THE DRAGONFLY EFFECT

June 2023

There are two creatures one must learn to dodge out there in the wilderness: female mosquito and male human.

The first creature you can’t blame: they are hungry and you are food.

The second creature, now available everywhere in great quantities, is certainly unemployed and possibly unemployable.

Just when you have finished adjusting your camera and tripod in long and slow silence and finally gotten friendly with an insect, young men can pop up out of nowhere and ask loudly, Kucch mila kya bhaiyya? Even more galling are the ones that ask, Kucch mila kya uncle?

I feel highly privileged this evening: no purposeful mosquitoes, no random men. I am out seeking dragonflies at a neighbourhood lake.

This lake is popular with birdwatchers and watchers of birdwatchers, one of whom had once asked me what I was gazing at. When I had told him that it was a Blue-faced malkoha, he had said, with a slanting of head, pursing of lips and furrowing of brows that conveys gravitas, ‘So you are an oncologist’.

Malapropists tend to take themselves seriously.

My associate and I are down the embankment, at the edge of water, ankle-deep in hyacinths. We spot a Crimson marsh glider. Highly territorial, the dragonfly alternates between circling my knees and chasing off a Dancing dropwing.

This is dragonfly season and they come in all sorts of colours. These delicate-looking filigree-winged creatures are skilled flyers that can catch prey on the wing.

India hosts almost 500 of the more than 6000 known species in the order Odonata.

The larva, or nymph, called naiad, live in water for months, sometimes two years, as ravenous aquatic predators before they metamorphose into sophisticated flying phenomena. They love mosquito larvae, which makes them so much dearer.

One is not sure how dentists and orthodontists will take this but they might have the same etymological origins as these insects. Apparently Odonate derives from the Greek for tooth. Dragons and damsels do not actually have teeth but have powerful jaw bones that can crush mosquitoes and gnats.

I am busy getting close to the glider when a young man sprints down the embankment, plods up to us, and whispers: ‘Be careful, there’s a crocodile nesting about 15 feet away’.

My associate and I squint, look around, and shrug. This lake is in the middle of human habitation. Sadly, there’s even a railway station on one side, with trains hooting and ‘platform number this’ and ‘platform number that’ blaring every few minutes.

Crocodiles here in this urban cacophony?

I resume the admiration of the dragonfly. I am now so close, I can see that it is making faces at me. We are immersed in silent mimetic conversation when I feel a poke in my arm.

My associate, looking mildly anxious, points to a spot a few strides away.

The mother croc.

FEELING VULNERABLE

In his book Deep Simplicity which had once inspired cultish devotion, John Gribbin wrote, “some systems … are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial ‘push’ you give them causes a big difference in where they end up …”

My extrapolation is erroneous and fanciful, like many poetic moments are, but my dragonfly-to-crocodile moment does bring to mind this theory of deterministic chaos, also called the butterfly effect. An innocuous little contemporary insect has been the catalyst that led me to a massive prehistoric reptile.

We don’t know what to do next, my associate and I, we just stand there motionless, emotionless.

And then we do.

He scans the dense hyacinths with binoculars and points out four other large crocodiles of an average length of 9 feet within about 25 feet of us.

We retreat quickly to the embankment.

The mugger, or marsh crocodile, is found in lakes and rivers throughout our country. The numbers have dwindled over the years to an IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) classification of Vulnerable. That would make this lake an invaluable reptilian sanctuary.

My associate is beginning to thaw, showing signs of nervous excitement. He points to a particularly large crocodile which has its mouth open. Reptiles are ectothermic, or cold-blooded, animals. They cannot regulate their body temperature internally. They have to depend on external surfaces.

He then points to the mother crocodile we had seen before. Now she too has her mouth open, and we see a baby swimming next to her. The helpful whisperer who had warned us, we discover, is a forest guard there. He tells us that this mother had 16 hatchlings.

Female crocodiles dig a hole in the mud to lay eggs, and listen for their sound when they are ready. Hatchlings have an egg tooth to break the shell but they need help to burrow out. More than 90% – up to 99%, say some studies – perish in the first year itself. A few grow to be 35-40 years, their average lifespan.

Crocodiles proliferate in Indian mythology, including in the story of how Adi Shankaracharya was able to procure his mother’s blessings to become a monk. In fact, the word mugger is derived from Sanskrit. (The word crocodile comes from the Greek krokodilos, or ‘worm of the stones.’)

We decide to come down from the embankment and inch closer to the mother and baby. I have to crouch to look smaller and I wonder how I appear to the mugger. A bearded cat maybe?

She gets restless, and then aggressive. A Grey heron is trying to snatch the baby! The mother thrashes about but the bird only sidesteps. This prey-predator drama goes on for many minutes before the heron decides to fly off.

It’s now sundown, time for us to leave. As we walk back, we see that the heron has snagged a lizard and is fending off a Brahminy kite trying to steal its catch. We zoom in.

The lizard is a baby crocodile.

MUGGER MONSOON

We are there every evening all of next week. I have read up about muggers, trained myself to become a better crawler and croucher, practised adjusting my tripod noiselessly, and written my will.

We start seeing more and more muggers, up to 25 one evening. They are either afloat or ashore. It is raining crocs here this monsoon.

The forest guard tells us that they counted 37 last year. That is a whole lot for this moderately sized lake. He says a pair had swum in when they had opened the sluice gates and all these are likely their progeny.

A friend who adores reptiles – he has rescued pythons and monitor lizards – comes along one evening. Like me, he does not anymore reveal the location of such invaluable habitats. Unlike me, he decides to inspect a tall man-made mound by the water.

“We will get a better view from there.”

The forest guard had told me that muggers sometimes rest on that mound. We scan with binoculars, see nothing. I am still debating when my friend begins squelching towards the mound, looking down, navigating the hyacinths and the boggy ground.

I follow him a few paces behind, not taking my eyes off the mound.

When we are about 15 feet away, I see a tree on the mound quiver. I whisper to my friend to stop. Thankfully, he does, even as a full-frown mugger dashes down the mound and runs off into the water.

I tell my friend about a rare piece of wisdom someone had shared with me recently: ‘Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same thing. And that’s why life is hard.’

We trudge off, renewing our pledge to not disturb the animals, towards the other mound which is much lower. We tread slowly and keep scanning with our binoculars. I see some trees, a few egrets and cormorants, and a large boulder.

This time it’s my friend who follows more watchfully. When I am a few strides from the mound, he grabs my arm and points at the boulder. I don’t understand why he is holding me so firmly.

And then that boulder blinks.

It rises, expands into a 10-foot reptile, and then scurries off in a mist of dust. We stand there overcome by its size and agility, its dinosaurian scales. We feel immense respect and awe.

The next few evenings we are way more cautious, discerning of the slightest disturbance we might cause. We discuss courage, stupidity, and what it means to not feel fear.

Does this primeval colossus, which evolved millions of years before we Homo sapiens did, stir in us some primal curiosity we can’t comprehend?

Do we have some perverse desire to get mauled?

Setting such penetrating questions aside, we wonder what the muggers are like in the morning. We arrive at the lake the next day at 8 am. All of them are already in the water.

A Bronze-winged jacana struts at the edge. They are a rather atypical bird: females are bigger than the males, and are polyandrous. They gather a harem during the breeding season. It’s a male that incubates the eggs.

Near it is a Black-headed ibis and a Grey heron preening themselves in an elaborate leisurely morning ritual. A few minutes along the bushes, we see a Blue-faced Malkoha, which is a cuckoo with a prominent eye ring, a Golden oriole, an Ashy Prinia collecting material for its nest, and a juvenile Spotted eagle visiting its injured sibling which the forest department has kept in a cage.

I shall be travelling soon, and for an undetermined period. I walk up somewhat sentimentally to the embankment near where the momma mugger usually is. She too is in the water, swaying gently in the waves.

Clouds are teasing us again. Monsoon rains are delayed this year. I am told that when the water level rises in the lake, the crocodiles are known to climb out at night close to where the human settlements are.

I wish her well, this mother mugger who was my maiden experience of crocodiles in the wild: no fence, no warning signs, no forest ranger to keep us away.

Just us, and a precious piece of prehistory.

~*~