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Growing wild and natural

Photo : Nithila Baskaran

Celebrate wildlife: A garden lizard

We lived in a house with a little garden in the heart of Chennai. Often we were visited by a family of common mongoose. They would come in from the next compound where there was a government office. After the office closed, it was their area. The mother will be followed by three young ones. If our dog, Speedy, a daschund, chased them they would jump on to the wall and look at him from that safe height. This almost became a game for the mongoose and the dog. Sitting in the portico we watched this.

Mongoose

To see and experience wildlife you need not have to go to a jungle, travel a lot or allot time for it. It is there all around you. All you have to do is to take time, look around and observe. Wildlife means life forms that grow and live naturally, by themselves. It can be birds, butterflies, plants and trees.

Even inside our houses we can see other creatures that live with us as co-tenants. Geckos for example. They hide behind cupboards and come out in the evening to crawl along the wall hunting small insects. They are harmless and have lived with humans for thousands of years. In our country there are people who try to interpret the calls of the geckos as a bad or good sign. You might see a small spider in your bookshelf that jumps like a grasshopper, this is the Jumping Spider.

The trees near your homes attract birds. If there are flowers on the tree you will see sunbirds coming to feed on the nectar of the flowers. Woodpeckers will come to eat the worms under the bark of the tree. Koels often visit. Squirrels, are fun to watch. If there are plants around your house, you could spot garden lizards and butterflies. If you do not have a garden, just look at the sky in the evenings and you will see a number of birds returning home to roost…egrets, parrots, mynas and so on. Try and identify them.

Bat

In the night you could often hear the squeaking, single note call of the shrew or the musk rat, which is not a true rat but is called so because it looks like one. It lives in small holes in the ground and comes out at night to feed on insects and worms. If there is a neem or Ashoka tree you could see little bats coming to feed on the fruits. If there is banyan tree, watch out for fruit bats. Many varieties of bats find their way by the echo of the sound they emit as they fly. Bats are not birds. They are mammals; that is animals that give birth to young ones and feed them with milk. But bats have developed wings to fly.

If there is one living thing that is all around us but still often goes almost unnoticed, it is the ant. You can see it inside our homes, in the garden and in the school. They have a very well organised community life. Just as the dance of the bee, the behaviour of ants can also provide scientific insights. Chemicals play an important role in the lives of ants, and humans have benefited by studying this. Ants use certain chemicals to preserve their food from being spoilt by fungi. This element is now used in preparing medicines.

Growing up

I spent my childhood in a village by a river, a tributary of the Kaveri. When we were not in school, we spent much of our waking hours out in the open, either on trees or in the river. There were days when we joined the man who went about poking the earth at the water’s edge with a long pole to locate mud turtles. On one side of the village was a scrubland, where we roamed for hours on end. In addition to the different varieties of snakes, we would come across jackals and hares. The night sky was full of stars and the Milky Way could clearly be seen. This awareness of nature has been a source of joy all these years.

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