Country notebook:m.krishnan

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan: Twisting & turning at top speed:The Sunday Statesman: 25 February 2018
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BLACK DRONGO

" The BLACK DRONGO is one of the few birds that practically everyone knows, though we are, as a nation, singularly unaware of the creatures that share this India that is Bharat with us, and the charm that they lend to life here. It is not a big bird, but it is bold and black and energetic, and endowed with a distinctive, deeply cleft tail, the kind of bird that no one can help noticing, so it is noticed and known.

Its names proclaim its character. It is the KING CROW in english, "Bhim raj" in Hindi, and "Valiyan" in Tamil, the last meaning "the powerful one" - no doubt it has other names in other Indian languages indicative of its might in such small compass.

Its mastery in the air, and the ability to twist and turn at top speed, and its fearlessness makes it the terror of all nest-raiders that many imprudently come too close to its nest. It believes in the dictum: "Thrice is he alarmed who has his quarrel just, but four times he who gets his blow in fust" and since justice is on his side when crows and similar thieving birds come near its nest, it is actually seven times armed! It shoots up into the air on quick-beating, broadly triangular wings, and plummets down on the unfortunate crow or kite as if it would transfix the enemy with its beak; invariably the trespasser beats a hasty retreat, and the pair of king crows follow it for some distance, speeding the parting guest.

Many observers have pointed protection from the nest robbers. Such associations, which are not really symbiotic because only one party to it is benefited, are not uncommon among birds and beasts.

King Crows like to perch high, on telegraph wires, posts and the exposed branches of a tree, keeping a sharp look-out for insects and other prey from their vantage point; where there is pasture, they also go riding on the backs of grazing cattle and goats, snapping up the insects that their mobile perches disturb. Unlike bee-eaters king crows often come down to ground to deal with prey that they can see there.

It is in the air that one really sees the bird at its best. The broad but short and sharply pointed wings are a dark, translucent brown when expanded and so is the forked tail, by their sudden changes from translucency when open to black opacity when shut, provide a visual complement to the dizzying twists of the bird's flight, and there is even an audible echo of these movements in the whir that the sharp expansions and contractions of the pinions and rectrices produce.

Early in the morning, before sunrise, king crows indulge in a chorus. Other drongos also do so, and some of them, like the white-bellied and grey drongos, have musical voices by comparison. But though the pre-dawn calls of king crows have a harsh sharpness, at that hour, when it is cold and the blackness is turning to a clear grey, they have an exhilarating quality.

Through the day they are usually silent, but as nightfall approaches they grow vocal again, and often come out with a quick grating double call, almost identical with the call of the shikara. Whether this is mimetic or just due to coincidence is a thing I do not know, though it is true that drongos as a family, are sometimes given to mimicry. But then, why should this shikara-call be sounded only at roosting time and not early in the morning as well? "

- M. Krishnan

* This was published on 12 June 1967.
# The photograph of a Black Drongo has not been reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan : A Skink would a-courting go : The Sunday Statesman :18 March 2018
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COMMON SKINK

"Of the lizard family one may well say: " How are the mighty fallen!" Once pre-historic lizards dominated life on earth, but those great monsters and dragons died out long, long ago, and today the degenerate representatives of the family scuttle along walls and hedges, and hide in crevices in stone and bark. In fact, with the exception of the crocodiles and alligators, none of them is really dangerous, or even frighteningly big.

All the same, they retain their primitive urges and passions, and are both violent and secretive in their ways. The life of most small lizards consists of hunting prey and escaping being killed, furtive solitude and sudden displays of intimidation. One would expect love to be a brief and somewhat violent urge with such creatures, and in many lizards love is like that. Therefore it was a surprise and a revelation to me when I followed a pair of courting Skinks for five days in my backyard some years ago, and noted that their intimacy was marked by a protracted courtship and many tender overtures that were ludicrously human at times.

They were the common Skinks of our plains (Mabuiya carinata), and both were very big. The female, over 10 inches long, was darker, and had the dark chocolate "hyphen-marks" on the skin prominently displayed; but because it had a regenerating tail, was much less in length; it was markedly paler. Both skins had a faint mauve blush over the dominant olive green of the skin~I do not know if this blush signified breeding condition.

For the first two days, the pair would not allow a really close approach, but thereafter "accepted" me, and I was with the pair from morning till late in the evening each day, seldom further then two yards away, often much nearer. I was using a folding camera with a proxar lens for close up pictures, and had to get the lens an estimated 18 inches from my subjects for the pictures. The pair kept close together, and except occasionally when hunting,were never more than 10 ft from each other. At nightfall the Skinks retired to a pile of stones, and disappeared down the many deep tunnels in the pile, and did not come out till the sun was up next morning.

It was during the early rains, in July-August, that I watched this pair, and at midday, if the sun was shining, they would bask in close proximity, bodies usually touching on a big slab of stone; if it rained, they found ample shelter under this same stone, which had a hollow space beneath it.

There were many other Skinks in my backyard, all of them considerably smaller, and invariably they ran away from the vicinity of the courting couple. The male was gallant in its attitude to its mate, never disputing any prey, and allowing the female to take the cockroaches I offered occasionally.


Tactile stimuli and responses seemed to play an important part in the leisurely progress of the courtship.
The male often snuggled up to the resting female, touching it with the body, sometimes caressing it with the snout. On the fourth day they mated, and mated again, twice. On the fifth day there was a sustained downpour and they disappeared from sight - in fact, I did not see them together again. I saw the female a week later, on the tiles of my bathroom in which it had, apparently, found a congenial home for the rains."

- M. Krishnan

This was published on 7 August 1967
#The photograph of the pair of Skinks not reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan : The goggle-eyed one : The Sunday Statesman : 22 April 2018
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GOGGLE-EYED PLOVER

" The small group of extraordinary birds known as the Burhinidae is noted for its enormous eyes, its members being nocturnal and crepuscular in their habits. The most familiar of them in our country, the Stone Curlew, is also called the Goggle-Eyed Plover, and its larger relative, the Great Stone Plover to be found along broad rivers and on the the coastline, has even larger eyes.

It is a bird as big as a hen, with a big head on a robust, long neck, and sturdy legs ending in three forward-pointing toes, on which it can run quite fast. The streaky, mottle grey, brown, black and white of its plumage renders it inconspicuous against the stony river beds and sand-banks it frequents, but its great, slightly tiptilted beak, and its huge, staring yellow eyes, sometimes give it away, even from a distance -- and it is seldom one sees it from close by,for unlike the Stone Curlew which freezes and stays put when it sees an intruder, trusting to the cryptic colouration of its plumage, the bird flies off at once, to land a safe distance away, and keep a sharp lookout.

Two years ago, in November, I came across a party of six Great stone plovers on the broad, dry bed of the Torsa in North Bengal; there were many thin streams in the river-bed, most of them shallow and, at one point on the stony, scrubdotted expanses between the streams. I came across these birds. It is said that the Great Stone Plover mates for life and that it usually goes about by itself or in a pair, but at times it associates in small parties, such as the one I saw, when not breeding. Throughout the week I tried ineffectually to get close to these watchful birds to photograph them; they kept very much together, in a close kit.

I would walk casually at a tangent towards them, pretending to be interested in the ground at my feet, and once or twice I even tried walking backwards towards them, though the uneven, pebble-strewn ground did not encourage reverse gear, but however artfully casual I was they would not permit me to get closer than 60 yards-and since there was no cover, a concealed approach was out of the question. As soon as they felt I was too near, they would rise in a body with penetrating, rather plaintive alarms, and skim over the broad bed of the Torsa to another section. Years ago and in the Deccan, I succeeded in getting fairly close to one of these birds, and when it discovered me, it came out with a very different sound of alarm or surprise, a low, harsh "grrr" ----apparently it is given to swearing at intruders on occasion.

The bird also has the the curious habit of jerkily bobbing its head up and down in a quick movement when apprehensive -- a gesture hard to describe in words, but unmistakable, once seen. When I was in North Bengal that November, I noticed that a migratory Lapwing which I also saw on the Torsa's bed and which I could not place exactly had the identical habit. The huge eyes of this bird are said to be adapted to nocturnal hunting, but the birds I saw were feeding actively by day as well-not resting in such shade as there was. They hunted the pebbly ground for crabs and insects and I frequently observed them packing at something and then swallowing it.

The greatest avian night-hunters, the Owls, have their great eyes set side by side in a flat face, to give them frontal, binocular vision. The Great Stone Plover has its eyes very differently placed, on either side of its head, and the eyes can see not only in front and to either side but also behind to some extent --when looking at the back of the head of this bird, one can see the rear rims of the eyes, and from personal experience I am satisfied that it dose not need to turn its head round to see what is behind it--so much of the area of the side of the head does each eye cover."

- M. Krishnan

# This was published on 16 October 1967.
* The photograph of a Great Stone Plover has not been reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK : M.Krishnan : An Elephantine Inhibition : The Sunday Statesman : 17 June 2018
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AN ELEPHANTINE INHIBITION

"SOME YEARS AGO I saw, in a cinema house, a documentary on a kedah, showing the elephants soon after they have been impounded in the stockade. I like wild Elephants too much to care for the sight of them milling around in a panic, bewildered and trapped but an incident in the documentary roused my anger, though it seemed comic to everyone else in the auditorium. A little calf, separated from its mother in that melee was shown approaching a grown cow, which promptly sent it flying with a kick and the commentator said something about the myth that elephants are considerate to all young of their kind.

Well that is no myth and that man said what he did out of ignorance. Anyone who has watched elephants closely will know that never, even when moving in a tight-packed crowd and in a hurry, do the huge adults trample on an infant or kick it accidentally. Such care in social animals in usually instinctive and not the result of an intelligent realization of their responsibilities by the weaker members of the herd. Sometimes such behavior is induced or guided by instinctive reactions to colours.

The phrase "a red rag to a bull", conveys the immediacy of an animal's response to colour, though it has no basis, for bulls are colour-blind and see red only as a shade of grey. Crows as is well known react strongly to something black. On a recent tree-photography trip I used a view camera and the usual square of black cloth a photographer throws over his head to focus on the ground-glass. The crows wee so violent in their response to my black cloth that I had to get it covered with a square of thin khaki after which they left me in peace.

Elephants on the other hand, seem to instinctively avoid contact with anything black. I think they are not able to see things right under them very well and believe that quite a few men who have fallen while running away from a charging wild elephant, or dived into cover and crouched owe their lives to this inability of elephants. In a herd, it is likely that the adults are not able to see an infant that is right beneath or besides them clearly except perhaps as a dark blurred mass and I think the dark colour of the little one serves to save it from being trampled accidentally.

Wild elephants uproot and damage milestones posts and similar things when they are left or painted, white or some light colour but usually leave them alone if painted black - this is further evidence of the theory. An experienced electrical engineer once told me that the bases of the pylons carrying the power-lines through elephant jungles are invariably painted black to save them from being damaged by the great beasts.

An even more interesting example of this instinctive reaction to black is provided by the pilgrims who undertake the climb up Sabarimala in Kerala to the shrine of Aiyappan they wear black shirts and black dhoties not out of regard for any religious convention but out of prudence - they have to traverse through several miles of elephant forests, and believe they are less prone to attack if dressed in black.

At first sight this simple dodge might seem the complete solution to the problems of people living near or right inside elephant jungles. Wild elephants are undoubtedly the animals they dread the most and hostile brushes between the great beasts and men are much more frequent than is generally thought - not all cases of men killed by elephants are reported. It may be thought that in such places all that people have to do to secure immunity from attack by wild elephants is to wear black and tar their shed and dwellings.

I think such a practice will definitely lessen the risk to humanity from wild elephants but not eliminate it. I am thinking of the calf that got kicked in that documentary and also of the fact that animals are often moved by instincts that are mutually opposed, and go by what dominates them at the moment. An elephant may well attack something black when driven by fear or anger as everyone knows, elephants do fight among themselves at times.

In deep hill-jungles where men have not yet occupied their terrain, elephants tend to run away from humanity. But where they have been constantly disturbed and harassed by men who have invaded and occupied their homes and occasionally shot at, they develop a lasting hatred towards humanity. It would be quite necessary to stop the disturbance of the elephants and bar cultivation inside the jungles, before the inhibiting potential of black can be exploited effectively,and that would be an exceedingly difficult thing to do in India today."

- M. Krishnan


# This was published on 19 February 1968.
@ The photograph of a herd of elephants has not been reproduced here.