WESTERN WETLANDS, WINTER WINGS

January 2023

I find myself there every other day, drawn inexorably to these watery lands that are host to the countless creatures that swim, fly, flit, dive, wade, walk.

This is the universe, in one spot, of the avian, amphibian and piscine. Occasionally, the half-feral half-domesticated feline.

They are either resting or restless, either prey or predator. They scout for mates, squabble over territories, preen their wings and claws.

Crouching there in the grass or mud, playing as dead as I can, attempting to leave no trace, hoping that nothing bites me in the butt, I feel at once privileged and pained: this biodiversity is breathtaking; what we are doing to it, heartbreaking.

These pictures were taken over the past few weeks in the tidal marshes, mangroves,

swamps and mudflats – generically, the ‘wetlands’ – scattered about the northern

parts of the Western Ghats.

The Cast

On this page you will find (not in the order of appearance):

1. Common sandpiper

2. Asian openbill

3. Oriental darter

4. Eastern great egret

5. Little egret

6. Purple heron

7. Little cormorant

8. Woolly-necked stork

9. Glossy ibis

10. Green bee-eater

11. Lesser whistling duck

12. Common kingfisher

13. White breasted kingfisher

14. Yellow-billed kite

15. Red-wattled lapwing

16. Common redshank

17. Common greenshank

18. Purple sunbird

19. Black-winged stilt

20. Red-clawed crab

21. Fiddler crab

22. Feral cat

23. Brahminy kite

24. Pond heron

25. Siberian stonechat

26. Kentish plover

27. Pacific golden plover

28. Peacock

29. Water buffalo

If you can’t, there's only one possible reason: I have misidentified someone.

Ramsar & Religion

Here are a few things I have learned recently about these invaluable biomes:

~ Wetlands provide fish and rice, help in tempering floods, mitigate the pace of climate change.

~ India has the most, 75, Ramsar sites in Asia, more than China.

~ The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat is an international treaty, signed in Ramsar in Iran in 1971, for the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands.

~ Wetlands are disappearing three times faster than forests, says the Global Wetland Outlook by the Ramsar Convention

~ I have yet to see a wetland – and I have been to dozens in the past months – which is not strewn with wrappers and bottles. Plastic is the new weed, and more toxic. Even the Salim Ali Bird sanctuary on Chorão is not spared.

~ And then that one big disaster – a road slicing through a wetland, a road that brings truckloads of tourists, many of whom just need another exotic and momentary backdrop to their selfies.

~ The Ramsar Convention is that one big hope, and so is religion.

~ If humanity once again worshipped Nature, believed that if you do bad things to it, it will do bad things to you (this is fact, not faith), the future might not have to be foretold in sombre tones.

~ There’s no new year in Nature, only a turn of season, a continuum of water and wind, sun and soil. Here’s hoping, for all our sakes, that we let Nature bestow upon us lovelier seasons ahead.

~*~