NATURE ON JUNE

May drags into june bringing in its trail more heat,more dust,occasinal squalls of rain and a harvest of knocked-down trees.The temperature still averages 40 s.g. and above.Pink cassias blush away unconcerned with the rierce sun.Laburnums,which have a delayed reaction to changing times,look as if they have just risen from their slumbers and are a mass of golden chandeliers.But by now most of them have more leaves than f;owers on their branches.Papris still shed their hailstone-like flowers; maulsaris and frangipanis make their floral obeisance to mother earth.At this time of the year,indian myrtels,a sub-species of farul came into flower in mauves and pinks and keep their colourful show going for a couple of months.

When the summers heat is here,can the rains be far behind? Thorny bushes of karwand and beever break out into tiny leaf,and farmers see these as portents of the monsoon.I have reraly seen the papeeha before the rains have heard its calls getting more and more strident.The english,maddened by the mid-day sun,render its call as 'brain-fever,brain-fever'and have named it the 'brain-fever'bird.The more optimistic maharashtrians consture the same call as paos ala,paos ala-"the rains are coming".

The pool attaract a variety of birds.Crows are ubiquitous.They come for left-overs of potato chips or sandwiches before bearers take away their plates.Trays of water for bathere to wash their feet in,before they enter the pool,are treated as bird-baths to cleanse feathers and slake thirst.More intresting are green bee-eaters which prefer to flit about the neem tree and,being the same colour,are hardly noticeable.When thirsty they fly down,hover over the pool till they spot an area free of bathers,then dive down,fill their beaks and happily fly back to the neem tree.Their green and russet hues as they skim across the pool surface make a very pleasant combinationof colours.

For me the chief importance of june is the arrival of the monsoon bird.It is natures messenger,appropriately named the megha papeeha or 'the song-bird od the clouds'.I record its advent in my diary as soon as i hear its distinct wailing cry.This has varied from the 1st to the 15th of june,almost a month after they are sighted on the malabar coast.The clamator jacobinus comes from the shores of east africa in one continuous flight over the indian ocean heloed by strong monsoon winds.After it reaches india some time in may,its flight inland is lesiureky but well ahead of the monsoon.I have seen pairs flying around in pre-monsoon showers in june and occasionally spotted one perched on a tree.By july when the monsoon breaks in delhi,flocks can be seen in all the parks and gardens.Being a parasite of the cuckoo family,the monsoon bird does not bother to make its own nest,incubate its eggs or take care of its young.The koel hoodwinks the crow and the monsoon bird does the same to babbler.While babblers are busy looking after the step eggs and chicks,monsoon birds enjoy the rainy season flying around and calling to each other.No sooner have their offspring been reared by their foolish foster-parents than they join their own fraternity and fly overland back to their homes in africa.

NATURE ON MAY

May is the month of the laburnum.Although gulmohars continue to blaze their fierce scarlets,oranges and yellows,you can see they are losing some of their fire and passing natures baton,as it were,to the laburnums.The laburnum or amaltas has become a great favourite of delhiwalas as the gulmohar for the simple reason that both are quick growing and colourful.Of the two,the laburnum makes the more spectacular entry.It first sheds its leaves;by the second fprtnight of april only the long,brown-black tubular fruit can be seen hanging from its bare branches.Then suddenly blossoms appear in clusters like bunches of golden grapes.The beauty of the indian laburnum defies description,NO poet or writer has ventures to put it to paper.Only painters have been able to do it justice.Alas! its glory has a very short lease-less than a fortnight-after which its leaves take over.The seed of the laburnum when crushed make s a powerful purgative and its bark,which is aromatic like cinnamon,is alsoused for tanning.

May is also the month of dust stroms,cloudbursts and hail stroms.They come with little warning.There is of course a preliminary lull;but after days of windless calm you hardly notice it.Only pariah kites wheeling in the grey sky portend that something is on the way.Then suddenly it sweeps across with gale fury,blowing dust into your eyes and nostrils.It si usaually followed by a coloudburst.The gale and rain take their toll of trees.I have seen ancient banyans which had stood for years like gigantic sentimentle on either side of parliament streer,torn up from their roots and ignominiously flung across the tarmac road.One may afternoon a weather-beaten neem on kasturba gandhi marg,under whose shade half-a-dozen cars sheltered from the blazing sun,came crashing down and broke a fiat car into two.

If you listen attentively to the koels' calls, you will notice a clear pattern.It is amongst the earlier callers.As soon as the eastern sky turns grey,male koels lay claim to their airspace by a series of staccato urook,urook,urook,repeated over half a dozen times.In human language this could be interpreted as a warning to other males;'keep off and that means you!'The rest of the ay the calls is a monotunous koo-oo,koo-oo.While courting,it is the female pursued by the suitor who emits sharp cries of kik,kik! as she courses through the foliage.One really sees koels in the act of mating.Once the female is ready to lay her eggs,her paramour takes the lead in luring crows away fromtheir nests.The female koel then quickley deposits her eggs amongst the clutch of crows'eggs and signals to her partner that her mission has been successful by triumphant cries,kuil,kuil,kuil!

I genereally see more of nature at dawn on my way to the club,in the hour i play tennis and on my way back home,than i do during the rest of the day which i spend closeted in my study.I did not realise for years,being too absorbed in the game,that the source of the fragrance that prevaded the courts was the siris.By the middle of may its pale yellow powder-puff blossoms fall and mingle with the dust to look like bedraggled fluffs of wool.It was the sme with the gulmohar under which chairs are laid out for people awaiting their turn to play.I had taken its presence for granted and rarely did my gaze rest on it till one summer the elements compelled me to open my eyes and take notice of its flamboyant beauty.

NATURE ON APRIL

I must have muddled my calender of flowering trees in believing that the flame tree and the coral come into flower at the same time as the semul.They do not the semul comes first.The coral and flame blossom almost a month later.By baisakhi silk semuls have almost entirely shed their blossoms while the flame and the coral are in their best finery.By then bauhinia beans are ready for plucking.Trees that flower at the same time as flames and corals are jacarands widely planted in new delhi.You have to see them in a cluster to catch the lapis-lazuli blue of their tiny bell-shaped flowers.There are a few in the roundabout facing parliament house on sansad marg,avenues of them along the safdarjung flyover,on siri fort road and in new residential areas.They can be seen at their best between the first and third weeks of the month.

Soon after baisakhi,the first crop of mangoes grows around delhi appear in the market.They are soldom very sweet or succulent.It takes the searing heat of summer to bring them to their full richness of taste and colour.More there are in the process of shedding old leaves and donning new once,coming to flower and being deflowered.What could have induced new delhis master-gardener,lancaster,to import sausage trees from east africa and planet them in delhi?Sausage trees can be seen along amrita shergill marg and many other avenues.It is a singularly ugly tree with exude a maladorous oil and bear solid sausage fruit for witch neither man nor bird nor beast have any use.Its flowers are said to open up at night and begin to close up by midmorning.Apparently fruit-bats relish their taste.Some rural folk make a paste out of its fruit and use it against skin eruptions.

In the last days of the month the first gulmohar blooms begin to peep out of their green casings.The gulmohar derives its latin name ponciana regia from M. de poinci, a governor of the French Antilles in the mid-seventeenth centuyr.The tree is a native of Madagascar.It has become the great favourite amongst flowering trees beacause of its flamboyant display of fiery red and orange.Cannaught place has a cluster of these trees and they are now grown extensively in most new residential colonies.

The summer heat and lamp rouse serpents from their hilbernation.Delhi has all the three spices of the must venomous snakes;cobras,vipers and kraits.It also has others which are quite harmless to humans but prey on mans worst enimies-rats and mice.One warm afternoon i went to see arpana caur,a young painter working in the artists colony at garhi.The studios are built along the walls of this ancient robber fortress.In between is an open space,now lush with grass and cannas.As i entered i saw a gang of urchins hurling stones,brandishing sticks and yelling as they ran towards a snake basking on the lawn.Before i could stop them they had beaten the poor reptile into a bloody mess.They cried triumphantely.It was a small orange-coloured snake with diamond-shaped black sports-a full-grown diadem.It was too late to tell the children that like many other snakes of delhi it was not only harmless but also a well-meaning reptile.

NATURE ON MARCH

March is an unpredictable month;one day can be as any in winter,the next as warm as any in spring.It may be as dry as a desert one morning and by sundown as wet as a monsoon night.Fresh falls of snow in the mountains o kashmir or himanchal bring chilly winds to the capital.Strong winds push clouds up to freezing heights,convert raindrops into ice,toss icelets up over and over again till they are too heavy to bear and let them descend on the earth as hail.Take a close look at a hailstone and you will notice that it is of a milky white colour and consists of frozen layres of water like skins on an onion.I used to wondr why hailstorms did not occur in winter months when it is cold but in spring when it is warm.Now i know it takes strong winds to make hail.

Human are not the only once to be fooled by the weather.Insects,said to be endowed with an extra sense of forecasting the weather,suffer heavy losses.Mosquitoes,flies and months which come out of hiding to pester humans suddenly find the weather turn inclement and are frozen to death.In my diary i record the first time i hear cricets chrip.This is usually in the second week of march probably somewhat earlier in my apartment than in other homes as i have a log fire burning every winter night.The vagaries of the weather make holi, the festival of colours,a chency affair.It usually falls some time between the latter part of february and the end of march.Some years ony the young are out with their long tube syringes,bouckets of coloured water and red powdr to figt mock battles yelling,'holi hai!holi hai!Other years it is warm enough for the middle-aged and the old to risk beign dowsed.

In march both birth and eath are much in evidence.On the one hand you can see the grape vine and madhumalti-quis,qualis,indica,a name given to it by a dutch botanist because of its eccentric manner of growth-add new leaves every day;on the other there are neems,mahuas,jamuns,peepals and banyans shedding their foliage.For the next weel or two gardners will be busy sweeping dead leaves into mounds and making funeral pyres of them.While the pyres still smoulder,those very trees will come into new leaf.Of the dying and the reborn,peepals and banyans have the most delicate of new leaves;pale pink,silky-soft and beautyfully shaped.If you want an offering from nature as your book mark,you cannot do better then press their leaves in your album.The peepal is bit of a sponger.It will begin to spourt out of cervices in walls,even out of boles of trees where there is a little mud.There is a speldid example of a peepal almost strangling its host tree in the lodi gardens west of the bara gumbad mosque.The peepal is a speldid example of an epiphyte.

In the last week of the month,spring vegetables and fruit flood the market.Cucumbers and kakree are on lunch menus.Watermelons,both cantaloups or musk melons are available.In recent years their quality has improved.In younger days you had to be able to tell the sweet melons from the tasteless and omly bought kharboozas said to have come from tonk or saharanpur.Today you have to be unlucky to bring home a flat tasting melons;most of them are sweet and succlent.Closely following on the heels of these'earthy'fruits come loquats and mulberries,both the white and purple variety.Mangoes from the south and the much fanciedd alfanoso from the konkan coast can be had for a price in fruit shops catering to the rich.But for locally grown varieties of this king of fruits you have to wait a few more weeks.

NATURE ON FEBRUARY

Whichever way i turn i see signs of regeneration.The harbinger of spring is the semul or the silk cotton trees,known in latin by the bombastic sounding title bombax malabaricum.The name is doubly deceptive;bombax has nothing to do with bombay,as you might be deluded into believing,but stands for silk-warm,thought i have never found any on it.Furtheremore,though malabar claims to be its state of nativity,it grows extensively all over the country.There are hundreds of semuls to be seen in delhi, both the scarlet and orange varieties.Visitors to the capital driving from the airport to ashok hotel can see them on either side of the avenue that runs between nehru park and the diplomatic enclave.They are in full flower in the first week of february.

February has much to offer to the nature lover.The first pink blossom on a leafless peach tree is a sight to behold,'fair as a star when only once is shining in the sky,'As te day begin to get warmer,birds became more active.Green barbets go on their wavy flight from one dark-foliaged tree to another,wind themselves up;kurr,kurr,krr,and then let themselves go;kutrook,kutrook,kutrook.Their indian name is sensibly onomatopoeic;kutrook.The green barbet is a shy bird,barley visible among dense-leaved trees because of its olive green plumage.Its call betrays its presence.No sooner does it became aware of anyone gazing at it than it falls silent and after a suspicious glance it is off on its undulating,heavy flight to another tree.I am impressed by bird-photograpers who manage to get it entering its nest-hole in a tree or with its aeak full of wild berries.Green barbets are my morning companions.Race course road,now barricaded,has putranjiva trees on both sides.In february they are loaded with berries and are therefore much frequented by barbets.

By the third week of the month,the peach loses its filwers and comes into leaf.Semuls begins to shed their large,waxen blossoms which lie round the bole in a messy woven carpet of red and yellow.Crows delight in viciousley pecking at those still on trees,particularly those that are partly open,as if cawing' open up,admn you!'

Big birds are much in evidence on big trees.One morning in the gymkhana club i saw a pair of hornbills fly to a semul tree where a couple of pariah kites were mating and screaming in ecstasy and agony.They watched the going-on with also scandalized by the kites shamless behaviour.They flew around the tree loudly enquiring'did ye do it?'i wanted to shout back,'i did not ,but take a look at those kites!'Grey hornbills are a common sight in delhi.They are as ugly and as untrusting of humans as vultures,without the vultures ability to soar majestically among the clouds.They go flapping their wings in undulating flight,screeching like kites.Theiar nests are malodorous because they are no more than holes in trees lined by the hen with her own excreta.I go to see a few wood peckers everymorning.Usually they are scaly-belled green woodpeckers hoping around the bole of a siris tree behind the tennis court.They rarely call when they are on a tree.I have never seen one on the ground.Occasionally i catch a glimpse of golden-blacked woodpeckers.They proclaim their arrival by shrill,ear-piercing cries.When the sunlight falls on their backs,they glisten like molten gold.The goldenbacked wood-pecker is a spectacularly beautiful bird.

One afternoon i saw a sight which continues to inrigue me.I had often seen sparrows gather in hundreds pefore roosting time and fly about together without any ostensible purpose.This afternoon i saw them on threeadjoiningkeekar trees.They looked like a swarm of bees buzzing about their hives;they hopped restleslly from one branch to another chirping incessantly.I got within arms reach of them but they were so absorbed in their own activity that they ignored my presence.It sounded like a very disputatious community meeting.After some minutes of watching them at close quarters i noticed that almost all of them were males.I detected about half a dozen hens in the total assemblage which must have numbered well over a thousand.Iconsulted my birds looks but found no explanation.

NATURE ON JANUARY

For some people the year begins at the hour of midnight.They bid farewell to the old and usher in the new with revelry and song,bursting balloons and swilling champagne.For others it begins when the rim of the sun appears on the eastern horizon.For me its starts some time between the two,when i get up to place a platter of milk for a dozon stray cats waiting impatiently outside my door beside the morning paper which is deliverd to me at 4:30 am i do not feel the day has really and truly begun till i have read the paper,heard the BBC news and drunk a mugful of warm ginseng tea.Then i pull back the curtains of my window,switch off my table lamp and watch the black of the night turn to the grey of the dow.I hear spotted owlets screech in the mulberry tree.I catch glimpses of small bats flitting by.And the down chorus begins with the raucous cawing of crows followed by the shrill chittering of sparrows and the cry of kites.Sometimes when it is still dark i step out onto the lown behind my apartment to gaze at the moon or the brightly shining morning star.I return to my study and switch on the radio to listen to the relay of the morning service from the golden temple.When it comes to Guru Nanaks lines on the semul to emphasize that the size of a tree has no bearing om what it yields,i know the morning service is half over and it is time for me to wake up my wife who likes to lake her morning walk in the lodi gardens at down.I get into my shorts to leave for my morning game of tennis.I have to first wipe the dew off the window panes of my car because often the humidity is above 95 per cent.It is still dark.I switch on my headlights scattering clusters of crows pecking at mangled remains of rats,cats and dogs run over by speeding traffic the night before.
My early morning drive to the gymkhana club and the hour and a half i spend there provide feast dor the eyes and ears.The club grounds are full of all trees.Since the side dividing the gymkhana from the residence of the prime minister has for security resons been closed to traffic,there has been a noticeable increase in the number of birds in the area.My morning game of tennis is played to the accompaniment provided by magpie robins ,golden orioles,barbets,koel,peafowl and papeehas.The bird orchestra varies with the season.Often when i took up to take a lob i miss it because grey hornbills,lapwings or moonsoon birds distract me.

If u are looking for colour in january, go out into the countryside.The mustrad is in bloom,spread out like a sea of canary-gold.Its bitter-sweet odour attracts honey bees.Beside mustrad, there are lentils,mainly arhar,sugarcane with its pampas plumes of pale russet, and young wheat.Skylarks rise from the green fields,suspending themselves in the air and pouring down song till they run out of breath;then plummet like stones and disappear in the verdure.By contrast,delhis parks and gardens are largely flowerless till the latter part of the month expect for marigolds,poinsettias,chrysanthemums and bougainvillaes.

While winters cold freezes the ardour of bird and beast alike,the larger variety of some species like vultures and kites are roused by it.By mid-january pairs of kites and vultures can be seen mating on branches of leafless semul trees and can be heard emitting excruciating screams of pain and pleasure.Big trees like the semul and the maharukh are preferred by these birds both for copulation and nest-building.Smaller birds like crows,pigeons and sparrows begin their search for mates.Cock sparrows squabble among themselves while their hens barely take notice of them.

NATURE WATCH

Many years ago when I was a young man, I happened to spend a summer with my friend's the wints,in oxford.Guy wint was on the staff of the observer and was away in london most of the day. His wife, freda, had converted to Buddhism and was also out most of the time meeting fellow Buddhists.There son, Ben, was at a boarding school.For company,I had the wint's three-years-old daughter, Allegra.In the mornings i worked in my room.When allegra returned from her nursery school, I gave her a sandwich and a glass of milk before we went out for a walk. Since she knew the neighbourhood, she led the way along paths running through words of oak, beech and rhododendron to the university cricket grounds. I would watch the game for a while-the Nawab of Pataudi often played there-buy her an ice-cream and then follow her back homewards.

Allegra or Leggie as we called her, was a great chatterbox as well as an avid collector of wild flowers.Our return jorney always took much longer as i had to pick whatever flower she wanted.She would point in some direction and order; I want those snow-drops behind that bush.'Or shout,'Goody!I want them blue bells! I want lost of them for Mummy!'Then there were periwinkles and lilies-of-the-vally,and many others,By the time we had our hands full of flowers,Leggie was too tired to leg it home.I had to go down on my knees for her to climb up on my shoulders.She had her legs round my neck and her chin resting on my head.A game she enjoyed was to stick flowers in my turban and beard.By the time we got home,Ilooked like a wild man of the woods.It was from little Allegra wint that i learnt the names of many English wild flowers.On weekends when the wint family was at home we spent most of the day sunning ourselves in the garden.Since the wint had a few cherry and apple trees, there were lots of birds in there garden.The down chorus was opened by thrushes and blackbids.They sang through the day till late in to the twilight.Both birds sounded exactly alike to me.Freda would quote Robert Browning to explaine the difference; Thats the wise thrush;he sings each song twice over,Lets you should think he neve could recapture the first fine careless rapture.

The wise thrushes of oxford had not read Browning and rarely repeated their notes.Or peachaps the blackbirds deliberately went over theirs again to confuse people like me.Then there were chaffinches,buntings,white throats and many other verieties of birds whose songs becme familiar to me.That summer,I heard nightingales on the Italian lakes and in the forest of Fountainebleau.Back home in delhi i felt as if i was on alien territory as far as the fauna and the flora were concerned.Before i had gone abroad,i had taken no intrest in nature.When i returned i felt acutely conscious of this lacuna in my information as i could not identify more than a couple of dozen birds or trees.Getting to know about them was tedious but immensely rewarding.I acquired books on trees,birds and insects and spent my spare time identifying those i did not know.I sought the company of bird-watchers and horticulturists.Gradually my fund of information increased and i dared to give talks on Delhi's natural phenomena on all India Radio and Doordarshan.

For the last many years i have maintained a record of the natural phenomena i encounter every day.However,my nature-watching is done in a very restricted landscape,most of it in my private back garden.It is a small rectangular plot of green enclosed on two adjacent sides by a barbed wire fence covred over by bougainvillaea creepers of different hues.The other two sides are formed by my neighbours and my own apartments.He has fenced himself od by a wall of hibiscus;I have four ten-years-old avocado trees which between them yield no more than a dozen pears every monsoon season;and a tall eucalyptus smothered by a purple bougainvillaea.There is a small patch of grass withy some limes,oranges,grapefruits and a pomegranate.I do not grow many flowers; a bush of gardenia, a couple of jasmines and a queen of the night.Since my wife has strictly utilitarian views on gardening, most of what we have is reseverd for growing vegetables.At the further end of this little garden,i have a placed a bird-bath which is shared by sparrow,crows,mynahs,pigeons,babblers and dozen stray cats which have made my home theries.Facing my appartment on the front side is a squarish lawn shared by other recidents of sujan singh park.It has serveral large trees of the ficus family, a young choryzzia and an old mulberry.Ihave a view of this lawn from my setting-room windows framed by a madhumalti creeper and a hedge of hibiscus.What perhaps accounts for the profusion o bird life in our locality are several nurseries in the vicinity,the foliage of many old papari trees and bushes of cannabis sativa which grow wild.I have not kept a count of the variety of birds that frequent my garden but there is never a time when there are none.Also, there are lots of butter-flies,beetles,wasps,ants,bees and bugs of different kinds.

There was a time when i spent sunday mornings in winter in the countryside armed with a pair of binoculars and Salim alis or whistlers books on indian birds.My fovourite haunts were the banks of the Jamuna behind Tilpat village;Surajkund,the dam which supplies water to its pool;and the ruins of Tughlaqabad fort with its troops of rhesus monkeys.I still manage to viit these places at least once a year to renew acquaintance with water fowl,skylarks,weaver birds and a variety of wild plants like akk,delha,vasicka,mesquite,mexican poppy and lantana which grow in profusion all round delhi.