Travelling in north-east India can be an amusing, exhilarating experience or nerve-wracking and frustrating depending on your frame of mind and your stars. Murphy’s law applies – so just bear in mind that if anything can go wrong it will, but then again it may not. As a wildlife biologist who has spent many years […]
The joy of cloudspotting
by Shreya Yadav When I landed in San Francisco a few years ago and got in the air train to the city, the first thing I noticed were the clouds outside the window. I had never seen clouds like this before. Soft white curls rolled across the horizon in perfect Van Gogh waves, swirling like […]
Nature in Music
We asked our staff for their favourite songs that evoke memories and feelings, merry and melancholy, of the natural world—ones that celebrate its beauty and wonder, and ones that lament about the environmental crises we’re grappling with today. And here are some of their suggestions. Do you have favourite tunes that moan about or celebrate nature? We’d love […]
Field days: of sloth bears, wild dogs, cicadas and a vanishing leopard
For my Master’s dissertation, way back in ancient times in 1992, I spent six wonderful months in the Bori WLS (now the Satpura Tiger Reserve) in Madhya Pradesh studying the Indian giant squirrel (aka the Malabar Giant squirrel). My study involved watching and following individual squirrels to understand their foraging and range use and how […]
The march of the triffids
“In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.” —John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids In […]
Shekru sees a blazing issue
by Geetha Ramaswami Shekru the giant squirrel sees a massive plume of smoke rising from the far side of the forest. He can sense waves of smaller creatures living in the soil fleeing impending doom… Shekru is very content hanging upside down from a teak tree branch, decimating his loot of newly procured seeds, his […]
It never rains in Spiti
3rd – 10th September 1995 The bus was hurtling its way down the rain and hail-washed mud road near the Kunzam pass when I realized that it was actually snowing lightly. Sitting cosily ensconced in the relative comfort of the Himachal State Transport Roadways bus, I felt a great thrill watching the lightly falling snow […]
All about figs – book review of ‘The Secret Garden’
Books on nature and wildlife for children set in the Indian context are few and far between, though in the last decade, there are several available. It has definitely improved since my childhood, when I read a lot about nature and wild species in far-off places but had very little to read on about Indian […]
Plant invaders: Q&A with Geetha Ramaswami
Geetha Ramaswami is a Research Associate at NCF, and is particularly interested in invasive plants—especially how they affect and get affected by the ecosystem they invade. What are introduced species? What are native species? Well, over many millennia, different species have evolved to live in different kinds of environments. They may not have […]
Colours of a Catastrophe
by Shreya Yadav I am swimming in the unusually warm waters of Kalpeni in the Lakshadweep, overwhelmed by the bizarre colours of this catastrophe. Muted pastel shades have turned violently psychedelic. A branching colony of brown Pocillopora is now lavender, sky-blue fingers of Acropora a radiant white, grey sheets of Montipora fluoresce green and […]