Wildlife photo secrets(3): Getting close

Red wattled lapwing through grass
"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." -Robert Capa. (Link to another site about Capa)Robert Capa, co-founder of Magnum, whose autobiography Slightly out of focus I recently read spent the best part of WWII getting close to the action. Its a hilarious read; he had to go through a lot to just stay in the war theatre with no passport and no press agency backing. He managed this feat of staying on in the war theater and close to the action with some amount of trepidation, at much risk to himself. He gained access mostly with a smile and with the lubrication on which he claims all armies move, alcohol (a strategy I haven't tried yet!)
Wildlife is both similar and different. Unlike people in wars, intent on their own purposes, wildlife notices your presence and reacts to it, usually by bolting. It's similar in that in some ways and sometimes it can be dangerous; for example with large carnivores, venomous snakes, etc. To get close, knowledge about your subject, its habits and capabilities, is paramount. I'll try and tell you what I have learnt. I'm still not as good as I would like and your own suggestions are very welcome.
Saw-scaled viper
Motion
Most wildlife: birds, insects, snakes, mammals, will react very quickly to motion. What this means is if you make sudden quick jerky movements, you will be noticed and whatever you are shooting will run away. So learn to move slowly, smoothly. I have found this can require quite a bit of strength and agility, so develop those. And oodles of patience, the hardest muscle to build.

Even if you have been discovered, staying motionless afterwards makes animals forget about you and continue with their life after sometime.Clothing
Camouflage clothing is artform, no really, look at what the military has been upto with it. It's useful, certainly you can't be wearing bright white or red clothes and expect to go unnoticed. Dress appropriately to the environment you expect to be in. Quiet shoes, comfortable shoes, discreet colours. If you can camo your equipment as well.Silence
This is actually one of the reasons I dislike shooting with other people. Silence obviously keeps attention away from you, but it does a second thing. If you are quiet you'll hear other things, you'll find subjects to photograph or you'll notice that elephant sneaking up behind you. So leave the Ipod behind ok? Shootings safer and more productive that way.Don't smell
No really. Particularly with mammals, strong odours, deodorant/perfume is a guaranteed way of not getting any shots. Leave your vanity behind.

Mongoose cub eating temple offerings
Sit still
The classic wildlife mode of shooting off course is to stay in one place and let animals come to you, hide photography. Get a hide, a camo net and stay. Hedge your chances of getting close to something by setting up a hide near a resource an animal needs (water, food, salt lick, mating grounds) or a place an animal inhabits (nest, den, etc). As I said knowledge is everything. Also oodles of patience, and all of the above. Some people also use bait, I haven't yet, although I have sort of used food others have set out.StalkingThis is a different kind of photography altogether. All but sit still applies, well actually sit still, move, sit still, move, you get the idea? Use the terrain, hide behind things, plants, stones, etc. Stay out of direct line of eyesight of your quarry. Use zig-zag or round about approaches to it. When there isn't anything to hide behind squat on the ground and move bent down.

Keep your camera close to shoulder high while approaching. Its hard to do this undetected when you're close. (Any other ideas here?)

Remember your limits, never get too close, you'll loose your shot or worse get bitten, gored or killed. When in doubt err on the side of caution.Familiarize
Believe it or not animals do get used to you. Wear the same or very similar clothes. Be unobtrusive and completely non-threatening. Keep returning to the place that your quarry is, it will maybe eventually accept you as part of the landscape. True of birds and mammals, insects and reptile, probably not.

Finally,
f5.6 and don't be there!
Camera traps are cool, and potentially expensive. So using remotes is also an option, stay close enough so you can trigger and guard your gear.

PS: the first 2 images link to my new Flickr gallery, following Strobist ideas on the service. Will see how it pans out.

Cicadas

Have you been wondering what the noise was? It's these...They make sound with their abdomen's to attract mates.

Wildlife photo secrets (2): learn about light

The previous post generated quite a response so I'll keep going; for a while anyway.

Actually any kind of photographer, not just a wildlife photographer needs to learn about light. It's right there in the name, learn to write (graphy) with light (photo).

It's the seduction of animals, birds, butterflies, flowers (pick your poison), that brings many people into taking pictures. Most people are just happy to have records of what they saw. A few will attempt to see rarer and rarer things in order to photograph them. A few will try and catch a rare behavior. This is eventually the point of the the whole exercise to many.

But, this will not always make a good photograph and certainly not a good photographer. What makes the latter is a certain ineffable something. However, the first has quite definable elements. One of them is light!

Saying that light makes a photograph is trivial, except what I mean is it makes or breaks a good one. Good light can elevate the mundane to beauty and bad can do the reverse.

So what's to light? Well, there's different kinds of lights. Heres all the features in which light can vary and that you get to play with in a photograph.

(a) brightness (the obvious one). You can have a high key image in which you pour a lot of light onto both the background and/or the foreground. Or you can go with the darker more mysterious look that allows just a subtle limning of the solid form of the object being photographed. Picks up a little detail no more, unlike a silhouette (which you can also do.)
















(b) spectrum: there are warm lights like the light you get just around sunrise and sunset are often make very winning photographs. Or cool light, which you usually get after the sun's gone down, on overcast days or in the shade, can make mysterious looking images.
The kind of colour you get will depend on the WB if you're using digital. So if you want to keep these casts (loosing which can be quite silly) the easiest thing I've found is to leave things on daylight WB.















(c) Hard light, where shadows have sharp defined edges. Most photographers seem not to like this light, it can nonetheless be turned to you advantage. At least partially because in this light, colours are often quite saturated.
Diffuse light, with softer or no shadows at all, the love of all photographers, particularly macro people. The light that seems to come from everywhere at once.














(d) The area that the light hits, how tight the beam/spot of light is and what kind of fall-off it has on the edges. Like the tighter, harder edged spot of light on the owl versus the softer edged halo around the saw-scaled vipers head. The idea here is to draw quick attention to the specific object of interest while keeping it away from that not of interest.














(e) The direction the light comes from:top-lit, back-lit, vs front-lit vs side-lit. The backlit and hence rim-lit tree cricket versus the front left lit ant.
Again, its a way of emphasizing one element as opposed to the some other element in the picture. (Note that the ant image also has pretty controlled fall off, avoiding lighting any other leaves or elements of the background that might prove disturbing.)



















(f) and finally something I have no clear examples for, number of light sources and the intensities and 'cast' or 'colour temperature' of each source.

Now what you've to figure out, when working with available light, is what kind of light you're working with and how to use it to your advantage. If you're making you're own light, decide what is the kind of light that would be best for the situation. (I know it's hard, but this is just the start!). If you want to know more about light, and even more about lighting something up using your own light sources, try Strobist. I've learnt and continue learning a helluva lot there.

And if you're still with me at the end, wish you good light!

Widlife photo secrets: time and access

In my callow photographic youth, in 2004, I met another photographer. He cast a pearl before me, he told me half the battle in getting good wildlife photographs is access. I didn't think much of it then, but three years behind me, I know precisely what he meant.

There is no simpler non-secret to getting better shots than to keep trying. To keep your eyes and ears open all the time and keep iterating until you get what you want. You've got to know whats worth getting and whats worth keeping, and then you're set, all you've got to do is push push push.

The best stories are worked over many many (oh don't be shocked now) years! Yes, years! There are good one's that are shorter, but the truly blue chip take years. Lanting's Jungles, Salagado's Workers, Nick Nichol's work in Bandhavgarh, etc.

The luxury of that kind of time is very hard for most people to come by. Many wildlife photographers, filmakers will given a chance lament the quick turn-arounds that are required of them. It was one of the reasons the Planet Earth series was hailed as a breath of fresh air. It was a production the size and length of which hasn't happened in a looong while.

Even if you had the time, you may not have that other golden thing, access. In India in particular, few natural habitats remain and these have gatekeepers, forest departments. Just getting in can take a lifetime. Then when you are in, you're often allowed to do very little, no setting up hides, no water hole waits, no walking in some parks(!), no camera traps. Then there is the expense associated with living and travelling in the park. Our labs field station budget is of the order of thousands a month! And just to break the camel's back, there are huge fees associated with shooting/filming in parks, especially filming.

So, to cut a long story short, work on the access bit. Or work the bits that are accessible. Learn to mine the places that you can go easily and then work them to ...um ...death. Hey, it's worked for me!

Seriously though, one of the huge advantages of undertaking the kind of project I have is that I have access 24/7 to most places. And I can get in to most other places with a little wheedling and cajoling. This is probably one of the few areas where being a woman makes things a mite easier, people percieve you as less of a potential threat. But even if you're a guy, it's not such a difficult skill, most people will let you in once, twice. The third and fourth time eyebrows rise and maybe you're turned back. But, persistence pays, and public spaces are still just that. You just have to bone up on your smile a bit. And as the big guy at NHM said, it's not how rare, exotic or unfamiliar your subject is, its about how good your photography is...Unfortunately we're all still stuck figuring out why or when something is 'good'.

Scop's owl

From Rohini hostel: thanks to Swati, my labmate.

Piece on Starling flocks in NYT

I thought this article on the European starlings in Rome and slide show that accompanied it was a nice follow-up to our own invasion, which has now unfortunately subsided.

Better feminists

There is a lot being said about the VT shooting, sympathy for those having gone through a horrid time, debates on gun control, criticism of VTs handling of the first shooting and information dissemination. I have very little to add.

But this post by Chris Clarke, whose perceptiveness rarely fails to amaze me, knocked me down. I've gotten so used to the language of reporting that I often don't catch the underlying currents.

Sally Glean

Did you wonder after the last post who the squabblers were and what they were squabbling over? I'll take the long route.

Among insectivorous birds, there two sorts of hunting habits. One sort in which the birds sally forth, leave their perches high above the ground and chase insects mid air and catch them in flight. The slender, aerodynamic and beautiful flycatchers fall in this category, as do the bee-eaters. The more quotidian habit is to grub about in the grass and undergrowth to catch what hops about there, to glean. To pick up the leftovers. And off course, the dull, common as dirt Mynas are gleaners. Poor things, boring in their habits and not rare enough to excite attention almost ever. Not even as smart as the crows.

But thats the beauty that is biology, every once in a while the commonplace is not itself. The first April showers came and with them came the dispersing insects, termites and ants, out to set up new life. An abundance usually prompts something equally exciting elsewhere. I was on the roof again, the light finished for the day just catching my breath, when I realized that although I was done, the birds were not. So I pulled out my camera and waited.

My weak non nocturnal eyes would pick up a little flicker in the air somewhere and it would be snapped up in an instant by a sallying myna, starling or crow. They looked like the flat lizards straight out of Planet Earth's Deserts episode. For just a little while, the myna's behaviorally adapted and shifted to being salliers, and became for me a little more special.

The squabblers in the previous post were two crows demonstrating their usual adaptability, joining the mynas at the hunt. They arrived at a flying insect at the same time and nearly snapped each other's faces off.

Squabble

Some more of...(or less, depending on how you see it)

Water. I missed World water day on the 22nd. Fortunately Magnum didn't and has not one but two fabulous features on it. The second is particularly...refreshing.

The other is merely a reminder. If you still haven't done this, Go up to your roof today, or to whatever is the highest point you can get to in IISc at 6:00 PM, stay there till the light dies. Take your camera if you're so inclined. This thing won't last much longer. Tell people you think might enjoy it.

Finally click on the second image to see the full size image. I ran a quick crude image analysis on that picture, there are at least 1200 birds in it. That's probably a third to a fourth of the whole flock. Its lovely, really.

Done: now for some sleep

Ok the entry has been sent. Well, mostly, I can still add images upto...today...the end of it that is UK time. This feels like homework for courses, 'Thursday means anytime until 12pm right?'

The best part of prepping my entry this time was the Nature in black and white section. Here's one of my favourites. I haven't done much b/w recently and it was great returning to that way of seeing. Figuring out what would look good in monochrome and prepping the entry has to have been the best part so far, now if I win....*LOL*

Slowness is not death, I hope.

This is the current state of affairs at this end. Well, ok I'm at least not obsessing over gear, just not shooting very much.

What with trying to get work on track, going home for a quick visit and trying to get submissions off to WPY for this year I haven't had much time for shooting or chasing people up over the book. I've already missed the mail-in deadline, I can't afford to miss the online entry one. Wish me luck.

"And they came two by two"

One of my utterly all time favourite books is Julian Barnes' 'A history of the the world in 10 and 1/2 chapters'. The book is a series of inter-connected short stories, which stand on their own as well. The first is the 'uncensored' version of the story of Noah's ark told by the one of the few wood worms that have snuck into the ark. The story is complete with the greatest unanswered questions of all time, what happened to the shit? What really happened to the unicorn?, etc. (The image by the way is of termites, similar only functionally.)

The ark has often been thought of as some kind of religious conservation allegory. The en masse saving of animals as creatures of God. E. O. Wilson recently wrote a book called 'The Creation' arguing that religious reasons for conservation are as strong and can be used. As much as the more usually used scientific ones that point to necessity and utility of conservation, through the notion either of interconnectedness or through the notion of sustainable use of a resource bank. It's a need, in my opinion, so urgent, that I don't care what tack one takes as long as more people can be persuaded to care for the planet and its denizens.

John Wilkins disagrees and calls it 'the myth of dominion and stewardship', I think, and points to Tom Hayden's address to a gathering of clergy. The different notions and ideas that are used to promote the idea of conservation and the premises and the consequences of each might be interesting to examine in and of themselves.

And there is a need to promote this idea, it is not self-evident. I was particularly piqued by a statement a friend made during a pub conversation. He suggested that all that the cause of conservation requires is education. I suspect he means indoctrination, cause really, education? Let's see now, the reasons usually suggested for conserving the natural world in a pristine state are stewardship, utility, sustainability, etc. Each of these operate in the longer term, almost always outside the term of a single generation. The changes that occur in the way the world functions as a result of the breakdown of natural ecosystems, the economic shifts take a while to develop. And are indeed exploitable.

Nothing in an education prevents you from optimizing your short-term pay-offs, and saying damn what happens when I am dead. Incidentally, I think an uneducated mind is equally likely to catch this problem. Educating someone merely provides access to information on what might happen if we ignore the idea, it's knowledge. And I'll stop short of saying that realizing the need for conservation requires wisdom. I'll let other wiser, deeper thinkers do that.

PS. Read the original 'Star thrower' essay if you can get your hands on it. The versions that appear on the net are quite shallow and incomplete compared to the orginal.

The exorcist pose

The wiki on owls says that they are able to turn their heads 135 degrees on both sides, not all the way around. So its a little short of the Hollywood record.

They do not, however, need demonic possession or cool f/x to have a 270 degree field of view.

Posture

What was that my mother told me years ago about posture and looking small as a consequence?

Schadenfreude and water

I'm considering becoming a lawn ornament. That way I can have a regular bath!

Someone wants to make a point and it's being made right now. Crisis has come very close on the heels of the warning. I'm amazed we have a warning system, not so much that it isn't an early warning one.

IISc has next to no water in the hostels, messes and the departments. They asked us to use fewer utensils this morning cause they didn't have any water to wash them with. Soon it will all be finger food. They were shouting at a kid for using drinking water to wash up, there was no water on the tap. We haven't had water in the hostel for two days, none in the lab now for one. Several depts haven't had any for days. IISc is considering (considering!) buying water I am told.

We've had four years of drought in Bangalore in my time here, between roughly 2001 and 2005 there were next to no rains. I lost the local population of my study animals to this drought, ask me I know. In those four years, there were maybe 10-15 days altogether that there was no water in my hostel, never a cut in the lab.

It just amazes me that theres a problem this year after its rained well two years in a row (Admittedly not in B'lore but elsewhere certainly and most of our water come from other catchments, I think, notably Kaveri which is kinda full right now). The problem is apparently at the 'corporation' level. So if they aren't sending us water right now, its either judicious preservation (yeah right!) or political need creation.

Whatever it is, it is fun, everyones already sprouting water bottles, hoarding. People are beginning look irritated, marginally dirtier and suddenly everyones interested in water. A few people are even giving the lawn waterers dirty looks. Maybe eventually someone will think of the very clever idea of hooking those perennially on lawn hoses (which get water from where? a borewell?) into underground sumps that go the rest of the institute and maybe it will tide us over a few days. If all else fails, see you on the lawns.

P.S. The block on blogspot and typepad seems to be here to stay. The guys at SERC never actually got back to me, which I suspect is code for 'Yes, it's blocked, whatcha gonna do about it?' Maybe I laughed too soon at my mates in NCBS and their incompatibility with Yahoo!

Access denied

I can't seem to access blogspot (or typepad) in IISc over some of last week and this one. So I hope those who read this site have feeds or know how to get around the block. Just google blogspot blocked and you'll get the cheats, posted when GOI decided to do the same.

I wonder whether it's the traffic watchers in SERC or the content watchers elsewhere....hmmm....Or off course technical glitches somewhere. IISc is not usually heavy-handed and blocks few things. Except off course images/files that have the words s*x, etc in them. Which is fun and games for reproductive biologists and people like me who work on cricket s*x! ('Long' distance foreplay actually.)

Natural selection

Water

They are all over campus, and get called by all kinds of names, herons, storks, cranes. Get it right people, they are Cattle egrets! And while they are closely related to those water-birds, they aren't actually that attached to water. Which is how they got to be on our relatively dry campus.

They get their names from the fact that they are seen following grazing cattle all over the countryside, picking up the insects kicked up from the grass. The downward bent head and intense stare, followed by a quick side to side bobbing of the head to judge distance by parallax, and then, wham, strike. A speared insect and a happy bird. But there are no cattle on campus and the birds needed to kick up their own prey.

Until they found a little trick. It probably began with wanting to cool off. They leave a little dish of water out for the birds in front of the library, I've seen them stand in it during the hot part of the day. Then I noticed the thing in the second picture. A bunch of them have learned to follow the gardener who waters the lawns everyday.

Maybe it was a cooling off instinct, and I was intrigued. So I watched them one afternoon, it was a cooler afternoon than many. They did follow the gardener around, not oblivious but not too wary of me. While they did seem to enjoy the water, the principal reason behind this activity seemed to be to pick up the insects the strong jet of water kicked up!

Now an aside and a rant, I watched them a while maybe an hour and half. The hose was running full blast the whole time, it was still running when I left. This lawn gets sprayed everyday. That night there was no water in my hostel, the previous day there was no water all day at my lab!

We got a mail a weekish ago asking us to conserve water and I believe this is a sensible thing to ask, we are very wasteful here. But the excesses are hardly happening in the labs, they are here. Spraying thousands of litres on a lawn in a year in which Bangalore has seen next to no rain!

I don't know how these things function, or actually I know. There is no regulation whatsoever of who does what! The nursery knows not or cares not of water shortages and no one will tell them. Its my pet peeve, this water business. A sump overflowed for three days before the same water dept turned up to fix it, I called thrice! Ah and calling! The folks who take civil/electrical complaints in this place will take complaints only in person! You can't email them or even call them. So you've to leave your lab during working hours and make a trip to their office to report a dripping tap which will maybe kinda get fixed. And working hours is very open you know, they turn up at 10:30, leave for coffee, lunch till two...indian govt office! So guess how many people actually report leaking taps? And then theres the leaking overheads, don't get me started...

So yes, I'll conserve water and for every drop I save, theres a tanker flowing down the drain! Here's a bit from Vikram Seth's 'The Elephant and the Tragopan' possibly based on the agitation against dams in Manipur and Nagaland. " Your pipes cry out for renovation./ Your storage tanks corrode and leak;/ The valves are loose, the washers weak./ I've seen the water gushing out/ From every reservoir and spout./ Repair them it will cost far less/ Than driving us to homelessness."

Like that story this one doesn't have an end, yet.

Here's looking at you.

The ghost

The night in IISc is full of sounds. Listening is a far better way to explore the universe at this time. Take a walk, try and figure out how many distinct sounds you can distinguish. Birds coming home to roost. Bats leaving their roosts to forage. Crickets, new and familiar, changing through the year. Slender lorises whistling to declare their territories. And then finally the owls.

We have four on the campus. The tiny Spotted owlets, the common commensal Barn owl, the Collared Scop's owl and then the ghost, otherwise known as the Mottled wood owl. Each of them have unique and beautiful calls, (what I would give for decent recording equipment!), but the call of a Mottled is more equal than the others.

Gerry, had once rescued two little fledgling Mottled wood owls from a tree that had been struck by lightening. One of them survived and it was called Merlin. He kept it in a little shed that he had. He initially hand fed it. Then eventually, he just let rodents go in the shed and Merlin would get them. It grew up and when breeding season came around and Merlin was being courted by another owl, so we began to suspect that he was really a she. We never really bothered to find out and I think G eventually deemed it fit and set it free. He doesn't know if M hung around or left. There are still Mottled's near his farmhouse, but who knows?

The first time I met Merlin, was when I heard this call the first time. It's an unforgettable sound and the name G had given it suddenly seemed most fitting.

PS. G, is Gerry Martin of NG fame and he's hosting a herpetology course, those of you are interested take a look here.

"You could not step twice into the same river..."

"... for other waters are ever flowing on to you. " - Heraclitus

To get back to talking about nature/wildlife images that break convention, here's an image by the photograpgers Verena and Georg Popp that I stumbled upon from the NPN's annual picks. There are two versions of the same basic idea, the NPN editors picked the first and then the photographers linked to the 'original'. I prefer the second and its what I have linked to.

Landscape images have by and large had three built in conventions. These are not necessarily always followed, but the winner of NPN's editors pick will attest to their 'mainstreamness'. One is that the image must be of a vista, and the other being that the image must be an f64, sharp from here to infinity and finally nothing must be moving.

All of these conventions have been broken before, in ways that have been considered effective. Michael Kenna whose work I came across through TOP uses the effect of time and motion in his work beautifully. Landscape images also sometimes deal with details within a landscape. Jim Brandenburg has this beautiful image of a not entirely frozen stream with flowing water blurred over time.

Can an image marry more than two elements?

This image does manage to combine three (!) elements of detail, motion and vista in a single frame. Each of these elements are in opposition to each other, its almost like a rock-paper-scissors set. One cannot cohabit the same image with another, yet here they are. And it manages to make these things come together and work in a simpler primal visual way; through the colour, the rush of motion and the click of discovery.

Someone's said before me that all good images have many layers to them, so does this one. The rushing colour holds and draws your attention and gives you no sense of scale, until you notice the little centre of stillness which you might guess is water. Then a few leaf like objects come to your notice. Then you look up into the picture for further clues and slowly the mountains and the pines that reflect in water come to your attention. Its this gradual unfolding of the image that makes it special; as you spend time with it, it rewards you with more and more.

And thats just the visual aspect, I'm sure everyones mind then wanders on to the juxtaposition of a fast moving stream with a seemingly immutable mountain. My mind wandered to Heraclitus, and then through Lyell and his version of a mutable earth, to the fact that the river of time flows over mountains as well, eroding and wearing them into spires. The image is taken in Triglav National Park in Slovenia, a little digging around suggests that the Triglav glacier might have had some hand in carving the mountain we see before us.

Water passing over rock with time and ceaseless motion can achieve a great deal.

The disdain

Migrations

It all began at the end of an uneventful day. I looked up at the sky as walked up the stairs to my room. And I saw birds. Not entirely unusual in itself, except this flock numbered in the middle tens. They wheeled in the air, changing direction with an almost audible snap, with the coordinated precision I have come to associate with migratory birds. Birds that must rely on each other to fly in harmony over long distances.

Many years ago I stood on a bund in an estuarine marsh and watched a huge flock of birds on the horizon. As the came nearer the sun glinted off their synchronous wings and they looked like a curtain rippling in a slow wind. A dense curtain made of thousands of migratory waders flying over Vedaranyam. Wheeling and moving as one body, they came closer and landed. It was an unforgettable sight.

One such curtain flutters over IISc right now. One made of thousands upon thousands of Rosy starlings. They were once called Rosy pastors, but were renamed starlings, perhaps to unambiguously link them their better known migratory kin in North America. And they are migratory, they have visited IISc before. But I didn't own a camera then and I didn't have the eyes I now have.

For a bird, a migration must be a great upheaval. Driven by the need for food, evolution has built some birds to fly incredible distances, to go from wintering grounds to breeding grounds and back. Migratory flights are often over large bodies of water where some can't land and for others over large land masses without much water in which they feed. Birds often double or more in body weight when they begin and are all skin and bones when they have arrived. They must beef up again before they return. Their digestive systems alter greatly in order to sustain these long flights. These changes might mean they need to stop and eat often in what are called stop-over locations. So not only are sites where they spend the winter important to these birds but also the IISc's they pay their flying visits to.

Their flights will be plagued not only by hunger but the old enemies predators, the cold, altitudes, the head-wind. And newer ones, man's alteration of their universe. Roads reflect light and mimic rivers, bright lights mislead them. Wires electrocute some, barbed wire fences impale others. Windmills cut these Quixotes from the skies, parabolas that collect the suns rays for heat burn them. And yet the ones that survive must go again and the young must find their way on a journey never undertaken before.

(Click on the picture below for a sense of just how many there are)

When the time is right, migratory birds show signs of Zugunruhe. Even birds that have never seen the outside of a cage slam the bars in a desperate desire to follow a map wired in their brain. du Maurier built a beautiful tale out of the frustration of birds denied their instincts by the weather and Hitchcock turned it into one of his many very watchable movies. The sheer power inherent in numbers is apparent. The motion of so many birds charges the evening skies. The usually restless crows are now nearly driven, cawing, driving, diving at the many potential targets, picking off the weak ones. Maybe even a little afraid and overwhelmed. The Mynas, relatives to the Starlings, seem to be reconciled with sharing their nocturnal roosts. Its chaos and energy worth watching as the dusk pinks over to a mellow evening.

Recovering

Winter is the season of decline and decay. The year ends, the days die earlier everyday. Trees shed their leaves, leaving little but bare bones, the grass dries leaving fuel for fires and seed to prick your skin while walking among them. The cold weather drives the cold-blooded creatures underground, the insects and snakes are few and sluggardly, basking, collecting the suns energy before they melt again into the tall grass I must tramp through.

And yet, here, it is the season of recovery. While we wait, for the year must turn around and the days get warmer longer. The flowers remind us of summer and spring although the temperature speaks otherwise.

The migrants that come year after year keep us company in our waiting in their exile from their homes tell a story of their own. IISc has lost many bird species over the years. Due to habitat loss and the changing congealing concrete matrix in which this green space sits. As the favoured spaces disappear so do the birds they attracted, the marshes cost us many a species and the shrinking open space of the airfield and dump some more. Yet some return, some after long hiatuses, their absences deeply felt.

I saw a Hoopoe here last year for the first time in 6 years and it returned again this year to afford me a go at an image. And a Brown shrike which was a first on the campus for me. Both birds were listed as locally extinct. A few regular sightings and we can return them to our lists of those that have returned. With a little luck and a little foresight the returns can be prodigal.