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Wildbuzz: Under the eagle’s jackboot
It was as if a ‘ghamandi’ (proud) rajah had placed his boot on a tiger trophy to strike a pose for a palace wall portrait.
A gang of petty thieves runs away with a diamond. They are intercepted by a band of dacoits who snatch the diamond from the lesser thieves. A Dirty Harry cop takes on the dacoits and seizes the booty for himself. So went a mirror incident, staged in Nature’s arena and highlighting the power of a majestic Tawny eagle to pirate, ie forcibly grab or steal, the prey taken down by other hunters. It ended with the eagle placing its powerful leg and talons on the booty, a Neelgai calf. The eagle bore such an imperious, triumphal, ‘don’t mess with me, this is my possession’ look in the eyes that it was as if the proverbial jackboot had without remorse stamped out resistance. Or, as if a ‘ghamandi’ (proud) rajah had placed his boot on a tiger trophy to strike a pose for a palace wall portrait.
Sandipan Ghosh, a Kolkata-based assistant professor of geography, is also a passionate wildlife photographer. He was reveling in his passion outside the famous carcass dumping ground in Bikaner (Rajasthan) where migratory/resident raptors alight to feed. “There were abandoned mines and I chanced upon stray dogs hounding a Neelgai calf the size of a Black buck female. The calf stumbled into a mine and broke a leg. The dogs pulled the wounded calf out but before they could start savaging it alive, four migratory griffon vultures landed and chased away the dog pack. The vultures were just about settling over the twitching calf when a Tawny eagle swooped hard on the vultures and chased them away. The lone conqueror proceeded to tear open the eyes and neck of the still-alive calf with its ruthless beak while pinning the prey down with its mighty talons. The eagle ate parts of the calf and soon crows descended to scavenge the remains. I was left spellbound by the sequence of Nature’s thriller,” Ghosh told this writer.
The rolling stones
A ramble up the ‘choes’ or dry rivulets of the Shivaliks affords views of ‘flower beds cast in stones of many-splendoured hues and shapes’. Some are smooth and lustrous as if nature had leveraged its powers of attrition to act as an accomplished gem cutter and polisher. Others are holed through to assume forms that appear strange, curious and yet vaguely familiar to the human creative vision. For example, two holes set closely together in a rock that I chanced upon in a Siswan dam rivulet evoked an analogy to a human skull, though overall it appeared as an esoteric Ganesha statue!
The effects of rain splash and water in spate are prime reasons for holes. “The rocks are carbonate rich and the white patches, veins and fragments are of carbonates which get dissolved in water on prolonged action of weathering. Sometimes, big fragments which are enclosed in the rock having a layer of carbonates, get loosened on removal of carbonate layer and come out leaving a hole behind,” Prof. RS Chaudhri, former Chairman and Director of Geology (PU), told this writer.
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