A thin ribbon of wilderness

 

There is a monitor lizard in the neighborhood. There are little clumps of trees, grass and bushy plants to allow the reptiles maintain a foothold in the rapidly urbanizing landscape. The monitor lizard hatchlings resemble ghavera, vishphoda, a poisonous reptile in the lizard family, so people run to kill them. Card-playing idlers are at the forefront of this assault. It gives them a break from the mind-sapping focus in the card game.

Sometimes, a group of four or five ducks goes sullenly over the village. They already look like an extinct species because there aren’t any waterbodies to sustain their winter sojourn here in the plains. During good old days, the village pond rippled with their fluttering feathers and boisterous quacks. There was even a group of geese in the village pond. They appeared very peaceful and confident but at a spur of some tricky moment, they let loose a round of bassy quacking and seemed very angry. The dogs had their scary tales to share how angry these Donald ducks could become. The sturdy big ducks taught the dogs many lessons in good behavior. By the way, I remember clearly, they slept on one leg and turned their neck backwards to put it on the back for a soft feathery pillow.

The surrounding countryside is under intense agriculture, leaving hardly anything for the migratory winter birds from the Himalayas. To keep the hopes alive for the winged visitors, three white-necked storks still visit the countryside around the village. They have been visiting for the last many years, spending their time with hesitant little flights, measuring the vanishing wilderness with their long strides. They are always together. All three of them cannot be females because they would have gossiped to animosity by this time. They cannot be males also because they would have fought over females and fallen apart. It’s either a female with two males (polyandrous stork system) or a male with two females (polygamy, which seems more likely given the scourge of male chauvinism across species).