The Snake Who Went To Hell And Came Back

There's a great story behind this picture. It gives us an insight into the amazing conditions that can be tolerated by these amazing reptiles. Except for the destruction of habitat and killings by humans.

We were travelling down a hilly road in Nelliyampathy, a small hill town in Palakkad district of Kerala. Nelliyampathy is a plantation town with coffee and cinnamon and orange orchards and limited amounts of tea. Nelli has vast tracts of forests interspersed with this cultivation. It's also contiguous with the forests of Top Slip and Parambikulam and very much a part of the Anamalais. The north-western part, to be exact. So there we were, coasting in the car slowly amidst a terrain of mostly rock and grass with patches of moist deciduous shola in-between. The road was narrow and had room for only one vehicle. It wasn't blacktop or with any kind of pavement, just a couple of worn out mud and rock tracks with a strip of grass down the middle. All of a sudden there's a green vine snake lying in the middle of the road, seeming to be the innocuous stick broken off a green shrub. So we get off and get a brief photo session but before we can get more shots, there's a jeep approaching from the opposite side. Not only do we have to get off the road to give the jeep room to pass, we also wanted to make sure it didn't run over our green friend. So one of our group members who is a professional herpetologist tried to catch Mr. Green to relocate him to a safer place. Before that could be done, the approaching jeep and it's horn scared the snake away somewhere. Once the jeep had passed we looked all over but couldn't locate him, it seemed like he'd just disappeared. We resumed our journey greatly disappointed and headed downhill, back to the town of Nemmara which is the jump-off point for accessing Nelli from Palakkad/Thrissur. On the way down, about 30km into the journey, Mr. Green decides to make himself visible again. He's just gotten out of the wheel arch and is making his way up to the windshield/bonnet junction, where the wipers are at. All this, while we have been running the car downhill! So we stop the car and by that time this fella is scared of all the commotion (the exclamations) we're making and tries to get into the panel gap between the sides of the car and the bonnet lid. Our daring herpetologist comes to its rescue and frees him from that dangerous spot. We have a field day with the cams on the snake since he's being handled, he can't run! After about 20 harrying minutes for the green fella we're done and let him go into the shrubbery near a stream.

It's only logical that he was under the bonnet all the while right from our encounter with that jeep. For all of 30km. Temperatures in the bonnet can exceed 70 degrees C especially when you're in hilly terrain since the car has to be run in lower gears. It's a wonder and a miracle that he wasn't toasted to death or that he didn't get himself entangled with any of the mechanicals down there.

Green Vine Snakes are commonly found throughout the subcontinent and other parts of South and South East Asia. They do have venom but it isn't very potent when injected into humans, although some people develop an allergic reaction to it. There's a widespread misbelief in Tamilnadu that these snakes attack you and inject poison in your eyes which results in death. This is due to the fact that these snakes spend most of their time in the trees (arboreal snakes), hanging down many a time. So in the event of an encounter with a human, the head would naturally be in-line with the snake's head and the eyes being the most prominent part of one's geometry, would naturally be the place the snake decides to attack.

For those interested, here's a small video of Nelliyampathy:

Jazz hath no memory.

Life

One's activities in life should be like an elaborate French meal with wine followed by the Spanish siesta instead of the Big Mac drowned by a gallon of Coke that it is now.

Static

After many sets of diapers, baby clothes and clothes, many pairs of shoes, many houses, many cars, falling for many girls, many cameras, many pairs of glasses and many years of living, I've realised that I've always gone to only one barber shop.

Commitment vs Committed

When you start going steady with someone, it's called commitment. When you're sent to the nuthouse, it's called committed. Makes one wonder...

Dr. Sleeploss, or How I Learned To Stop Hallucinating And Love Paranoia

Did you know you can get an amazing high by just not sleeping? It never struck me before when I was regular with missing sleep but now that I got a chance to stay awake thirty-six hours and driving all the while non-stop (it's been quite some time since I hadn't hadn't slept), I realized I was into another world after twenty-four hours of no sleep and only four from the day before. I remember being extremely happy, not with myself or with the world or with anyone in general, just happy. My speech was slurred, I stammered and broke sentences awkwardly and had bad grammar too. I'm sure my vocabulary had decreased to that of a four-year-old's but I can't vouch for it because my memory was playing up and was exaggerating my previous jungle exploits to my friend who was with me on this birding/nature-spotting trip to Mudumalai NP and Bandipur NP.

The plan, basically, was to just keep going up and down the main road of the two national parks hoping something would turn up in our headlights. But that was not to be so. The main road that runs through these parks is a national highway connecting Mysore and Ooty, and it being a weekend, a Republic Day weekend to add, traffic was heavy. Now, how heavy can traffic be on jungle roads in the middle of the night? Well, ask us. There was not a moment when we were alone on the road. There were vehicles of all kinds (bikes at three in the morning, Maruti 800's overstuffed with people, trucks overloaded with goods and what not) passing us as we were crawling around at low speed, vainly in search of elusive creatures of the night. There was either a vehicle overtaking us, or someone's headlights blinding us from the front or lights blinding me reflected off the mirrors (god, I hate people who don't dip lights in traffic). The only sightings we could manage (when we were not giving way and being overtaken) was a female Sambar with calf, a lone male Gaur (who was least bothered by our very close presence and our headlights on him), and an elephant who'd decided that he was invisible to us because his head was in thick bush and his (rather large) butt was the only thing sticking out of it.

After staring at (rather large) elephant rear anatomy for about ten minutes, we decided to get moving as we thought he wasn't exactly going to turn around for us and pose (photography being possible only with a 50mm f/1.8 lens with the camera cranked on ISO 1600 and shutter speeds being in the range of 1/16th to 1/8th of a second). Further down the road we saw an about ten-foot tall stump of a dry tree glowing with fire inside it, embers falling onto the dry grass below. Worried about our beloved haunts and with fear of losing them completely to forest fire, we hurried and made our way back to the check-post and told the guy there of it. The check-post turned out to be a police check-post not a forest one, and the guy there didn't seem to be interested in leaving his warm bonfire for some raging forest fire in all its element somewhere far off, so he said it'd be taken care of in the morning when someone would surely see it. Correction, someone else would surely see it. We persisted and finally managed to get him in the car and take us to the reception centre where a real forester would do something about it.

So, off we went to the reception centre, wheels spinning wildly and spitting out dust behind the car, to the Bandipur reception centre. It was about four in the morning, and we surely didn't expect anyone to be awake, but we were hoping to wake someone up and ask them to do something. At the reception centre, the guy from the check-post went knocking on the front door and called out an unintelligible name. Five minutes passed and nothing happened. He did it again, and I joined in on the knocking with gusto. Still nothing happened. We went around the whole building knocking on every knockable object and shouting for someone to wake up but that someone in there was soundly asleep while our much beloved forest was burning down to ash. After a fruitless fifteen minutes of screaming and knocking (the people driving past the reception centre must've thought a local mental hospital must've had a bust-out or something.), the guy from the check-post decided he'd have a look at the fire after all, and so away we went. We stopped in front of it and the guy needed pointing out as to the whereabouts of the fire. After ascertaining that what we were pointing to was indeed a fire, the guy announced, "yeh to mamooli hai. (this is insignificant.)" with the least bit of articulation and stress. Surprised more at his delivery than at the significance of his words, we returned the guy to his post and went our way, all thoughts of being awarded the National Bravery Award erased from our minds.

Highlights of the trip included a couple of Black Baza, a Besra Sparrowhawk female, some Nightjar that we couldn't ID, a field mouse, and a troop of Common Langur that always looked you in the eye when stared at. Weird, aren't they? Oh, also a male Tickell's Blue Flycatcher who was a showoff and such a schmuck that de'd get in the way of me trying hard to shoot a Malabar Whistling Thrush. As you know, MWTs are some of the hardest birds to shoot. They love to skulk in the dark bush-floor and rarely are out in the open. And being completely black does make life for a photographer harder than having ice-cream in hell. Thanks to the TBF's antics, all I got of the MWT was this:

On the way back home, it was well past the thirty-three-hours-since-sleep mark and I began to hallucinate. Twigs on the road prompted heavy braking, and when my buddy inquired as to the need for that, I said, "didn't you see that snake? We almost ran over it. Did you see what kind it was?" The black-and-white concrete posts delimiting the hill roads and preventing vehicles from falling off into deep ravines started to look like a horde of male Pied Bushchat. The squealing from the disc brakes also prompted stops to look for a never-before-heard bird call. Paranoia then set in with the drivers of vehicles being overtaken being "slow dunces" and that of those overtaking us being "mindless fools".

That '70s Show

"Work is for poor people. I am a rich person with no money."

"It's an overwhelming addiction, our systemic quest for 'more'; be it more ice cream, more alcohol, more drugs, more technology, more information, more knowledge, more megapxiels, more freedom, more war, more religion, more money, more whatever. It's all the same thing, it's ALL rooted in the external, as if our salvation lies there."

- Carl Donohue, www.skolaiimages.com

The above was an excerpt from one of his posts at this discussion:
http://www.naturescapes.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=115747

The Rule of Thirds

As told by a friend of mine, the rule of thirds can be carried over from the visual arts to the real world and yield a more productive and pleasing life. Spend one-third of your day working, one-third playing and the final third sleeping. A simple way to a better life!

Grasslands: Soaking it up

Just back from a trek to Siruvani. As you work your way up from the bottom, you have dry scrub jungle to start with which gives way to dry deciduous as you keep moving (you're not climbing much here). Dry becomes moist deciduous which after about 600m MSL is transformed into evergreen rainforest. Keep climbing and you have grasslands at about 1000m above mean sea level. Now, climbing grasslands after the rains is quite tricky. Grasslands are said to be the glaciers of the non-alpine slopes and that is so very true. The loamy soil (black, in the case of Siruvani) soaks up water from the rains like a sponge and releases it slowly into the forest (which is why the evergreen patch is right below the grasslands, first in line to receive the water), throughout the year. Now, back to climbing grasslands: the lower grasslands are quite mushy. Plant your foot and it all seems very stable until you follow it up by weight transfer and your foot sinks deeper into the muck (which was dry mud a few seconds ago), more water is released all around, the ground begins to give way and slide under your foot and you end up with your arms flailing for support (but there are no shrubs, it's a grassland, remember?) and then, disaster! You've landed nose-first into some of the cleanest muck on this planet. Welcome to Siruvani!