Chirping of Gubbi (sparrow)

It's been nearly three years; I wrote my last blog. Lot has happened in this gap. Got transferred twice during this time. There are many ups and down in official and personal front. My friend Kajari biswas has been constantly prodding me to write. Finally, I am able to write that too about bird which belongs to the same order which Sparrow belongs. All pictures used in this writing are taken from Samsung S6 mobile. Here are the chippings of Gubbi....  I thank the medical shop owners Rudra Narayan Agarwala, Shiva Kumar Agarwala and Viresh Agarwala for allowing to take pictures of Barn swallow and providing information about the bird. After being transferred from Birbhum, I settled down at Dow Hill as the Director of a century-old training institute. Dow Hill is a small place situated amidst clouds on top of a mountain in the Eastern Himalayas. The place is well known for evil spirits and is listed as one of the most haunted places in India. For mark...

In childhood, I had heard many stories of close encounters and narrow escapes from fights with sloth bears. As I grew up, I saw many such encounters with lions, elephants, etc. , on Discovery and National Geographic Channel. After I started wandering in the wild, I heard many such stories. Today, I will be narrating one such encounter of mine with one of the surviving mammoths on earth, the Rhinoceros . November 2012; to check the progress of preparations for Wildlife Day celebrations, I went to Falakata from Madarihat. After the progress was checked, instead of taking the direct road to Madarihat, I chose the jungle road. I decided to drive the vehicle. On the way back, two of my Range Officers, Buddhadeb and Ranjan Talukdar, were narrating the story of a rhino attacking the vehicle of an Assistant Wildlife Warden long back. Listening to the stories, I drove into the tall, dense grasslands of Moyurdanga. Moyurdanga, as the name suggests, derives its name from Mayur (peacock). The f...

          With shrinking forest cover, planting a seedling has become popular slogan everywhere. Lot of money is spent on afforestation. How many of the seedlings planted grows to become fruit bearing trees? Many die naturally, some are cut by villagers for the firewood or will get damaged for one or the other reason. It would have wonderful if fully grown trees are planted directly in the field. Many trials have been done in this direction. But it's not possible on a mass scale.          As part of IFS training, during our field visit to Bandipur, I remember Dr. A.J.T. Jonhsingh saying that the forest department should take up planting of fig plants and other fodder species in wildlife areas. But raising nursery of fig plants is very difficult. If small fig plants are planted in forest, they will immediately be browsed by herbivores and will not be allowed to come up. The fact is that fig trees are abode for wildlife. One will ...

As sun sinks, the darkness swallows the earth slowing the down the activities of most of the living creatures, indicating that its time for us to sleep and give rest to our body. There are exceptions to it. Some animals gets activated with the fall of sun. One creature that comes to everyone mind is OWL. In most of the areas tigers start there hunting from dusk. Bats, Loris, Nigh jars, Leopard etc., are have adapted nocturnal lifestyle. There vision is good in the darkness. Some use ultra sounds to detect there food like Bats and some organisms like Pit vipers use heat sensitive infrared waves. Humans are naturally afraid of darkness. We depend on artificial light. Our eyes may find it difficult to see the things in nigh, but we can see them with cameras. To capture photos in the night what we need to do is to make camera blink its eye slowly. The means its shutter speed needs to be lowered. Finding proper place, framing the picture and proper base not to allow the shaking of camera a...