What is Culture? Thoughts upon seeing the Sarpam Thullal of Kerala

What is culture? It is a way of life, rich with symbols and meaning.

I do not have adequate words to express the many layers of myth, legend, and beliefs that are in this Sarpam Thullal video. This is actually a 3-part video series. Please see it. Look at the number of people involved in it. Look at all the elements. Music, art, craft, religion, food, ecology, environment, people, clothing, all the richness of the land....everything is embodied in this video.

If Sarpam Thullal ends, all of this culture will die. The communities who depend on it for survival will lose a way of life. The musicians will stop singing. The artisans will stop making these crafts. The beautiful sarapakkalams will stop being drawn.

This post is not really about Sarpam Thullal. It is about culture and change. I fear that we are already losing much that is unique about our land. Under our very noses, a whole way of life is being lost through the relentless urbanisation of India. And it's not a slow, gradual change. It is abrupt change, in the space of a single generation.

I agree that change is inevitable. That some of the ways of our forefathers are no longer feasible. But we have much that is good. How do we save this?

Elephant sighting in Kabini, April 2015

We had a wonderful trip to Kabini this week, with sightings of several animals and birds by the river. 

Summer is usually the perfect time to see the gathering of elephants by the river bank. Usually as the river dries up, the green grass emerges from dormant seeds, providing nourishment to elephants.  Apart from this, there are dense clumps of Giant Bamboo grass along the river bank, which also the elephants love to eat.

But right now, the bamboo is dead. This type of bamboo flowers once in three decades or so, and yields bamboo rice (very expensive, nearly Rs 2000 per kg). After the flowering, the bamboo dies. You can see the dead thickets of Giant Bamboo in the photo below (on the left). With the bamboo gone, the Kabini riverbank cannot support big herds of elephants. So the matriarchs have taken their herds to other parts of the forest. Only some individuals remain, especially solitary tuskers. We had some excellent individual sightings. 

Here is a closer look at the two elephants in the photo above. The older one is definitely female, but I cannot tell whether the young one is male or female. It is possibly a mother and child. The mother has decided to remain by the Kabini riverbank for the moment. Perhaps she will migrate elsewhere later in summer.

Here is another tusker that we saw. He is also busy eating the green grass. He is surrounded by groups of jungle mynahs. When he feeds, he disturbs little insects in the grass, which the mynahs love to eat.

We drove into another part of the park and were rewarded by a unique encounter with a tusker in musth. He is the Ganesha of Kabini, with one tusk :) Check out his ears, and compare them with the tusker in the previous photo. These pink edged ears are a sign of age. This is a much older elephant, compared to the one in the previous photo. He was in musth (you can see the secretion from the glands on his temples). He probably lost one tusk in a fight with another elephant. He was moving quite rapidly, and when we left him we saw him reaching up with his trunk to break branches of a tree. 

We also saw a very young male elephant, whose tusks were just beginning to emerge. He was grazing by the side of the road, but vanished into the forest when he spotted us. He must have been kicked out of the bigger herd and was now beginning his life as a solitary male.

On our safari, we also stopped at the forest department's elephant camp, where we saw Arjuna, the impressive elephant who heads the Dussera procession of the Maharajah of Mysore. I felt rather sorry for him, frankly.

Apart from elephants we saw many other creatures big and small. We had a magnificent but short sighting of a leopard, which was the highlight of the trip. I enjoyed seeing the Giant Malabar Squirrel, which I had not spotted before. The langur-chital groupings were fun to see. The birding was also good. In fact, I enjoyed everything about Kabini, and think it is a wonderful place to visit in summer.

Gaur sighting at Kanha

It was evening and the sun was setting among the treetops, when we saw a herd of gaur in Kanha. The density of gaur population in Kanha is quite low (it is a very large park, spread over 940 square kilometers). So this was definitely an unexpected sighting for me.

The gaur (Bos gaurus), is the largest bovine in Asia. It is the tallest species of wild cattle and is native to South Asia and Southeast Asia. In India they are usually spotted in south Indian forests; so that's another reason why I didn't really expect to see them in Kanha.

The herd emerged from the bush, and started to graze on the edges of the road. This effectively blocked our road access and we had to wait for a while, until they left the road. So I had a good chance to look at them. There were perhaps 5 or 6 gaur, of which we could see clearly two females and their young. The gaur typically live in maternal herds, led by a matriarch. The herd has juveniles and calves, and during the breeding season (April-May) the herd also has males. Even after the breeding season, the herd may have a large male.

I looked for the largest gaur in the herd - it was a big dark brown one. I was trying to figure out if it was male or female.  Females remain brown all their lives, while males darken and become black as they grow past 5 years. I figured this must be a female, and possibly she was the leader for this herd. (See this great article for information on how to tell the age and gender of gaur). Female horns point inwards and are more closely set, male horns grow out wide and then curve up.

The horns of both males and females start to whiten as they get older. This female has 40% or so white, so she must be around 4 yrs old.

The gaur prefers green grass when available. We could see this family grazing on whatever green grass they could find. When green grass is not available, they eat leaves, buds, shoots and even tree bark. They like bamboo quite a bit. They eat for most of the day, nearly 15 hours or so. After a few minutes, the herd spotted us and I think the young calves got a little alarmed (see photo below). I realised that the gaur in Kanha are not really used to humans and vehicles. Within a few seconds, they all crashed away into the bushes.

As we drove past the area where they were standing, suddenly a female gaur came back again, out of the bushes. She stood there staring straight at us. It's as if she was saying, I'm not scared of *you*! I remembered that the gaur is a pretty dauntless creature, and will even face down a tiger.

In 2011, the forest department relocated some gaur from Kanha to Bandhavgarh (where they had gone extinct around 1996). A total of 19 gaur were translocated in the first phase. A couple of them were killed by tigers but the rest are doing well. Later another 31 gaur were translocated, and they have also managed to survive very well in tiger territory. In fact,  Bandhavgarh now has some 70+ gaurs (there have been several births and the gaur population is thriving). The belief is that gaur do well when their herds are in significant numbers. In the wild, you can see gaur in herds ranging from 2 to 20 individuals. But the smaller units have less ability to protect their calves and juveniles from tigers.

Here's another gaur we saw, in a different part of Kanha. This one is a male (I'm guessing!), based on the shape of the horns. They are broader, they sort of shape outwards and then up. And the center of his head is more pronounced. He is still not very black, and his horns are small, so I would say, not more than 2.5 years old. 

If you go to Kanha, do ask your guide if you are in gaur territory. I think (if i remember right) they frequent only some parts of the park.

The gorgeous Noor of Ranthambhore - sighting in October 2014

I got these photos of Noor aka Mala (T-39) from Robert and Katie Cowan. They were in Ranthambhore last week. Isn't Noor just gorgeous?

Here's another photo: you can clearly see the "beads" on her back. This characteristic pattern is what gives her the name "Mala", which means garland. Noor and her two cubs have been among the star attractions of Ranthambhore this season.

Noor is the daughter of the Sultanpur tigress T-13 (Chhoti), and the granddaughter of the legendary Machhli (T-16). Noor's first cub is a male called Sultan (T-72); born a couple of years ago when she mated with Ustad (T-24).  This year she has had two more cubs with Ustad. 

The grass has started to dry up in Ranthambhore in many places, although many places are also still very green.  In this photo below, you can see that Noor looks well-fed and healthy; and there are reports that she has been having good hunting success.

In my previous trip to Ranthambhore, I had excellent sightings of Noor; but that was just a few days after Sultan was born, and she was super skinny and hungry at that time. Take a look at my previous encounter with Noor here. http://delhimagic.blogspot.in/2012/06/tiger-sighting-at-ranthambhore-may-2012.html

Ranthambhore Tiger update

An update on the female tigers of the tourism zone in Ranthambhore, courtesy Dicky Singh of Ranthambhore Bagh:

• All the mature females of the tourism zone of Ranthambhore have cubs right now: T 8 with one cub, T 19 with four cubs, T 39 has cubs (though no one has seen them as yet) and T 41 with one cub. Besides these, there are three or four young females that have either just come of age or are still too young to have cubs. Besides these females, there are about 14 males that can be seen in the tourism zones.

The photo below is something I clicked 2 years ago. The tigress in the photo is T 39 and she had just then given birth to her first cub. I am glad to hear she had a second one this year.

If you enjoy nature and wildlife, and wish to visit a tiger sanctuary, right now is the best time to do it. April, May, June are the best time for sighting tigers as the undergrowth will be less thick, and the water sources limited. Here is T 39 walking thhrough the shrubbery just a few feet from us. Can you imagine this scene in winter, when the forest is green and dense? The tiger would be impossible to see! So go now, people, while there are fewer tourists in the jungle.

More photos here: http://delhimagic.blogspot.in/2012/06/tiger-sighting-at-ranthambhore-may-2012.html