Raptor Friday - Raiders of the honeycomb

Until five years ago, every bird that soared was an "eagle". I had just started birding and I don't know how many times until then I had let pass this intriguing bird as an eagle. And by "eagle" I would have meant the ubiquitous Black Kite or Pariah Kite (Milvus migrans).

The high flying male. Note the barred undersides of the wings and tail, and the small head and slender neck

I have spotted the Oriental Honey Buzzard (Pernis ptilorhynchus) in a variety of habitats -- flying high over scrublands, in eucalyptus plantations, over my office campus, and in dense forests. One of my friends was lucky to see one perched on his compound wall. 


Its name, of course, comes from its habit of pursuing its favourite diet, the larvae of honey bees and wasps, which it catches by attacking honeycombs. In my mother-tongue, Malayalam, the bird is known as thenkothichi -- literally, she who is greedy for honey. Evidently, those who named it mistook (and romanticised) the raids on the honeycombs as attempts to find honey.

Female perched. The yellow eye and the dark brown plumage are distinctive

The best way to identify the bird is by the shape of its head. Unlike the rounded and large head of a kite and the flat head of an eagle, the honey buzzard's head is slender -- more or less similar to a pigeon's -- with a thin neck. In flight, the honey buzzard's neck and head stick out at right angles to the outspread wings, and in most cases the six primaries (flight feathers at the edges of the wings) are fanned out like open fingers.

Male perched. Note the red eye, pigeon-like head and banded tail

The male has red eyes and a rather featureless blue-grey head, while the female has yellow eyes and brown plumage. Apart from feeding on the larvae of bees and wasps, the Oriental Honey Buzzard also preys on other insects and the commonly seen garden lizards (Calotes versicolor).

Ok, you have seen enough!

Honey buzzards need large trees both for nesting as well as to host honeycombs, their primary source of food. The rapid advent of urbanisation, which affects almost every species of bird, has also led to a marked decline in the habitat available to the honey buzzard. 

Balcony Bugwatch - The moron, the lightbulb and the Potter Wasp

You must be familiar with that old joke: How many morons does it take to change a lightbulb? The answer shall be illumined presently to the patient reader of this post. 

But first, the story of a sting operation. 

Apart from a long line of little black ants bearing whitish larvae to the safety of another crevice in the wall, there are other insects at work in my balcony. One is a species of Potter Wasp. Sometime in December, my daughter (to her utter alarm) observed an adult wasp fashioning a nest with damp earth. It buzzed in and out of the balcony tirelessly bearing bits of wet mud in its jaws. Over several days this building material was adeptly patted down into a hollow structure with many tubular chambers. One of these cells remained open at one end even after the nest was finished. The structure was cemented to the base surface with mud, which I suspect had been mixed with the insect's saliva and possibly something else that acts as a resilient binding agent. 

The moist part that you see in your picture (above) dried up in a few hours and turned to quite the same colour and texture as the rest of the nest. The adult soon disappeared and has not been seen for over two months now. I assumed she had fulfilled her corporeal assignment and ended up in the food chain of the bee-eaters often heard trilling about nearby.

Enter the moron with the mission of changing a lightbulb. Since the wasp had fastened its nest to the clamp of the lampshade in the balcony, I couldn't change the lightbulb even if I wanted to. Having seen no action for over two months, I decided to inspect the shade. I couldn't do that without disturbing the nest. Presuming it to be empty, I chipped away at it with an old kitchen knife, hoping to detach it cleanly and add it to my collection of souvenirs taken (without menace, may I add) from the natural world. 

Chipping away the nest proved more challenging than I had expected. At one butter-fingered juncture, the blade of the knife bent at the tip. At the next barbarous hack, the nest gave way and fell to the floor, smashing into two or three uneven fragments with catacomb-like  innards.

From one of the cells, a very agitated-looking adult wasp emerged with a rustle of eager wings, shaking off slivers of pupal sheath. Inside the tube from which it emerged were the wispy carcasses of spiders, flies, beetles and other food that the parent wasp had stashed long before its offspring had hatched. After loitering about the balcony muttering revenge, the wasp flew away into the bleak and hostile afternoon.

Assuming the rest of the nest to be empty, I decided to pry some more with my bent knife.

There were two cells remaining in the nest. The one to the left in the picture contained a dead wasp, which had pupated. But I could find only bits of its legs and a hollowed-out thorax. Since the cells didn't seem to have any vestibular passages between them, which ruled out cannibalism by one of the same brood, what had eaten the rest of it? And, since the remains were quite desiccated, how long ago?

The cell to the right vibrated with angry, impatient whirring. As I trained my camera on it, an adult wasp slipped out, deposited small grains of white faeces, and began to explore the territory around it. Then, with a sudden flourish of its new wings, it took off abruptly into the great wide open. My hacking of the nest had yielded two ready-to-fly adults and one dead-on-arrival pupa. Had I not opened the nest, how long would it have taken before they would come out on their own? 

Other questions remain: Did the parent wasp know how many eggs it was going to lay? Or did she build the cells one by one as she laid her eggs, taking breaks to hunt and provide for her brood? Was she able to provide for all the cells? Did one of the larvae die of inadequate nutrition? What about the empty cells? Would the new adults survive? Would the bee-eaters get them?

At the end of the afternoon, only one question was answered: It takes only one moron to change a lightbulb.

Text and photos by Beej

Encounter - Antlions and the pit of death

An ant's minefield of death. In each of these pits lurks a very hungry antlion larva

For as long as I can remember this killing field has been around at the same spot, sheltered under the arch of our ancestral home in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. The present colony sits on the mud collected between the wall of the arch and the road. What used to be a mud road running into the courtyard of the house was upgraded to a brick road and then to a tarred road, but the colony (not really a "colony" since the individuals have little to do with each other in a communal sense) has thrived. This minefield of inverted volcanoes has been home to several generations of antlions and its near permanence is testimony to their adaptation and survival instincts.

As kids this colony of antlions fascinated my brother and me endlessly. It was the place for macabre experimentation in complex predator-prey relationships fueled by both curiosity and frenzied betting (involving marbles for coveted currency), though not necessarily in that order. The basic level was to introduce a hapless ant in a selected pit and place bets on its fate. The antlion would indicate its presence by throwing up puffs of dust, almost as if the inverted volcano was erupting. It served to confuse the ant and collapse the steep pit slopes, blocking the ant's escape. The ant would become absolutely still, perhaps sensing its fate. Then in sudden fateful and much anticipated moment it would vanish, pulled in by the still unseen predator. Bets involved both presence and capture; mostly they were both settled with the presence. Escape was rare.

Then there were the variations. The next level was to catch the antlion by scooping off the entire pit just at it had grabbed the ant. We would then carefully sort through the mud and locate the guy – a tiny bug with menacing jaws (for its size) and otherwise, to our eyes, unremarkable. This tiny predator is actually the larva of the antlion, the next stage being the pupa which metamorphoses into a damselfly like adult. I have rarely seen any ants or small insects in the vicinity of the colony so the food supply is not really abundant but then I guess it does not need to eat a lot. The colony has always had pits of different sizes to suit the size of the larva and newer pits keep coming up, so by all means the colony is prospering.

Other game variations involved introducing more than one ant, ants of different sizes, and an especially morbid one where an antlion was introduced in another’s lair. The variations kept coming, fuelled by a steady supply of ants and helped along by weak incipient conscience and imaginative betting odds.

The Antlion larva's menacing jaws
Photo: Jonathan Numer (Wikimedia Commons)

Close up, the antlion is a fierce-looking character. Wikipedia gives the following description, “The life cycle of the antlion begins with oviposition (egg-laying). The female antlion repeatedly taps the sand surface with the tip of her abdomen. She then inserts her abdomen into the sand and lays an egg. The antlion larva is a ferocious-appearing creature with a robust, fusiform, a very plump abdomen the thorax bearing three pairs of walking legs. The prothorax forms a slender mobile "neck" for the large, square, flattened head, which bears an enormous pair of sicklelike jaws with several sharp, hollow projections. The jaws are formed by the maxillae and mandibles, which in each pincer enclose a canal for injecting venom between them. Depending on species and where it lives, the larvae will either hide under leaves or pieces of wood, in cracks of rocks, or dig pits in sandy areas. Antlion larvae are unusual among the insects as they lack an anus. All the metabolic waste that is generated during the larval stage is stored and is eventually emitted as Meconium near the end of its pupal stage.” 

Antlions belong to the insect family Myrmeleontidae comprising about 2,000 species. I have encountered them in several locations especially below rock outcrops (quite a number are to be found in Ramanagaram near Bangalore).

After spending their larval stages as pit hunters, the ant-lions metamorphose into a damselfly-like adult that some know as the Doodlebug (the long antennae are telltale). Arun Menon shot this adult in Bangalore

While the larval stages may last 2-3 years based on the food supply, the damselfly-like adult with transparent wings (an effective camaouflage since during the day it lies motionless) lives for about a month alone. Its main job is reproduction. That achieved, it dies. It must wait for a few minutes after emerging from the cocoon (emergence is mainly at dusk) for its wings to expand and toughen but it is never a very good flier -- compared to dragonflies and damselflies. The adult is mainly active at dusk and the usual wingspan is 8 inches but can reach up to 16 cm in the African genus Palpares. The body length is typically 4 cm.

The website Antlion Pit has this interesting bit of information on the antlion being host to another species: "Of the documented relationships between antlions and other animals, perhaps the most interesting is the relationship in which antlion larvae serve as hosts to parasitic insects. For example, the larvae of the Australian horsefly (Scaptia muscula) live inside antlion larvae pits, where they share the spoils of the antlions' trapping abilities".

This year, as I introduced my son to this master predator, I realized I had lost a fair amount of skills in dealing with them. It was time for him to take over but he seemed reluctant. My wife attributes it to a more evolved conscience; I privately disagree and am convinced that it has to do with lack of appropriate betting stimuli.

These pits were the scene of many childhood games

Text by Sahastrarashmi

Photographs by Arun Menon (adult ant lion) and Sahastrarashmi
Antlion larva photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

For further information please see http://www.antlionpit.com/what.html