indian hornbill just a few minutes ago, and it was still sittign on a branch above us. after all the leech bites, i was in a very sour mood, but the great hornbill wiped all that away, and what i felt then was PURE joy, oh what a beautiful bird, when the great hornbill flies, the sound will put you in a trance...its a whoosh whoosh sound and you can NOT get enough of it.
the next day was uneventlul, and so was the following dya, which was mostly walking to find a bus to iyerpadi, we hitched a ride to the nearest bus stop on a lorry foll of tea estate workers.

its been 2 years since, and i'm still get a high when i think of the lovely forest we were in, and of course the great hornbills..

tree frog

2006-08-27T00:27:00.000-07:00

this picture proved to be extremely expensive...the frog jumped on mom's hand as soon as the picture was taken and she dropped the camera...still i think the picture was worth the pain....

life sentence??

2006-08-27T00:23:00.001-07:00

I'm talking about the state of wild leopards which are being captured in India. All of them have been taken to zoos across the country.But that is all we know about their fate.The moment we realise that they have been taken to the zoo, we feel that it is safe and so don't really bother about it. Now here is the question. what do we mean by safe? do we mean that it is protected by the dangers of living its life in the wild ( where it really belongs)? or do we mean that it is safe from people. If you say, safe from people, I ask how?. How is the cat safe from people. It is in their hands that it's future lies and when i say 'in their hands' I mean it literally. It is to lie in a zoo with a maximum space of 50 square meters, to be jeered by hundreds of so-called "educated" people trying to attract it's attention by clapping or whistling( some even go to the extent of jumping up and down and banging the meshed cage. Not much unlike the chimps in the enclosure nearby). isn't it time we asked the officials what happens next? aren't they ever going back home? arent they ever going to hunt again? arent they ever going to do anything else anymore, than be used in an "ex-situ conservation" breeding programme? If every leopard captured in the bathroom of a school watchman is doomed to an eternal jail for no fault of it, the forests of India are going to have to shelter very few of these wonderful animals