The Green Ogre Weekend Update July 10

If you've missed anything this week, the weekend edition of The Green Ogre should sort you out...


I've been away on a family vacation most of last week, soaking up the monsoon in south Goa. Rain-washed Goa is refreshing. The Western Ghats slope down in a verdant riot that skids to a stop beside the ocean, buffered only by deserted beaches of soaked, clingy sand. Butterflies, dragonflies and birds were everywhere. Despite a domestic ban on birding, I sneaked sly glances at stork-billed kingfishers, prinias, spotted munias, black drongos and even a crimson sunbird that dropped by the hotel garden to say hello as I was dunking my daughter in the pool. Gorgeous, I say. And now, having returned sufficiently vindalooed, balchaoed, rechaedoed and bibincaed, I'm pleasantly surprised to see that my fellow-Ogres have been hacking away. 

This week, we continued our Agumbe Diaries and presented more finds from our sojourn in that neck of the deep, dark woods. On Monday, Sahastra introduced us to the Bicoloured Frog, one of the most attractive creatures to hop on the forest floor. In fact, if you're not watchful, you might mistake it for the forest floor itself.
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Sex is always a subject for steamy discussion. Despite Sandy's depraved jokes about the amatory pursuits of frogs, I gleaned some wisdom from watching all sorts of creatures in love. Dragonflies interlocked in subtle arcs as they mated on twigs. Grasshoppers and bush crickets carried on unabashed, hopping away together only when we almost crushed them underfoot. Lesser Whistling Ducks wheeled in the air, piping joyously, while Rufous Woodpeckers introduced new mates to the treasure trove of ants' nests in the treetops. Love was so in the air, and so inspired were we by monsoon mating mania that that we shot like zoopornographically obsessed paparazzi.
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Having said too much already, and having pushed this blog to the brink of NSFW-ness, we thought it best to clam up on Wednesday. But then, Arun's busy frame of mud-puddling lime butterflies raised so many curious eyebrows and engendered a spate of new questions.

Dung Beetles aren't the most charismatic of insects. They are dark, round, fat and inconspicuous except when they whir absent-mindedly past your ears or crash dizzily into lamps at night. Worse, their crappy lives revolve around what other animals leave behind. But then again, rain affords you the luxury of time. Time enough to stop and stare at a cow pat for five hours, and we were amazed at how a Dung Beetle made short work of it. Andy essayed this ode to the lowly dung-muncher.
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Last Day's Luck is a phenomenon that has mystified most nature-walkers. After three days at Agumbe we had heard so much about snakes that we expected them to stalk us from every bush and tree stump. No such luck. And then, a few hours before we were to depart, a Green Vine Snake showed up and allowed us the luxury of a long, relaxed photo-session.
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Among things that crawl, snakes scare the mojo out of most people. And a leaping frog has been known to turn dull altos into shrieking sopranos. But leeches?! Those eyeless, elastic strips of skin that crawl the mulchy rainforest floor? Sandy is so terrified of leeches that he gave us a hard time on the trip, repeatedly checking under our feet and rushing off unannounced into the bathroom to strip himself down for vainglorious de-leeching attempts. He refused to cross a stream and enter the dark rainforest for fear of his wetting his shoes -- later, when we returned from the walk soaked in rain and bristling with living leeches, he looked relieved that Fate hadn't picked him for that brief adventure. Leechophobia drove Sandy to such a paroxysm of panic that he wrote a fantasy-laced opus on these bloodsucking monsters.
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That's your weekend edition of The Green Ogre. Enjoy! 

Monsoon Mating Mania

Monsoon in top gear is a season for an unabashed green orgy, and we voyeuristic Green Ogres clicked away shamelessly. So much for the birds and bees...


"On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round."
- Robert Browning

Crimson-tailed Marsh Hawks form little earthly arcs as they clasp. Often, when mating dragonflies take wing together, they resemble some large composite monster

The phrase 'Sex and the City' brings to mind too many limp television romances but here we were in Agumbe, so far removed from anything urban that our cell phones barely twitched. Distractions were therefore not going to trouble us. So, absently, perhaps the single (and deprived?) among us must have pondered the question: "What was sex away from the city going to be like?"


I assure you that it was not on our agenda to find out, but without our asking the rainforest's little denizens put on an unabashed show just for us. Even a prude would have stopped to watch, and marvel at the minuscule arcs being etched in the great circle of life. 

Doing it on the hop...

...or on a twig

The sex lives of animals are intriguing but they don't always make for pleasant breakfast conversation. How many embarrassed parents have hurried their confused children away from friendly neighbourhood dogs making an amatory spectacle of themselves in full view of 132 apartments? 


Truth be told, I learned the facts of life long before my parents had the opportunity to tell me about the birds and bees. Ironically, I learned what I had to just by watching birds and bees, and other animals. By age seven, I had some very viable theories on reproduction, most of which led to "Aha, I told you so!" moments later on in life. 


Something about animals (or was it something about me?) led them to perform without restraint before my eyes. And so, before I was myself of reproductive age I had witnessed, both in the wild and in captivity, the private moments of (in no particular order) chickens, quail, partridges, butterflies, dragonflies, mynas, peafowl, cats, crabs, squirrels, geese, donkeys, horses, elephants, monkeys, guinea pigs, rats, mice, pigeons, parakeets, sparrows, snakes, buffalos, cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, deer, gaur, nilgai, blackbuck, agamas, frogs, cockroaches, leopards, waterhens, fish...  


Watching their complex (and, in some cases, extremely uncomplicated) courtship rituals was always fascinating, even if not in a voyeuristic way. With every year, I began to look forward to the monsoon that awakened a deep-seated love rush in all living things. 


Three days and nights in Agumbe brought back so many childhood discoveries that it was like falling in love with love all over again.


While grasshoppers whirred underfoot, crickets kept up the chorus at night. In the murky nooks of the rainforest where we ventured gingerly, half-excited and half-fearful for the vipers that we were told lurked there, frogs were awake and lovesick enough to sing by day. At dusk their chorus mounted to a din above which you had to raise your voice to be heard. Frogs and toads clasped in the stagnant pools of rainwater. Grass stalks at the bottom of clear-flowing runnels were braided with spawn.


Wherever we looked, insects mated. Amorous flies buzzed love songs in our ears. Tiger Beetles tumbled on the ground, looking mean and aggressive even as they coupled. Katydids and grasshoppers hurried away to quieter corners at our approach. 


Whether it was the unusual beauty of two bodies in harmony, or sheer zoopornographic glut, we the paparazzi stalked these lovelorn creatures and made a photographic feast of it. Here are the spoils for your vicarious enjoyment.

Or in brazen defiance of gravity like these Handmaiden Moths

Clearly, we were not the only voyeurs

Text by Beej
Photos by Sahastrarashmi, Sandeep Somasekharan and Beej


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Encounter: The Malaysian Moon Moth

This lovely moth we were admiring was probably in the last hours of a life spent in sleeping and making love

An epicurean life peppered with hints of bacchanal experiences is one that many of us would envy, and it’s interesting how insects live such a perfect life. 


It had been a week since the monsoon arrived in Agumbe and we had landed at ARRS hoping to have three field days spotting the region's famed herpetofauna. The amphibians and reptiles must have been well camouflaged and the repetitive pattern of green and brown had put me in a state of trance. That's when an apparition appeared.

Bright yellow, almost 12 inches long and half a foot across, it seemed almost artificial among the bright green leaves where I found it. I wondered first if it was a life-like miniature kite that was stuck in the leaves. I called out to the Green Ogres and exclaimed “Butterfly!” and got a curt rap on the knuckles. “Moth!” Well, most of the moths I had come across hardly had the vivid patterns I was looking at, so I knew this one was special.

We were looking at the Malaysian Moon Moth (Actias maenas) which occurs in South and Southeast Asia.  This specimen was a male, as it had brown markings on its wings with two circles resembling eyes that we might find on paper kites. The female of the species does not sport these wing markings. It is light green with a shorter tail. Striving not to disturb the moth we photographed it from a distance. When the moth did not take umbrage at our intrusion we got as close as a foot for clear shots. The moth stayed put and we found it at the same spot even when we returned that evening. 


Malaysian Moon Moths are hard to find primarily because they limit their habitat to thick forests. Further, they live in the imago stage for only 7-10 days. That would strike many as an unusually short lifespan for a attractive species of a significant size. However, it would seem entirely logical if I were to explain that these moths do not have mouths through which they can feed. All the feeding happens during the larval stage when the caterpillars go on a feeding frenzy to prepare themselves for the cocoon phase. 


Once they emerge from the cocoon the males wait until they can catch a whiff of the pheromones from the female, which they can sense even from six miles away. Female Actias maenas take flight before emitting pheromones, and this behaviour make them different from the other females of the Saturniidae moths, which emit the pheromones before taking flight. The reason for the moths' rather lethargic disposition is that they have less than 10 days to find a mate, which may involve flying a significant distance while starving.


The moth's sole mission is to mate. Now who wouldn’t envy a moth’s hedonistic lifestyle for all it involves – eat, sleep and make love!


Text by Anand Yegnaswami
Photographs: Sahastrarashmi and Sandeep Somasekharan
Thanks to Gopi Sundar for ID help


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