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.