On Nature’s Trail

Living in modern concrete jungles, we tend to lose touch with nature. Forgetting that every living being is connected in nature’s web of life, that every little act that despoils the earth brings us closer to the brink of destruction. We need to re-establish our links with nature, to understand the importance of the environment and our role in protecting it. What better place to start on this journey of discovery, says Charmaine Sequeira, than on nature’s trail?  

Organised by the Bombay Natural History Society, the nature  trail through Sanjay Gandhi National Park (better known as Borivali National Park) was my first real close-up experience of nature’s ingenuity and engineering marvels - evident in every little life form that we encountered. 

Like the termite hill wherein the temperature is always maintained at a constant  - the termites rub their bodies together when it is cold to heat the inside, and stay comatose when it’s hot, to reduce the heat.  The caterpillar being eaten alive by parasites – they eat the fat and external body parts while  keeping off the heart, brain and other vital organs.  That way they keep their  victim alive, albeit in a coma, to let them feed on it.  Gruesome,  yes, but all  part of nature’s survival tactics.  Looking closer, it wasn’t  a leaf, but  an emerald green grasshopper – which when picked up immediately spewed a foul smelling liquid onto our  guide’s palm  - a defence mechanism to make its predator let go.

Glancing up,  there was a paper making factory –  a pagoda ant home on a tree.  Among the first “paper manufacturers”, these ants peel off the bark and construct a huge, black, papery home out of it.  Then, for hard-to-understand reasons of their own, they allow a certain species of woodpecker to lay its eggs in the home; they keep the eggs warm, let them hatch, do not attack the chicks  - which  then grow up and eat the ants!  The height of ingratitude  indeed!  Should anything else pass beneath the branch, the ants sense the heat from a possible predator, drop on to it and cover it with bites. 

And to keep them  and their food hoard perfectly  dry during the monsoons, the harvest ants construct a waterproof dwelling for themselves  –  with an  almost out of sight, deceptively small opening and  a water drainage system that is an engineer’s envy, it accommodates several  kilos of food grain stash!  Saving for a rainy day indeed!   

Observing nature at close quarters, it was remarkable how much I  learned about the “natural world” during that brief brush with nature, in  just a couple of hours and  1-1/2 kms on nature’s trail.

Visit www.bnhs.org and join their very affordably priced nature walks, nature camps and excursions to sanctuaries. If you have been a part of any such excursion, do write in your experience as a ‘Comment’ to this post and share your memorable moments with our readers.