Country notebook:m.krishnan

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

[ PAGE 2]
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CLANNISH

Territorial feelings may also account for hostility towards intruders. In July 1951, I was staying at a forest bunglow and the gate of the compound seemed to limit one side of the domain of a party of LARGE GREY BABBLERS - another party of these highly clannish bird inhabited the scrub beyond the gate. One morning, a Babbler from the scrub crossed over to the compound and was promptly mobbed by the bunglow party. The assault was technical; a voluble, excited attempt at encircling the gatecrasher, which retreated to the scrub in haste and was not pursued - there was sufficient threat in the attempt to constitute an assault in law. In could be that if that intruder had come far enough in, if it had not been so near the gate that escape was easy, there would have been more action.

Flight from what hurts or threatens is such a natural and widespread reaction among animals that the victim's lack of attempt to escape does seem surprising, at the first sight. However, it could be that it does not respond to the threat gestures of its antagonists (this preliminary display by the attackers has probably been mistaken for deliberation before attack by the older naturalists) because those gestures have no compelling force or "meaning" to it, because they do not release either flight or appeasement responses in it. Of course, encirclement, confusion and bodily injuries caused by actual attack may all be reasons for the victim's apathy - illness or injury prior to the attack may also be causes. There is no intelligent appraisal of chances of escape or acceptance of the inevitable - if that bird were capable of intelligence, it could escape.

A SAFEGUARD

A group attack can, of course, be directed against a member of the group. There is usually some safeguard to prevent actual fighting in gregarious animals and threat gestures are often sufficient to assert rights. Fighting out of sexual rivalry or over rights of precedence is confined to the rivals and the rest of the clan takes no sides but where a basic "right" is violated the protesting bird summons clan aid and usually gets it. Lorenz describes the amusing behaviour of jackdaws when a stronger bird tries to usurp the nest hole of a weaker member of the colony. The aggressor assaults the rightful holder and appropriates the site by sheer force; the dispossessed bird indulges in a proprietorial "zicking" call which soon changes to an outraged "yipping"; this brings all the jackdaws within earshot to the nest, jostling one another and yipping furiously and this sudden babble usually breaks up the fight, "particularly since the original aggressor participates in the yipping!" Lorenz explains how this is not a cunning move by the miscreant to divert suspicion from itself by crying "stop thief" with the rest, but an uncontrollable reaction - he adds. "I have often seen cases, however, where the aggressor was very definitely recognised by the advancing members of the colony and was thoroughly thrashed if he persisted in the attack."

CONCEDED 'RIGHTS'

It is likely that some such communal disturbances, initiated by the outraged calls of a bird defending some usually conceded "right" against an aggressor brought about the "lynchings" reported. But the culprit need not have indulged in violent aggression - its culpability may be accidental and beyond its control.

That brings us to the CROWS. I have heard the theory that an injured or a sick bird is some times executed by its clan and that this is a communal safeguard, for obviously an incapacitated bird must be a drag on the clan and can not perform its duties by the next generation efficiently. There is, of course, no suggestion of conscious action in all this - the birds act instinctively in this manner. This is not a variation of the "court of justice" idea and is scientifically sound, but still it is a speculative theory.

I have seen crows pecking a crow to death - I am sure many others have witnessed this happening. I can not attempt any explanation of the murder because I did not observe the incidents that led up to it and had not studied those crows closely enough to know their identities or their relationship to the victim, i.e, it is my ignorance of the "facts of the case" that obscures my understanding. However, I am happy to provide an example to the contrary from my own observation. I have seen a party of crows trying to rouse a member that has fallen to the earth with man-inflicted injuries. They flew low over it, repeatedly flying just over its prostrate, struggling body, evidently trying to induce to follow them; later, they alighted and settled around it, cawing agitatedly; they approached close and then hopped away. That wounded crow took nearly 15 minutes to die and only when it was quite still did its companions fly away.

I trust I have at least explained why there can not be any one explanation of intraspecific mobbing and how it is useless to theorise unless all the facts are known, especially those anterior to the attack. No little bird can tell us the truth about these things because, as pointed out already, we are attempting to understand motives far beyond avian understanding. However, our knowledge of bird behaviour is much sounder and more comprehensive than what it was, and an expert observer can often account for an avian mobbing - perhaps much more certainly than we can explain why human mobs sometimes react as people did during the recent Kumbha Mela."
[concluded]

-M.Krishnan


This was first published on 11 July 1954 in The Sunday Statesman

Note:
A sketch of an avian court and another of a party of crows sitting around an injured member not reproduced.
The Article came out as as a single one , I have divided into two parts for convenience.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

......... [ PARAKEET ]
.........
.........

"During the 40 days it spent in my prison, I gained the impression, slowly, that it was a very old bird. It quite refused to make friends with humanity and was idiotically scared if anyone went near its cage, but it was indifferent to the cat - curiously enough, the feline was equally indifferent to the cage.

Parakeets fly swiftly, but they are essentially climbing birds. Since my bird had no tail, there was no feathers to obscure its legs as it clambered about and I was able to study its climbing technique closely.

Most birds have rigidly set feet, with three toes pointing forward and one behind, but a parakeet can reverse its third toe and most often its feet have toes in opposite pairs, the better to grasp with. Moreover, its upper beak was not firmly joined to the skull as in other birds but is capable of a certain play - this gives that massive, curved, overhanging book-bill a measure of delicacy and "feel" that that is invaluable to a climber. A parakeet always goes beak foremost, whether climbing up or down.

It is said that when a parakeet goes to sleep, perching on both feet, it is a sign of poor health and that a bird in good health will perch on one foot. I can testify to the truth of this from observation. After the first two weeks (when it used both feet),# my bird slept perched on one foot. I have the definite recollection that whenever I saw it asleep it was perched on its left foot, with the right foot drawn up, but I can not say that it never used its right foot for perching. Had this occurred to me yesterday, I could have verified my suspicions, but you know how it is with these things - this has occurred to me just now, five hours after releasing my bird ! "
- M.Krishnan

This was first published on 15 August 1954 in The Sunday Statesman

The last three paragraphs have been reproduced.
The sketches are not reproduced here.

# NOTE:
A male parakeet received deep wound on its left side (the kind of wound described as a 'stab injury' in medico-legal books) by a crow during night and was profusely bleeding. Krishnan got up from bed and with the help of flashlight located it in his compound, picked it up ,treated it and kept under his supervision for 40 days and then released it when it was found fully fit.
Use of 'both feet' was during the first two weeks of the treatment and recovery phase.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

[TAILORBIRDS]


"THE warbler tribe is the most numerously anonymous of all birds. There are several hundreds of them - wren-warblers, willow-warblers, tree-warblers, fantail warblers and just warblers - all smallish birds, most of them quite tiny, all more or less of dull feather. They are inconspicuously grey, brownish or greenish, much given to playing hide and seek in bushes and no less given to warbling or to feeble call-notes. It is not hard, once you have the hang of family characters, to know a bird as a warbler when you see it. Further identification, is a matter for the warbler specialist, and even he likes to have the bird in one hand and the textbook in the other.

It is surprising, therefore, to find that one of the most familiar and easily identified of our garden birds is a warbler. It is 'Orthotomus sutorius' - if it fails to mistify you, I might as well use the common name and call it the 'Tailorbird'. There are few gardens in India, however, modest, that are not graced by the presence of a pair of tailorbirds.

True, there are other warblers that look like the tailorbirds; there are Ashy Wren-Warbler, for instance, another small, slim, energetic bird with a cocked up tail and the habit of flitting airily about bushes. It is more grey or dark brown on top, in any plumage, than the olive green tailorbird, though both are of a size and shape and both have pale undersides, but it is not by their looks that you tell them apart, not even by the cock tailorbird's tailpins, because these are shed after the breeding season. The wren warbler makes a curious, quickly repeated snapping noise, faint but audible and unmistakable - if you hear a tailorbird making this noise, put it down as the Ashy W-W.

Tailorbirds have many calls, among them a rapid "chick-chick-chick-chick" (I think this is an alarm call or rather an alert). A loud monosyllabic "Tweet" and a louder two-syllabled "Towhee". No other bird of that size has such a bold loud voice. And if you watch a tailorbird while it is calling, you will see a transverse black bar appear and disappear on either side of the neck with each call.

The beautifully sewn nest is, perhaps, even better known than the bird. One would think that suck a work of sartorial art is the true and unique hallmark of the tailorbird, but at times the Ashy W-W builds an almost identical nest, also slung within stitched leaves. However, if there are eggs in the nest you can tell the builder at once. The tailorbird's eggs are speckled, and wren-warbler's are a deep, shiny red.

The very first nest with young that I watched was a tailorbird's, in a Hiptage bush just below the varandah of a house. Sometimes these birds build their nests close to human life, even in a potted plant on the varandah at times. So bold and confiding are they that they will continue to feed their tiny, wide-gaped young while you sit and watch the process from two yards away, provided you keep utterly still and don't stare too rudely. No other nesting bird is so easy to watch.

Off and on, for the past two years, I have been watching a pair of tailorbirds that frequent my garden. They are there all day, and I think, all night as well quite often, for I have often seen roosting in a yellow oleander bush late in the evening. They seem to like my neglected and rank garden, and to feel very much at home, but though there are plenty of insect life here to feed them and their broods they have never nested within my compound walls. Where large-leaved creepers and bushes are available, tailorbirds prefer to nest in them, and there are few such plants in my garden.

I have taken great pains (what a lie!) - it calls for none to allow the plants here to run wild and fight it out among themselves, and I am reluctant to interfere with the perfectly natural growth, but I think that one of these days, when I can find a lusty seedling and energy, I will dig pit by my kitchen wall, fill it with something less inhibiting than the clay soil of my compound and plant a 'Hiptage' seedling there for the tailorbirds to nest in."

-M.Krishnan

This was first published on 7 November 1954 in the Sunday Statesman

*One sketch of a Tailorbird with cocked up tail has not been reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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" CALLING UP

The comparison with Col Corbett's thrillers is inescapable. It must be said in Anderson's favour that he attempts no one-handed shooting or other fancy manoeuvres, but he is not Col Corbett's equal as a naturalist and nowhere in that class as a raconteur. His narrative style is workmanlike and lacks that sure feeling for suspense and drama, that uncanny communication of atmosphere and circumstantial detail, that are Col Corbett's own. However, Mr. Anderson has been equally lucky in his escapes, and his book raises several interesting issues which may be briefly considered here, for they are features of recent Indian Shikar literature.

For instance, there is the question of calling up man-eaters. I believe that Col Corbett's 'Man-eaters of Kumaon' was the first book to describe the method. This method usually provokes skeptical banter in Shikar circles, outside them as well. I have even read of the predicament of the bandicoot-hunter who finally decides, when sittings up and traps and poisoned baits have all failed, to call up the Night-Raider of the Nether Regions, only to find he can not because, in his ignorance of the N-R's sex, he does not know whether to use the coarse, rasping grunt of the male bandicoot or the softer grumble of the female. But though I wrote this passage myself, I have never been able to understand why people should doubt the feasibility of calling up tigers and panthers.

ANCIENT EXAMPLES

Actually, the calling up of other animals has long been practiced in India and outside. The birch-bark trumpet used by North American hunters to lure the bull moose within range, and the use of leaves pressed to the lips by primitive tribes in India to produce sounds like the distress-calls of fawns to attract hinds (this will also attract wild dogs) are ancient examples of calling up. The greater cats, which "mate as fiercely as they kill", are highly excitable and aggressive during that period. However, their hearing is exquisite (that of the tiger has justly termed "microscopic") and it is doubted whether anyone can imitate them well enough to deceive them. I do not think this is always necessary, particularly in calling up man-eaters.

If you can bring yourself to bark like a dog, working up a good, staccato fervour into the barking, you will find (as I have found) that you can provoke a violent response in canines both at home and abroad. It is not that the dogs mistake you for one of their kind, for they can see you. But something in the infective urgency and strangeness of your behaviour moves them powerfully. Could it not be that a tiger in a state of fretful excitement is sometimes moved to seek out a human imitator out of sheer irritation? It is significant, in this connection, that slightly wounded tigers are said to respond to calling up as readily as those seeking mates.

There is another possible explanation, even if one will not concede the possibility of a tiger mistaking a human voice for a mate's. Mr Anderson's book illustrates this second explanation admirably. In his account of the Yemmaydoddi man-eater, he tells how he attracted the tiger to himself by tapping a branch in simulation of a woodcutter - and in telling of the "Man-eater of Jowlagiri", he says the tigress was kept till dawn (when there will be light enough to shoot by) in the vicinity of a shrine which housed the author and his companions by his giving her the answering call of a tiger and also by the prospect of dinner, since she knew there were men inside the shrine. Granted that his calling up after dawn failed to deceive the tigress, it could be that she came up to him attracted, as was the tier of Yemmaydoddi, by himself."

-M.Krishnan


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This was first published on 14 November 1954 in The Sunday Statesman


Note:
(1)The Article was re-published in two parts in The Sunday Statesman on 11.08.2013 and 18.08.2013 and I have reproduced only a portion of it.
(2)Sketches of 'A tiger actually killing a bull (taken from a machan)'
and 'The killer of Jalahalli' not reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M. Krishnan : PEACE AND GOODWILL IN NATURE : The Sunday Statesman : 21 June 2015
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"TRUSTWORTHY witnesses have testified, independently of one another, to a strange jungle phenomenon - a killer walking past a group of its natural prey, which continued to graze unconcernedly, ignoring the disclosed proximity of the usually dreaded enemy. Big game hunters have seen a lion strolling past, even strolling through, a herd of zebras or antelopes, which did not even bother to raise their heads from the feeding, and in India the similar occasional indifference of deer to a tiger has been recorded. Those who saw this in credible sight rightly concluded that somehow the prey knew that their enemy was not hunting just then, and was, therefore, safe - though these hidden hunters were armed, they were too deeply touched with wonder to use the opportunity to add another head to their trophy room. I have never had the good fortune to witness this phenomenon myself, and my reconstruction of it in the illustration* here is purely the darkroom manipulations.

I may point out to naturalist readers that this extraordinary behaviour of predator and prey is something very different from the inhibition induced by the adoption of an attitude of suppliant vulnerability in interest specific encounters. Here, there does seem to be a definite perception by the prey of the predator's lack of aggressive intent - their normal reaction to the sight and even smell of the killer to panic and bolt.

A rather motivated truce between predator and prey, the weak and the strong, has also been observed among birds. Watchers of the crag-top nest of that tiger of the air, the Peregrine Falcon, have said that though many Rock Pigeons were nesting in the immediate vicinity, the pair of Peregrines never killed them, but sought their prey (usually Pigeons) much further afield.

Many nesting birds have decided antipathy to aggression in their territory. While we should clearly realise that such behaviour is instinctive and unreasoned, it is nevertheless a fact that it does serve as a check on nest-raiders (like Crows and Tree-Pies), and that by nesting in the same tree or cliff as powerful birds, weak birds do gain effective protection. It is well known that Orioles and comparatively defenceless birds frequently nest close by the Drongos, which are highly intolerant of trespassers.

Common danger also serves to promote a truce, for the time being between animals and their natural enemies. In times of extreme drought, a carnivora do not seem to kill at or near the only available source of water, and during forest fires, floods and landslides the instinct of self-preservation of the predators is dominant over the desire to kill. Even in beats, oddly associated animals have come out together.

From time immemorial, such occasional truces between born enemies have impressed men profoundly. In every human civilisation, there have always been tales, about friendships between animals that are antagonistic or unrelated. No doubt these tales reflect man's deeply felt desire for peace and goodwill, and its frustration in his own acquisitive life. However, the fact remains, in spite of anthropomorphic tales and folklore, that there are many such ties, and even friendships, in nature. As Konard Lorenz has pointed out, our understanding of animal ways, particularly of instinctive behaviour and the "releaser" and "imprinting" phenomena, does not in any way lessen the wonder of such associations.

Naturally, it is among animals of the same kind that we usually find close associations of the type that can be called friendship - and by this I mean a more selective and individualised relationship than gregarious ties, or the bond of mother love (though there are few things on earth more wonderful and touching in its strength and sensitiveness than mother love). Among the higher animals, we do occasionally come across authentic friendships - even in finding a mate they are, at times, much more selective than we think they are.

Most of the higher animals feel the the need of companionship as strongly as we do, and when they are deprived of the company of their kind, in an artificial environment such as zoo, they often enter into odd but powerful associations with strange mates, very different from themselves. Some of these associations have been explained on the basis of attachments formed during infancy, but others are less easily and certainly explained - for example, the desire of an airborne Elephant for the company of a Hen, and the love of a captive Warthog for the Monkeys with which it has been caged. Nor are all such odd associations induced by artificial circumstances. In Mudumalai Sanctuary of Madras, I saw repeatedly, at widely separated intervals, a Chital hind running with a mother Sambar and its fawn - Chital are commonest animals in those jungles, and this Chital could have had no lack of opportunity to rejoin its own kind. Other such associations, some explicable on the basis of mutual or unilateral benefit, others with no obvious motive, have been recorded.

One of the the strongest and most remarkable of such associations, to my mind, is the bond that commonly develops between a She-Buffalo in a mixed village herd and the rest of the herd - including the herd-boy!.....the She-buffaloes I have in mind, though theoretically domesticated, were animals with a powerful sense of independence, a pretty wild on occasion. I do not know what sublimated material and herd instincts lay behind those associations between buffalo cows and herd boys.

I remember one such association. The buffalo concerned was large and old, a great, cantankerous beast freely given to the use of its formidable horns; the herd boy was an urchin of 10. He beat its ponderous charge unmercifully with a stick when it failed to obey him, and frequently saved his legs by riding on its broad back. One day this miserable little boy did something very wrong, which called for immediate and stern measures,in the opinion of his elders. And his father (who owned that buffalo) and his uncles (who insisted on prompt reprisal) could do nothing to him because he he had fled to the sanctuary of the cattle-shed in the backyard and was now crouched between the short, columnar legs of his friends. Early in the proceedings the buffalo snapped its tether and thereafter it would permit no one to approach within 20 yards of the refugee. Finally, it was only by abjectly promising (in the presence of third-party witnesses, of whom I was one) to forget the entire incident and forgive everything, that the boy could be induced to soothe the roused feelings of his massive protector, tie it up again in the cattle-shed and re-enter his home."

- M. Krishnan

This was first published on 20 December 1959 in The Sunday Statesman

*The photograph has not been reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan: Bear at high noon :The Sunday Statesman : 14 June 2015
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BEAR AT HIGH NOON

" AT half-past eleven I decided to call it a day. We were six miles from home, at least an hour and a half for a pad-elephant taking it slow on hilltop tracks under an oppressive sun. We had been following a herd of Gaur for over two hours, gaining nothing by our persistence. So now, accepting defeat, we turned home.

On the way there was a sandy nullah and beyond it the only large field of lush grass there in summer. Three days previously, I had seen the almost human footprints of a Sloth Bear in that nullah and I now suggested a slight detour so that to pass through that field of four-foot-high grass, still tender in patches. Bears are very fond of young grass and apparently they are not so shy of daylight in grassy cover - twice before I have seen bears in such places, around four in the afternoon.

The mahout, my only companion, didn't think much of my idea. Bears, he argued, were nocturnal; it was well known that they were nocturnal or, at best, crepuscular. No bear in its senses would be out at noon, under that blistering sun, though some men would.

Furthermore, he would ask me to consider the inevitable delay in getting home, once our mount got into a field of green grass.

We were still debating the point when I entered the field, and I saw the Bear. Actually, what I saw was not a Bear but something coal-back and round, well inside the grass. Before I could warn my companion, he shouted at our elephant for stopping to sample the herbage, and the bear heard him.

Surprised in such tangled cover, Bears usually stand up on their hind legs, better to see the intruder. This one did no such thing. He had his back to us, with his head low and only the humped back and rounded posterior visible through the grass stems, and he turned sharply to the right and galloped away, with that heavy, clownishly exaggerated action that bears have, which is no longer comic when they are comic towards one. After going some distance, he pulled up, rudely turned his back on us again, and was a black ball in the grass once more.

This manoeuvre was repeated, when we moved nearer.

There are times when a man, retailing an experience, should tactfully omit a detail, in the interests of verisimilitude. But what I noticed was so particular, so altogether droll and improbable, that I am willing to risk such reputation as I have for accuracy to record the detail. Twice I noticed that the Bear was watching us from between legs, getting an upside-down view of us by bending its head so low that his chin touched his chest. The first time I could see both eyes clearly, between the somewhat straddled legs; only one eye, in a somewhat lateral view, the second time.

Never I have seen any other animal watch an intruder in such a fashion, excepting a Langur on tree once - and even that Langur looked downwards and backwards at me from above; it did not bow so low that the eyes looked up and back from the inverted face at the object of suspicion.

We tried another slow casual seeming approach, but that canny Bear was watching us narrowly, and was not to be fooled. When we were still some 30 yards away, he dived to a patch of taller grass, and by the agitation that ridged the grass tops in a wave we could make out that he was bearing steadily towards right, out of the field and back to the nullah we had crossed so recently.

There was a sandy hollow where the field ended, with half-a-dozen tall trees in a clump, and we arrived at this clump only a second after the bear did. Seeing us, he reared against the trunk of a 'Terminalia' - a big Terminalia of the kind whose bark is so reminiscent of crocodile-skin. For a moment he stood in indecision, hugging the rough bark - and for a moment my photographer's heart leaped up with joy, for I was sure he would go right up, and I would get the first pictures ever taken of a Sloth Bear climbing a tree.

He glanced at us, and then looked longingly up the trunk, and then decided to keep to terra firma. I know it is all wrong to interpret or record animal behaviour with any hint of anthropomorphism, but it is equally wrong not to record what one saw. Had you been there with me, you could have seen the Bear thinking - one quick look at us, a longer look at the trunk, and he was away. We lost sight of him as he tore down the hollow, then we saw him again as he scrambled up the other side of the nullah. There was a narrow belt of shorter grass that he had to cross before he could reach the tree jungle, but he didn't cross it. He entered the grass, and then suddenly he was no longer there, vanishing from the sight mysteriously. He has gone down a bolt-hole I knew.

Bears are, I think, the most interesting of our forest-living beasts, so strangely human in some ways. It is no surprise that our folklore and Puranas are so rich in melursine characters, and that in our jungleside traditions Sloth Bears are the only animals that seek out and carry away village belles. It is not merely that the plantigrade feet of the bear leave behind such semi-human prints, or that the carcass of a skinned bear is so horribly like a man - even a live bear, standing up and with the head turned away, looks very like a man. I think the droll ways of these bears, their strong mutual attachments, and their love of fruit and other jungle dainties that men also like (including the toddy in the pot up a wild date palm), have all contributed to those traditions. Only, the traditions have outlasted this wholly Indian and fascinating creature, in many of its former homes."

-M. Krishnan


This was first published on 13 December 1959 in The Sunday Statesman

#The photograph of the Sloth Bear hugging a big trunk not reproduced here.

[Indranil Panigrahi]

Canon 550D, Canon 75-300mm

The photograph was taken in our garden. The Squirrel has selected a matured (but not ripe) guava. M.Krishnan had observed that squirrels are clever enough not to go for fully ripe fruits 'the stalk of which will not give way too readily.'