Fighting Sparrows and Broken Eggs

 

The hate in humans is being spilled over into the natural scheme of things. In non-human species, the natural instincts are adapting to the rulebook of the super-species. 

Cooling in the elixir of postmodernist glow?  There are deft strokes, steely lines and spools of songs about our achievements. However, there are pale beacons that beat the fog with their pallid but penetrating light.

The angelic, sacred balance defining the natural laws has been violated and warped. Something basically wrong has happened with nature during the present scandalous times.

Have you ever seen a sparrow couple fighting out with another, the latter having set up its nest, mated, laid eggs and waiting for hatching under the mother’s warm fur and father’s protective gaze? It does happen now. The force of human touch is too strong on nature. Everything is getting humanized. With due respect to the pardonable—beyond the realm of sin and piety—non-judgemental fight among innocently instinct-led lives in the animal and bird kingdoms, we can still brand it as the most gruesome attack on somebody’s home and hearth to fulfil the basest of a selfish motive.

They were furiously screeching and abusively chirping. Their beaks bit into the rivals’ fur mercilessly. Their little claws trying to gouge out the opponents’ eyes. Mind you, it had all human connotations. Their rumpled feathers and crumpled fur had all the elements of a bloody street fight among we humans. And what was it for? To grab the nest, of course.

Possibly the fact that the nest had the smell of human hand in making it had something to do with the things going nasty like among the supreme species of earth. It was a barn roof made of wooden rafters and stone slabs. The box made of plywood was attached to one of the rafters. It hung there with a broad look of TO LET for free at the uncemented, brick-laid floor below.

Earlier this transgressing couple hardly cared to look at the abandoned nest, vacant after the previous hatching, waiting for some laborious sparrow couple to sort out things for another cycle of home-making by the new entrants. Then a diligent couple arrived looking for a secure home. Finding the odour of long-left nestlings inimical to their pure, non-short-cutting instinct to procreate and preserve, they worked to bring it into order for a new homely start. Old bird-drops smitten sinews were thrown down piece by piece and new ones fixed for a brand new cosy interior. Then eggs were laid and the expectant moments for hatching started.

Now there was a fight at hand. Perhaps, it’s the modern day norm to destroy before getting on to the next step in the journey. The way they—the attacking couple, led by their hissing instinct which easily overpowered the much mellowed down parental defence—beat out the parents waiting for the fluid in their tiny eggs to form and shape into nestlings, made them condemnable as the rogue, brutish couple. Broken shells and scattered fluid on the ground for ant-feed provided testimony to the charge against them.

The winners knew that the mourning couple will take one more day to keep fussing around the site, so unashamedly they mated on a nearby tree, fully sure of their possession of the nest. The next day, they started flitting in and out of the grassy shelter, with spring in their flight and much mirth in their dives; making minor adjustments to the grabbed property to satisfy that primordial birdie instinct to make a new nest before drawing out procreative self’s best. Very cleverly, they made those minor adjustments; gave themselves a clean chit and life started again in the nest.

Why have even birds started taking short-cuts like humans, stepping over others’ toes in the selfish stampede, crushing others’ dreams to fulfil personal motives? Very intelligently the birds around the human world have also picked out a few paying lessons from our book of practicality.

Is love such an outlandish idea for the modern civilization?

Dead Vultures and Well-ground Meat

 

There were times when we had vultures in north India. Beyond their metaphorical abusive usage in languages, they flew very high. They roamed freely in the bluish depths of undisturbed skies. Floating majestically, their wings sprawled out in utter peace and calm, they looked like the inhabitants of a separate world. They were too far and safe. They were detached, but as an earthling, you cannot ignore earth however high you can fly.

Away from man’s reach—save some incidences when they crashed into man-made metallic birds—they floated free and landed only when there was something lying on ground with no more life, no more play in the hustle and bustle of things; something beyond the survival matrix of sweat and blood; something totally passive to the pulsating throngs of life. And they swooped down, the scavengers from the skies.

They descended matter-of-factly. Cutting air with their sun-parched wings, coming to the world of we humans, to play their part in the natural scheme of things allocated to them. Beyond the bloody, brutal and sordid pulls of their pointed, hooked bills into the dead innards, they appeared self-effacing, modest scavengers going with their duty to help clean up the system. They appeared even saintly with their sad, drooping eyes!

I remember a whole fat, lifeless cattle turn into a skeleton in some odd hours, leaving no scrape of flesh around any bone, and no foul, stinking odor later on. The dogs took onto the bones, lost in the mirage of pacifying hunger from the deepest depth of a well where there might not be any water.

Then Diclofenac, a cattle medicine, came. The more the vulture did their duty for the dead, the more death did its duty on them. The vultures lost their skies. They got sick and fell from the sovereignty of their skies: one more entry to the increasing list of extinct birds. A very casual occurrence though. The skies became clear. Only mankind’s steel birds have a right to fly that high.

We don’t have vultures now. Only airplanes can go so high. The ethereal blue is calm and steeped in history. Of course the dead cattle need to be disposed off. The farmers bury these in shallow sand-pits. The dogs pick up the trail, dig out and chew on the sandy rot. And a huge cumbersome cloud of foulest odor clumsily reaches human nostrils to remind them of the species that is extinct now. Not too many mind though.

The dogs, on their part, now go to the metalled road to meet their famous death, the much anointed dialogue, kutte ki maut, which is rarely natural. Death and its agents need not push themselves to grab their share on the road. It’s National Highway 334 B running through the densest rural and town settlements across central Haryana, starting from Western Uttar Pradesh, crossing Yamuna and going crosswise in Haryana from east to west. Till a year back it was merely a district road. But then they suddenly changed it into a national highway without adding to its dimensions. It’s just a two-lane road without any lane divider. The heaviest to the lightest vehicles ply bumper to bumper day in and day out. Accidents happen rampantly. The latter is no longer news even in the town supplements of the local dailies.

The truckers have grabbed its link to Rajasthan and southern Haryana, with even more greed than a hungry vulture of decades. There is no toll tax on this link. It saves them 1200 rupees. This much money matters man! Even the time it saves also matters. So human safely is lost in the smoke exhaust.

Overloaded trawlers ply gleefully. It’s a journey of overs: overload, overspeed and overgreed. Transport companies put up rewards for the fastest drivers. In the mad rush, rules, regulations, care and concern take a back seat. And people die in road accidents. Almost daily there is a fatality. In a neighboring village, two brothers, one 17 and the other 19, going to their fields to prepare for physical tests for army recruitment, were crushed to death early one morning. The tragedy isn’t the odd one out. There are many but they get buried in the tar under speeding, burning wheels.

The dogs too, knowing that there are no vultures, come under the heavy wheels to get crushed to a pulpy, well-ground meat. Even bones get ground easily; the vehicles are so heavy after all. Years back, when there were vultures, a dog hit by a vehicle, would be at least dragged to the roadside trench. Vehicles were sparse, wheels were smaller, speed was less and people had time to respect even a dog’s dead body and threw it into the roadside pit. Then the vultures would take up, efficiently, smoothly and surgically.

Now right after the first hit, you cannot tell whether it was a dog, a cat or pig. Wheels are endless. It gets crushed within minutes, first to a juicy broth, then to dry sponge, the blood absorbed by the burning tar under hot wheels. It’s dry before you realize. The eddies of smoky wind let loose by tyres then puff away the last grains. It’s quicker than even the biggest horde of vultures.

No man, possibly there is no need of vultures now. Metaphorically though vultures exist, thriving in fact, as we add to the haramzaadgi in us.

A Day in the Life of a Peacock

 

Since the days of caves, we grew up to take other animals as foes. Then thanks to our skulls full of contriving ideas, we outsmarted most of the species to take control of things. Further on, in the march of civilization, we turned indifferent to the plight of our fellow constituents in nature. And now we have accepted their fate to be extinct. But then we have to be prepared to face the extinction of lot many things we relate to as human beings.

Simple days and moments in the lives of animals are no longer the regular times. These are defined by we humans.

Pre-monsoons have been kinder this year. Just at the beginning of the rainy season, the air is humid and clouds display teasing games of surprise and showers in the sky. For the last one week there is lull period though.

It’s unbearably hot and humid. Mother is busy finishing the first-half chores of the day. The peacock lands in the courtyard with its riot of colors. It arrives with a small storm that airs the desultory weather. Unfortunately, there are no chapattis left from last night supper. This particular peacock likes chapattis more than the grains. She knows it from her experience. It hardly put its beak into the grainy offerings in the past. Chapattis, on the other hand, it relishes almost like humans. She feels sorry for it, “There are no chapattis son!” However, the feathered son follows her in the courtyard. She even tries to shoo it away so that it can reach some other door-step and beat its hunger at the earliest.

The multi-colored guest is panting in the heat and humidity. It cranes out its royal blue neck to search for the chapatti pieces. They aren’t to be found. It then follows mother to the innermost recesses of the house. It seems to have run out of its options in the wilderness. The pesticides in the surrounding farms killed the rodents, reptiles and insects in a greedy swipe. The food is gone. It’s famine for him and bumper crop for the farmers.

Hardly any option left for the poor national bird. Hunger is a terrible pusher. It changes one from what one generally is. The fear of hunger is worse than most of other fears. So the big bird, having run out of natural options, follows her. With panting beak, beating its natural instincts to be scared of the humans, it kowtows her to grab the moment of her generosity. Her heart melts, “No chapattis today! And you don’t eat grains, but still try these today.” She puts a bowl of multiple grains including wheat and pulses.

When you are really hungry, the choice and type of the food don’t matter. With quick beakfuls, even not caring to crane out its neck to ensure safety, the poor thing gulps down the grains. Mother looks sadly at it, “Poor thing isn’t cribbing about food.”

It just wants to beat hunger. Having eaten to its full, it takes some pecks in the clay water bowl left on the courtyard wall and swoops away, swooshing the air with glitter of multiple colors under the sun. It has ensured a day’s survival in a world where its next generation has almost no place. 

Guys, isn’t it sad that the world as we have known it is coming to an end? Isn’t it our duty to do the littlest we can do to help the dream last a bit longer? Plant a tree on the special occasions in your life. Try to use organic products. Cut down on disposable plastic by carrying your shopping bags and water bottles with you. There are more than seven billion people, and tiniest contribution by everyone will make a difference. It may breed a culture of care and consideration. Then who knows the future generations may still be lucky to see at least that much of nature as we have seen.

Harmless Hornets, Biteless Bees and Beggar Peacocks

 

In the balanced pattern of evolution, there were well-laid out course of energy channels. That’s how it went on till mankind was just one of the species. However, as the super-species he has toppled the equation. A super-species is helpless in pursuit of more and more goals. So we simply continue fighting. The fight with other animals and nature is almost over, now we have to fight among ourselves.

Now with his IQ he is trying to decimate EQs, the enemy within, the signs of weakness. But then little does he realize that this supposed weakness itself is the strongest fortification against the ultimate destruction. 

Elsewhere, I see most of the species subdued and beaten to behave appropriately. They appear to have drawn the mighty lesson. It’s no more living and evolution for them, just a depleting struggle to survive for some more decades, ultimately to be kept as souvenirs and specimen in museums and zoos, or at the most natural parks, if mankind’s greed allows that much space to be left out.

Large yellow paper wasps, one of the stinging hornets, defended their nests with a single-minded determination. Stinging winged chivalry! Attack! So much for their primal instinct! Well that was almost three decades back when we ran helter-skelter as the winged yellow striker, twitched its antenna, its dull black points of eyes staring menacingly before the strike. Children cried with pain. Next day a joker with a swollen face would provide free entertainment. So much so for the wild instinct! There were still remaining traces of wilderness in the countryside.

What is meant by being wild? It’s just to be natural. But then having turned the wilderness upside down, trading it with the civilized onslaught, we humans are restlessly marching ahead. There is a stampede and many species are getting trampled in the dust below. The wilderness is almost gone. Most of the species have lost their footing, as the terribly over-bloated and glutinous super-species, man and womankind, firmly hold the reins of the chariot of nature. Everything has changed. The wilderness vanishing, so is the mundane ‘wild’ streak in birds, animals and insects. It’s a tamed world in controlled, humanized environs.

Coming back to the yellow foe of our childhood, they held their positions, defended their share in nature, struck lips, cheek, nose and forehead to defend their fortifications. The punished swollen face of the linage of Homo-sapiens bearing a testimony to the fact that he is not the only claimant to the cakes of Mother Nature. Things have come upside down since then. As the human juggernaut moves on, mowing down the last traces of wilderness, species are losing their primal instincts, just to buy some more time before the inevitable extinction. It’s an acceptance, a sort of death time’s letting go of any signs of further struggle, a final surrender, a soulful resignation.

The yellow hornet doesn’t bite now. Somehow stealing out some niche in the not so impressive corner of the house, where they are not a blot on the household decorum, surviving there like some beggar on the pavement, they simply don’t bite. The sentinels don’t rush at your nose even when you raise a cobweb cleaner in the nest’s direction. The instinct of survival seems to have taught them a lesson that they cannot afford to mess with the bi-pedaled torch-bearer of the onslaught on nature.

I commit the error of still linking honeybees to the notorious chivalry of those comb-defenders we witnessed during childhood. They don’t bite anymore. Forget about flowers, they have to run greedily for the semi-arid shoots of acacia.

It’s scorching heat and honeybees buzz around the water bucket. It’s man’s offering. It’s no wild stream bordered with wild flowers where they can lay claim their share of nature and defend their fort. The bucket is man’s creation. So they don’t bite. They sense that it’s man’s beneficence and kindness that they are still surviving. I put my hand among a swarm of honeybees stuck up around the corners of the bucket. Nostalgia strikes. I still remember those bites and swollen limbs. Well that is history. They just fly away. In a struggle to grab the last survival sips in a world that has no place for them anymore, they have forgotten to strike. The confidence is gone. They don’t have any rights anymore.

That’s what happens when you just survive and not live. Only woman and mankind are living, or at least think they are doing, others are just surviving. They will definitely become extinct. Then it will the human’s time to struggle, merely survive and get extinct. (Before that of course humans will desperately try to artificially replace whatever nature, in combination with countless other species, has bestowed them with. The stage is getting set for the evolution of a new species—some unthinkable human-machine combination.)

The peacock, a riot of colors, is in double mind. With its cute eyes it stares at me. The age-old instincts in it are admonishing of a danger. It takes a step back. Where can it fly back to? It’s a migrant in the village. The countryside is saturated with pest control chemicals. So there is nothing for it to feed upon there. I understand its helplessness, so take some more steps forward with chapatti pieces in my hand. I know it’s hungry. It won’t fly away. The peacock has accepted its fate and so have all others, except humans, of course.

Last in its Lineage, the Grand Mogul, the Peacock

 

With one after another species becoming extinct, a direct offshoot of our inconsiderate non-loving self, we hit another nail in the coffin of our follies. In the man-manipulated evolutionary pace, things will go out of control in such a daunting way that little will we realize what is happening. Mechanization is its own goddess. It has already steeled up our nerves. It needs its own battle-worthy soldiers. And mind you, it decides its own course.

I for one, take copious sighs at the dying traces of the still left out naturalities around. It gives more warnings than it provides sips of aesthetics for the chamber of emotions in the brain. 

Rain-washed green has painted the countryside. Nature seems to have been besotted with only one color on its palette, bold green. Thankfully, we still know this color in natural surroundings. Future generations though may not be that lucky. It’s very soothing to the eyes, and more so to the spirits. Trees look like they will survive mankind’s onslaught against nature. Clouds unfurl their sails across the sky and moist wind creeps into any nook corner that may still be dry. Monsoon is going well after all.

The fields around my village are splashing with as much green paddy as possible. Raise your eyes in any direction and you will see a green sea. Monsoonal sun across the corners of flying lumps of clouds gives the best glimpses of nature's bounty. But the travelling shadows also try to cover up silent, invisible man-made tragedies.

Farmers have been cornered like never before. One day they are forced to dump tomatoes in roadside ditch, the fruits of their labor not getting more than INR 1/Kg. The other day the price may go as high as INR 80/Kg in metros. Driven by intensive agriculture, born of costly inputs and decreasing landholdings, farmers mindlessly dump poison in all forms of pesticides, weedicides and insecticides. So this lush green is a merciless stroke of brush on the canvas of nature, swiping away the natural world of many insects, worms, reptiles and rodents that make nature holistic and all-encompassing in its game of give and take across food chains. So guys, it’s just green paddy and poisoned soil below.

Peacocks survive on insects and reptiles in the fields. Nothing is left for them to feed upon, so food-less where would they go? A peacock's plumage swinging to gentle breeze in open surroundings of the countryside is a treat, and we were lucky to witness it countless times during our childhood. Now the last or second last generation of these destitute birds, who rarely get an insect in fields, has landed with an airy resentment in the village. An irony: the poison-giver is somehow better than the poison itself, at least in the short turn. In the foliage of neem and acacia trees, they just pew out their miseries. To the infants and younger lot, it gives a chance to get acquainted with the national bird's sound, and of course help them in learning the initials of human language.

My mom has an almost regular bird visitor, who perches upon the neem in our courtyard and pews out its begging song as if pleading, ‘Mai roti do!' While she dispenses her routine chores across the yard, it continues to draw her attention. Roti delayed, it is forced to come down and enter the inner reaches of the house just to make its presence felt through luxuriant plumage. Once roti pieces are thrown before it, it has to chuck up the offerings as fast as possible because crows line up in their accusing harsh tones, blaming it for being a transgressor who has infringed upon their rights. Crows are very clever. Some of them get behind its plumage and take a pick at the feathers to distract the big bird. One defensive look behind and a few pieces are stolen by the other crows waiting in the wings. I call it the 'beggar peacock', my mother does not like the title though.

If that is the fate of the national bird, it’s hard to imagine the condition of others. Looking at this marvel of nature, whom mom sometimes accuses of being ungrateful—when it comes without its plumage, all the feathers having been shed somewhere, and mom cursing it for being so mindless to waste them somewhere and not shed them in the courtyard—I just feel sad on account of the fact that maybe it is the last or at the most second last in its lineage.

In this holistically interlinked plan of nature, if things are so miserable for so many species, mankind shouldn’t feel too safe. When evil effects have chucked out forests and countless species of birds, animals, insects and reptiles, they will have only humans to spread their tentacles into. In fact, it already is happening. Just that we have the toys of modernity to get busy with, while the fire burns around. Isn’t it childish? Did we grow at all?

It might almost be on the verge of irreversible loss, but we still have our last weapon to stall the doomsday. With love, systematically nurtured through academics and policies, we can still afford to be hopeful.