Burning Bright - In praise of the Flame of the Forest

Devoid of flower through the year it is like any other tree pale of trunk and green of leaf. But come March, when the Flame of the Forest burns up the landscape for far furlongs, its incendiary sight you can neither ignore nor forget


I remember Beej telling me about his first visit to BR Hills on damp, foggy morning, and how the Flame of the Forest in full bloom had studded the landscape like the faces of smiling children in a sea of glum grownups. When I saw the spectacle for myself it was an epiphany in itself. 


It was in March last year, when mornings had ceased to be bone-chilling and moved on to what one might call mild and pleasant, that I was on a customary stroll along the bund of the now “ruined for renovation” Hebbal Lake in Mysore. Just next to a fig tree of which I have written some time ago), I noticed a breathtaking transformation. There had materialized a tree, with branches that looked like bare muddied bones covered with orange-red flowers like glowing upturned claws. The morning sun rendered the numerous flowers yellow with gleaming edges. It looked like the tree was smiling - nay, I should say beaming. The name of the tree dawned upon me automatically – from my memory of Beej describing it on one of our trips. Flame of the Forest. Butea monosperma.

A hundred glowing claws

I realized at that moment that I had passed the tree a thousand times without giving it a second glance. I have photographed parakeets and herons perched on its branches without a care for what it may have been. It was just another tree with brown branches and green leaves, innocuous to the extent of being invisible. All of a sudden this tree had transformed into a sight: Its branches conquered by bright orange flowers, as if the tree had gone up in flames. Does spontaneous combustion occur in trees, too?

Tongues of Flame

This year, after returning to Kerala, I had another chance to visit Mysore. My heart bled as I walked along the Hebbal Lake bund, which was razed of the lantana vegetation that grew on its banks (these bushes once resounded with the rapturous calls of White-browed Bulbuls every time we passed them). The only consolation was that the larger trees on the other side of the bund had been left alone. The Flame of the Forest beamed at me, as if glad to see me again.

A closer look at the flowers

Orange flowers like upturned claws, with tiny yellow stamens protruding like snake tongues. In some branches the flowers had given way to fruits – green pods that carry the seeds.  

Look closely and you can't miss the pods that encapsulate the seeds

Numerous Chestnut-headed Starlings, uttering shrill cries, hopped from branch to branch, looking for nectar and drinking themselves to a state of inebriation. Beej had likened the trees he had seen in BR Hills to happy-hour bars in the forest – with so many feathered patrons swilling their free drinks and paying scant regard to the ogling birdwatchers. Could they be blamed? Such a feast is on offer only once a year! 

The hardy tree, which thrives in a variety of climates and topographies, is a medicinally important plant as extracts from it are used in various drugs. Now I am on the lookout for a sapling for my tiny yard. I’d love to have a Flame of the Forest right next to the mango, guava and sapodilla saplings that I have planted.


Text and photos: Sandeep Somasekharan
Smitten with flowering trees? You have to check out The Green Ogre's archive of posts celebrating them!

What Little Grebes learn at Sunday School

Family entertainment for this family of Little Grebes might be, in all seriousness, a training session for the future. Notes from a morning well spent...


Early one Sunday morning, a fortnight after I got my new lens, I headed out to Madiwala Lake. Roaming around, I encountered a family of four Little Grebes (Tachybaptus ruficollis). The chicks, more like subadults, were almost adult size; only their plumage was different. I watched the adults do their usual stuff -- swimming, followed by quick, silent dives for food. The chicks also followed suit.

Adult grebe displaying

As the grebes were quite shy, I sat myself down beside the water so that they got used to me. Although they kept their distance, they went about their business. Suddenly, one adult raised itself up, called and, literally, started running over the water. A chicks immediately responded by doing just the same. 

The adult picking up speed

The adult bird was always first to start the sprint after a short, quick call, with the chick in hot pursuit.  They would run rapidly for a distance and then slide back onto the water on their bellies before coming to a stop.

End of the sprint

This behavior continued for a while, with multiple 'walking sessions' extending for almost half an hour.

The grand finish - the belly slide

Only one adult and chick exhibited this particular behavior; the others kept to themselves all the while.

The adult watches the chick come to stop

All I could assume was that this was some kind of training session for the chick. It was a grand spectacle to behold, with the two birds beating their wings and running together over the water, splashing it in every direction!

Text and Photos: Arun 

Encounter: God, Darwin, Ali and the Blue-capped Rock Thrush

In the foggy ruins of time, most memories can get blurred, or muddied entirely. But not a birder's remembrance of a cherished bird. The story of me and the Blue-capped Rock Thrush involves God, Darwin and Salim Ali -- playing significant bit-parts.

Back in the day when I believed that God had created the world, I honoured periodically a votive my mother had made to send me with my father to Sabarimala, a hill shrine in the southern Western Ghats reached after a half-day pilgrimage on foot from a check-dammed river that curls sluggishly at its feet. I loved the vagabonding, and the uncustomary walk in the forest. It’s been two decades since I last went. That temple – now among this land’s richest, and visited by 300,000 pilgrims daily in the season – occupies more acreage than it did then, what with the permanent habitation enveloping it. That sorrowing forest river, Pamba, swirls now with plastic, detritus and the excrement of pilgrims too blinded by devotion to consider what their ecological footprint has stamped out. It’s another matter altogether that somewhere between then and now Messrs Darwin, Sagan and Dawkins interrupted my religiosity with questions of pressing urgency, eroding it first with guilty discomfort but eventually washing it away albeit without disrespect to the forces worshipped by those who had brought me up. 


That said, some nights when I attempt to command my mind to sleep as effortlessly as I did as a child, the temple and the forest surrounding it surface from my subconscious, embellished with shards of innocuous untruth, deliberate fictions that soothe and console the pangs of losses irreparable in this lifetime.


When that comforting reverie takes hold, I feel the moist trampled earth comfort my aching bare feet, the damp of the forest condense on my shirtless back, the overwhelming scent of vegetation. I hear a faraway chuckle, then see the bough of a forest tree bend and swing as it receives the crashing burden of a leaping Malabar Giant Squirrel. I always hear birdsong – the jubilant squeals of Hill Mynas, the sweeching of Scarlet Minivets, the percussion of White-bellied Woodpeckers, the squabbling of Rufous Babblers, the trilling of Chestnut-headed Bee-eaters...


Sans field guide or binoculars, my birding was incidental and a touch surreal. Sometimes the shadowy shape of a bird would announce its presence urgently, fleet past and melt into the jungle. Malkoha? Drongo-Cuckoo? I’d peer, I’d dither, but I could not afford to linger: A pilgrim must stick with his flock. Thus, many sightings were approximated, assumed and, not unwittingly, concocted.


Yet, one encounter I remember clearly. It was December, a few weeks before Makara Jyoti, and our pilgrim party was camped in the muggy shade of a tin-roofed shelter, open on three sides, with the bare ground for a floor. Gruel was cooking on an open fire. Robber-flies were hunting winged things infatuated with my fragrant preteen sweat. Bitten by both, scratching, and tolerating the misery of that tropical afternoon (and dreading the imminent night that would tempt airborne roaches out of uncharted crevices), I gazed longingly towards the tops of trees in the forest verge that began about twenty metres from the shack.


Jungle Crows, sparrows and mynas abounded. Red-whiskered bulbuls overreached to filch morsels. As I watched lethargically, an unfamiliar bird flew into view. It was smaller than a myna, dull, slaty-blue with a rusty brown breast. It lingered, unafraid, doing nothing. It just perched there on the steel beam and looked idly about.


My birder’s eyes, schooled on Collins and field guides of suchlike Imperialistic abstraction, tagged the bird as a thrush. I noticed the aspect, the overall blue appearance, large black eyes, rich rufous chest and belly, white patches on the wings, and the bluish grey head. I watched the bird for a good five minutes before it flew away into the forest. I didn’t see it again until I embarked on informed birding a few years later. I made a mental note then and later an entry in my diary: “Blue-headed Thrush”.


In 1989, when I got my first legitimate field guide – Salim Ali’s 'The Book of Indian Birds' – this was the first bird I looked up. Turning the page feverishly, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I was almost correct. This was Monticola cinclorhynchus, the Blue-capped Rock Thrush.


Every time I see the Blue-capped Rock Thrush – and I have seen it frequently in southern India in winters and in the Himalaya in late spring and early autumn – I am reminded of myself at twelve, a scruffy, itchy pilgrim gazing in rapture at a sprite, a vision, a gift of the forest.


Thank God, or whoever is in charge, for that epiphany.


Text: Beej
Photo: Sandeep Somasekharan


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Two hoots in a deserted quarry

My love of owls has made me peer into abandoned quarries, tree hollows, rafters of old barns, and dilapidated houses. Last year, I watched three Indian Eagle Owl chicks grow from featherballs to subadults. We waited a whole year to publish this report, assured that they are now relatively safe


In India, where kids grow up with superstitions whispered into their ears, owls are much maligned. An owl hooting at night is said to bring death. Barn owls (Tyto alba) fetch lakhs in the black market as they are believed to have magical powers that aid in black magic. And some say if you starve and beat an Indian Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo bengalensis), it will start talking like a human and predict your future. For a nature-watcher, however, these hunters of the night are graceful and elegant. And the more you watch them, the more you fall in love.

the beauty with large eyes!

My love of owls has made me peer into abandoned quarries, tree hollows, rafters of old barns, and dilapidated houses. In one such quarry in the outskirts of Mysore I saw a fully grown female Indian Eagle Owl, which perched on the least noticeable ledges and watched us with her large, all-perceiving eyes. The spell she cast on us was unbreakable, so much that we continued to pay her frequent visits.


Generally she would be quite shy, taking off to distant inaccessible corners of the quarry if we got close. But on one visit in January last year, she didn't leave her perch, however close we approached. The ledge, though, was inaccessible - it was about 10 feet high and about 7 feet away from the edge of the deep rainwater pool at the bottom of the quarry. We imagined the reason for her perceived acquiescence was that she might be nesting. We left her alone.

Momma squints a warning

A few weeks later, in February, we returned. The mother was nowhere to be seen. Scanning the ledge carefully corroborated our guess: three tiny feather-balls. My heart thumped. The sun was coming up, and the chicks were pushing against the farthest corner of the quarry wall, seeking protection from the early morning sunlight that was now turning harsh. The nest was a humble setup -- a ledge with sand at the bottom and some grass growing at the edges. Mommy showed up presently, her stern stare radiating a warning: “Keep off!”


Huddled in the nest and vulnerable.



Momma plays sentinel


When we next visited the quarry a month later, in March, we couldn’t spot any chicks. Dismayed that they might have died of illness or fallen to predators, we prepared to leave when we spotted a chick behind the grass stalks that jutted out of a ledge. It appeared to be three times larger than we had last seen it. Another sat a few feet away on another ledge. There was no sign of the third (we never saw it again). Mommy occupied another ledge, watching us intently with the same stern schoolteacher expression. Since the chicks were on a different ledge from her, it was pretty obvious that they had started to fly.

Well concealed



And the second chick on another ledge

Our next trip to the quarry happened only in May as something or the other interfered with our plans. All we saw were two adults: The larger mother and the other was probably one of the chicks, which had by now grown large enough to be on its own. The second chick had probably left the quarry (or maybe it was dead -- we would never know), and I had a feeling that I would not see this one for long either.

The little one takes flight...



The last glimpse that I got of the young owl

As expected, on later visits we found only the mother owl. Since Eagle Owls are voracious eaters and require a large area to hunt in, it is likely that the grown chicks had left to set up their own fortresses elsewhere. I do think about them once in a while, wondering where they would be now, whether they managed to survive and found happy hunting grounds of their own beyond the reach of superstitions or predators. 


After all, when babies grow up before your eyes, you get attached to them!


Further reading:

1. An excellent technical documentation of Eagle Owl chicks [PDF], by Eric Ramanujam and T Murugavel, is available at the Journal of Threatened Taxa website. 
2. Sad, Wise Eyes, an article about owl trafficking by Shruti Ravindran, appeared in the March 2009 issue of Outlook magazine.

Text and photos by Sandeep Somasekharan


More on The Green Ogre:


Read more about Indian Eagle Owls and Barn Owls 
Read more about threats to Mysore's scrubland habitats
 

The February wallpaper -- Enter the Dragon!

Make this picture your desktop wallpaper-calendar for February 2012. To download, click the link below or the picture above.

file storage online

Garden Lizard (Calotes versicolor)
Photograph: Sandeep Somasekharan

What's cooking in Khichan?

Journeying in another Green Ogre's footsteps, this wild crane chase off the beaten track culminated in an immensely rewarding avian spectacle. The Demoiselles of Khichan are alive and well, and numerous and beautiful as ever!

The Demoiselles of Khichan

Heading from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer we took the road less travelled towards Phalodi. You don't have to be born with a compass in the head to realize that the route you are taking is circuitous. Yet, our quest justified this digression. Fewer tyre treads had ensured the roads were in better shape, yet it was not our ride that purchased our concentration but the scenes outside. Though this was not my first visit to a desert, the Thar compelled us with a different sensuality, dotted as it was with settlements of thatch-roof huts (called jhopdis). 

Desert Cafe on the way to Khichan

Catching our attention from time to time were Black Shouldered Kites, Indian Rollers, Grey Francolins, Shikras and Grey Shrikes. We passed camels feasting on acacias, which evoked the question (to our driver Kailash): "Yeh oonth paltu hain ya jungli?" (Are these camels domesticated or wild?), to which his answer was always in favour of the former. 

Camels were not the only mammals we saw. There were Chinkaras aplenty at one desert enclave before Osiyan; we spent a quarter of an hour with the herd getting pictures. We passed Osiyan and its famous Jain temple, a desert cafe, more camels, more questions on their social life, more curt responses from Kailash and one final, all-settling retort: "Yahaan sirf paltu oonth miltein hain!" (You only get domesticated camels here!). Kailash had presented an iceberg that wrecked my interest in the ship of the desert.

A Chinkara on the way to Khichan

We opened packets of savories and I reflected on the reason that had brought us on this path. A few years ago my good friend and fellow Green Ogre Sahastra had visited a little-known village in Rajasthan, Khichan, famous for the flocks of Demoiselle Cranes (Anthropoides virgo) it hosts every winter. In a two-part post published on this blog he had piqued my interest in this spectacular avian congregation (whetted by the fact that the species had been christened by Queen Marie Antoinette herself). While I firmed up my itinerary I got yet another reminder from Sahastra: "Don't miss Khichan." And so we sped north by northwest while our eventual destination lay northwest of Jodhpur. A signpost for Khichan pointed right and a sense of guilt crept in for I had dragged my friends along on this wild crane chase. However, I was confident that we would take back something special from this detour.


A Nilgai showed up on the pale arid patch as we arrived close to Khichan and soon we heard the clamour that the flock of Demoiselles presented. Stepping out of the car for better shots, I saw a flock hurriedly take off and then turn back and land. Thrilled, I counted 50 to 70 birds and went trigger happy on the shutter release. Our driver said there were more ahead. Up ahead was a water body, beyond which was a larger flock of Demoiselles with smaller flocks joining them every few minutes. Circumnavigating the water body we got closer to the flock and my mental algorithm kicked in, giving me an estimate ten times the previous number.

A growing flock of Demoiselle Cranes

I had never come across such a large gathering of any living species, not even ants or termites, and it appeared that the cranes weren't done gathering. Tiny specks appeared on the horizon, growing in size. They assumed the shape of a line, then a triangle, then descended towards the field with vigorous, almost violent flapping of wings in the manner of air brakes, hopped and settled as drops in that ocean of grey. More cranes joined the flock in coordinated victory formations. The awe-inspiring atmosphere thus created might have seemed to some octogenarians like a repeat of the Battle of Britain with the RAF and Luftwaffe squadrons swarming the sky for aerial supremacy. 

An approaching cloud of Demoiselle Cranes

And they kept coming....

A chat with young Jethmal from the village taught us that there are four such large water bodies in Khichan. At the appointed time, 10 AM, the birds arrive to feed at the feeding house, where they roost. Jethmal said the birds were fed 10 to 15 quintals of grain a day. 


We turned back to get more pictures of the cranes while maintaining a respectful distance in order to avoid disturbing them. Some of the cranes acted like sentries -- they formed the front line of the flock and seemed edgy. I nicknamed one Long John Silver as it was missing a foot. The last thing we wanted was an alarm call from one of these lookouts. We couldn't have enough of the sea of grey at Khichan, yet we had a schedule to keep up. The numbers kept swelling and my last estimate was about two thousand cranes in the area, though more of them were still flying in. 

Flying in formation

Long John Silver, the crane without a foot

As we were leaving, a group of foreign tourists arrived. Indeed, the Demoiselle Cranes had put Khichan on the tourist map. I won't be surprised if more and more wayfarers choose the road less travelled from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer via Khichan. Promising to return, I left for Jaisalmer.

The platform in the background from where tourists can enjoy views of this magnificent congregation

Text and Photos: Anand Yegnaswami

Wordless Wednesday - Darn this itch!

Photo: Sandeep Somasekharan

Enjoy more Wordless Wednesdays, when we Ogres get picturesque speechless! ;)

Life and death - Another Richard Dawkins lesson

Silent in life -- and in death

While critiquing a book by his contemporary Stephen Jay Gould, the noted writer on evolutionary theory Richard Dawkins refutes his contention that the idea of progress in evolutionary history of life is an artifact of our anthropocentric bias, and evolution is an inherently random process that tracks the changes in environment. Dawkins responds with the saw-toothed model and suggests that while over very large spans of time we may not find any progressive trends, in a shorter time-span the predator-prey arms race might lead to progressive building up and refinement of technology, an upward movement on a progressive ramp.

Dawkins elaborates: “This, to repeat, takes progress to mean an increase, not in complexity, intelligence or some other anthropocentric value, but in the accumulating number of features contributing towards whatever adaptation the lineage in question exemplifies. By this definition, adaptive evolution is not just incidentally progressive; it is deeply, dyed-in-the wool, indispensably progressive. It is fundamentally necessary that it should be progressive if Darwinian natural selection is to perform the explanatory role in our worldview that we require of it, and that it alone can perform.” (Richard Dawkins, The Devil’s Chaplain, Houghton Mifflin, 2003, Pg 211)


He adds, “Only a saw-tooth succession of small progresses terminated by extinctions. Nonetheless, the ramp phase of each saw tooth was properly and significantly progressive.” (Pg 214).

It took a bird’s death for me to understand this. I had spent a full week in November last year enthralled by my first sighting of the Large-tailed Nightjar (Caprimulgus macrurus). Its perfect camouflage, the absolute silence, the soft noiseless flight, the lovely liquid eye -- all spoke of the careful honing by evolution: A perfect night bird. I missed it unless I knew it was there. Sometimes, I could not locate it even when I knew it might be there. So often, I missed it even while peering through binoculars. My admiration for the bird peaked with every passing day and every sighting. All the time I tramped along the garden looking but not sighting it just added to my veneration of the nightjar. I was in no doubt that its adaptation to its tropical habitat was perfect.

Natural selection is described by many as an elimination process. Since it weeds out the unfit, it involves reduction. But we usually do not realize that it can be an enormously creative process as well. Any improvement in the weaponry of the predator's tactics (viz. running speed, capacity for camouflage) is tracked by the prey (better warning calls, speed, etc.) and vice-versa. Such mirrored improvements lead to positive feedback and often go into a vicious spiral. Ernst Mayr describes such an arms race between marine snails and snail-eating crabs. The snails, he wrote, protected themselves against snail-eating crabs by “evolving stronger shells as well as all sorts of structural elaborations of the shell" and made it harder for the crabs to crush them with their pincers. He added: "The crabs, in turn, develop stronger claws, which induce the snails to grow tougher shells...” (Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is, Basic Books 2001, Pg 210-211).

Turns out the bird's adaptation, though excellent, wasn’t perfect. On the last day, just before the vacations ended, I visited the local temple. I have been fascinated by the lichens that grow on the temple's crumbling plaster. On the platform were strewn a few feathers, most of a pigeon-sized bird but shaded in gray, buff and brown. My heart skipped a beat. "Nightjar!" the feathers cried out. I could think of no other bird with these lovely soft shades evolved to merge with the tropical soil and leaf litter. Whoever or whatever had killed the bird had probably pounced on it on the ground and brought it up to the temple's platform to finish it off. A predator plotting its evolutionary curve, honing the technology to kill to survive. In this case, seeking out silent, well-camouflaged ground birds.

Arms races lead to progress in the short and medium term (in terms of geological time) since they usually come to an end either due to the extinction of one party (in which case the other party might hit a plateau or even regress) or due to economic reasons. Sometimes, both parties may go extinct due to a natural catastrophe and then the arms race will begin anew among the lineages of their successors. Moreover, since undue diversion of limited resources (e.g. continuous improvement in running speed) eventually starts to hurt somewhere else, sooner or later, the attribute (running speed) will plateau off. Further improvement will come only at the cost of other investments that are necessary for survival, e.g. making extra milk for cubs. Moreover, there are physical limits to improvements in animal technology, e.g. the ability to execute high jumps or improve dive time (hold  breath).

I never saw the predator but guessed it was the local Jungle Cat (Felis chaus) that once littered in the hollow of a large dead mango tree nearby. I can imagine it, in the fashion of Ted Hughes' The Thought Fox – another perfectly camouflaged mammal, its mottled grey brown coat merging with the night, stepping softly and soundlessly, silent hot breath, an approach from the rear to hide the shining all-seeing eyes, a tense crouch and then the leap. As nightjars get better in their camouflage, the jungle cat too gets better at seeking it out, locked as they are in the eternal fight for survival, the predator and prey inching up the incline of the saw-tooth.

The arms race does not lead to progress in the global sense since it is punctuated by extinctions, plateaus and sometimes by regress. However, in the short phase that these races happen, they are progressive. Dawkins writes: “Only a saw-tooth succession of small progresses terminated by extinctions. Nonetheless, the ramp phase of each saw-tooth was properly and significantly progressive.” (Pg 214).

Death really does help us see things more clearly.


Dawkins signs off by saying, “If you let the animals bring their own definition you will find progress, in a genuinely interesting sense of the word, nearly everywhere.” No anthropocentric bias but races along the saw-tooth incline spiraling to extinctions.


No wonder Dawkins is called the high-priest of Neo-Darwinism.

Text and photographs by Sahastrarashmi

A ramble through Alaska - Portage Glacier, Anchorage

Concluding Anand Yegnaswami's sojourn in Alaska, this episode sees him face to face with a Grizzly and learning something new about the gender of Santa's red-nosed reindeer

Refreshed from a rather uneventful third day of our trip we emerged from our slumber gung-ho about what was to be our first experience of a fjord. We had read in school textbooks about Norwegian fjords and here was our ticket to experience one from a cruise boat.

A brown bear

The cruise we had booked promised fascinating views of glaciers and wildlife that included sea-lions, puffins and whales. The Czech acquaintances Rajarshi made the previous day had shown us captivating images from the cruise taken a day earlier. Had someone heard us praying, they might have assumed us to be sexist expecting parents but we prayed hard for the sun.


As we emerged from the hotel still praying, the ice-cold drizzle left us bedraggled and washed away our hopes of the fjord experience. It wasn’t a surprise when the cruise operator told us it was impossible to provide cruise services on such a wet and windy day.  We were done with Seward and as we headed out I learned from chatting with the lady at the gas station that the day before had been the 14th sunny day of the year. I left grumbling about the weather. Zeus was off my worship list.

Portage Glacier with the Blue Ice visible

We opened the glove compartment to look at the guide and found Plan B smiling at us – we settled on Portage Glacier and the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. The weather seemed to have come out of its fickle bout and we enjoyed our drive until we reached the glacier. Having caught wind of my recent affront, Zeus sent a freezing downpour accompanied by a breeze so strong that the tandem strike could have frozen the marrow in our bones. We braved the weather and moved on to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.

Bisons at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center

At the Conservation Center we saw significant acreage allocated for the rehabilitation of wild animals. Moose, elk, brown bear, Bald Eagles, bison, coyote, musk ox and lynx formed the group of animals that have found refuge here. We heard about the injured Bald Eagle that was too hurt to be safely released back into the wild. I was pained at the plight of a bird of prey so majestic that was now hopping along a solitary branch of a tree stump and would never again spread its mighty wings. Having seen the commendable conservation efforts at the wildlife center we headed for Anchorage.

The Seward Highway 1 that flanks Cook Inlet is known to offer Beluga whale sightings and we kept our eyes wide open and shouted “Beluga” for everything that moved only to quickly realize our folly and melt into sheepish grins. By the time we reached Anchorage our throats were parched from the screaming while our eyes were dreary from having seen none.

Anchorage, Alaska

Anchorage is one of the coziest cities I have visited during the beginning of fall, not temperature-wise but temperament-wise. The city, built by army engineers, is organized well into streets and avenues with buildings bristling with character. The three previous days of recluse living with inadequate social interaction made the visit to Anchorage a treat. I have never enjoyed crowds so much. 


We lapped up the cultural gallimaufry with gusto as we saw different races, nationalities and ethnicity converge on the city while we went looking for souvenirs. We saw totem pole replicas with carvings of raven, bear, and whales. We saw artwork on ivory from whales and even baleen, which raised our eyebrows on the legality of the sale of these items. The trip to Alaska illustrated the power of nature to sustain communities in the severest of weather conditions. 


There is, however, a thin line between sustenance and exploitation. Will the pressure of population take its toll on this paradise? From our interaction during the trip we learnt that most of the population in Alaska is transient, they travel to Alaska for work during the summer and leave before winter. Probably the inhospitable winter is in a way a boon for conservation. We left for the airport.

Sculpture in Anchorage asserting the significance of nature in Alaska

At the airport we chatted up a gentleman from Colorado who was returning from a visit to his girlfriend’s family near Anchorage. He brought in a very interesting piece of information from the Caribou farm he had stayed in. He mentioned emphatically that “male Caribous lose their antlers by December 15." Which means Rudolph is a female!

I took back more than just souvenirs, pictures and memories from Alaska.


Text and photos by Anand Yegnaswami
Read all posts in the Alaska series