Everything Green is Gold

Just how intricately nature balances itself struck me while I was shooting in the Sunderbans in 1986 for Bittu Sahgal’s Sanctuary Films. I had come back to Bombay (now Mumbai) with the cans of exposed 16mm film which needed to be handed over to Adlabs, while reviewing the rushes of what we had shot in the preceding week. While images of mud skippers and olive Ridley turtle hatchlings flickered on the screen, Bittu was going on about the drop in prawn populations in Chilka Lake in Orissa. I thought Bittu was slightly cracked in any case, so didn’t quite understand what the connection was, other than thinking he needed to brush up his geography… Chilka was in Orissa which was miles away from the Sunderbans in West Bengal. 

Back in Sunderbans the next day, I mentioned this strange obsession of prawns and Chilka to Pranabes Sanyal, the Field Director of the Sunderbans on whose launch we were chugging along the Matla River, which was not really a river but a huge tidal creek. Sanyal was lost in thought, then he told the launch to pull alongside a jetty, that had recently been constructed by cutting and lashing together Sundari trees (Heritiera fomes), which was a dominant mangrove species. Something had clicked in his brain, and he explained to me how many such jetties had been constructed and the sudden lack of debris of their leaves, was impacting prawn populations. 

Recently, a neighbour brought down a gigantic tree on his land near the main road. This created a subtle shift in the sightings of greater barbets (Psilopogon virens) who were far more conspicuous this year. With my 500mm manual focus lens I don’t have the option of snapping off shots, having to carefully stalk, frame and focus instead. As a result, had until this year failed miserably to get any decent shots of these shy birds who use the vegetation to stay invisible. 

I’m not a scientist, but I wish one could read the patterns around us. The number of bees are without doubt, way less than previous years, and there is also a sharp drop in the insect life. And though the foliage is back and the great barbets are there, they are strangely quiet, perhaps confused by the sound of a JCB that cuts, digs and then smashes rocks into stones, in the process sounding like a cross between a demented woodpecker and the barbet itself. Ah well… the sound of silence amidst a cacophony that we can no longer hear. Perhaps that is our destiny!

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