The Hindu Business Line : Sights & sounds

THE Borivili National Park is a brisk 30-minute walk from home. Four days of rains over the week have got the sap coursing in the forest and on Sunday morning one was there at the gates for a long stroll to take in monsoon fresh Nature. At 7.30 in the morning, one met up with good friends Rushikesh Chavan, Praveen Kale and Jaya of the Bombay Natural History Society along with a few students doing a course in ornithology. To be with Rushi, Praveen and Jaya in a forest is sufficient reason to break out of bed early on a Sunday morning with the bonus being Dr Parvish Pandya, professor of zoology at Bhavan's College, Andheri, acting as the guide.

One learnt a bit of the queer living styles of plants and animals though the lessons may not last long on this writer. It was not a walk in the rains as the cloudy sky held back while the group made its slow way stopping and gazing at every piece of action. The magpie robin was the first bird one sighted and one has a nodding acquaintance with this bird having observed the fellow on morning walks in the rather leafy L.I.C colony. Toads and frogs were at their noisy best on the edges of a fast flowing stream when Dr Pandya sighted a checkered keelback (a harmless snake) waving in the flowing waters with its head nodding above the stream. Close to it under a stone, one saw a mating pair of common toad with the male smaller than the female. "The normal method of amplexus (mating) is for the male to clasp the female with his forelegs around the body behind her forelegs. The male is carried around till the eggs are laid and fertilised," explains J.C. Daniel in The Book of Indian Reptiles and Amphibians.

Dr Pandya clicked the action some three feet away and got on to tell a Roman tale. Seemingly, in Rome, women poisoned the wine the men imbibed with common toads to avoid sexual harassment. The large and prominent parotoid glands behind the eyes and above the tympanum in the common toad secrete a poison, which injures the mucus membrane of the eyes and mouths of other animals. The poison mixed with wine made life hard for the Roman males and kept them off women.

Moving along, one noted clusters of blooming white flowers of the crinum lily on the forest floors. They come to life with the first rains, live for about 10 days and die away to be born again the same time next monsoon. The pretty flowers have a faint aroma. For long, one has been amused the way one tree clings on to another and Dr Pandya showed us the strangler fig tree, which latches on to a host tree without taking to the sap of the host. It probably starts as an epiphyte and ends a predator killing the host by strangulating it. At this place, one did see a spotted dove though not too clearly, while Rushi helped us watch a pair of magpie robins nesting atop the hole in a dead tree.

Off and on one heard the familiar call of the white-breasted kingfisher and a few other birds, which Dr Pandya identified in a jiffy without seeing them. The talkative cicadas on the tree trunks prompted Dr Pandya to mention the first visits of naturalists into the Silent Valley in Kerala. "On their first trips they never heard the cicadas and named the forests the Silent Valley," he explained. It was 11 in the morning when we touched the Silonda trail though we did not walk the distance as we had to be at the Centre for a lecture by Dr Pandya. Yet, we had sufficient time to see the soupy nest of the common tree frog; the frog selects a spot on the branch overhanging a water body for the tadpoles to safely fall into. By beating its legs the female emits a frothy secretion and the male clutches the female to perform the normal method of amplexus. From a distance, the frothy nest looks like a furry ball in which tadpoles take birth and wiggle out to fall into the water below.

We started our walk back to take a lecture on "Classification" by Dr Pandya at the Centre. One did not nod off as Dr Pandya held one's attention even while talking on a dry subject like "Classification" with its Latin names for plants and animals. He explained the reason behind the naming switch for a tiger in Latin. From Felis tigris, a tiger got renamed as Panthera tigris tigris with the cat family being redefined. The old generic name of Felis now applies to the domestic cat, while the larger cats like lion, tiger and the rest are called Panthera. The frequent naming ceremonies for Nature's citizens is a bit of a nuisance for the commoner, but Dr Pandya thinks it is an attempt to get at a common identity across nations and languages. Then followed a slide show on birds with Dr Pandya mimicking various birds with practiced ease. It was bird calling at its very best by a zoology professor.

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