Telling time by Calendar

When I was writing ‘telling time by flowers’, I remembered something. Even today I am not a traveller and that was the first time I was travelling to outside my state on my own. I had to change train at Mumbai and had nearly whole day in my hand there. I was to utilise that time visiting a relative’s place. So early in the morning, minutes after the Sunrise, I get down from train from where I had to exist on West. Not seeing any signboard, I walk to shoeshiner sitting on the platform and ask, which side is west? He looks at me, looks up in the direction where Sun was rising and points to opposite direction. yes, that was embarrassing but I still loved how instead of just pointing me to west, he chose to teach me to look to Sun to know direction. 

As I was looking at flowers indicating time, thought what if I didn't have watches and calendars available and was to create them myself? Question is already answered by many civilisations independently many times so its unlikely I can think from scratch, but I can look at those answers and try to choose my favourite. Simplest and most useful would be an assembled calendar rather than written and memorized one. Day starting at Sunrise, a larger unit of time based on lunar cycle that causes so many things to oscillates based on itself and a unit of time that covers one full cycle of repeating seasons. Seems fine except that its a system where different levels of time keeping are defined based on different things. Year-Sun, Month-Moon, Day-Sun. ok, join them with self adjusting, self correcting mechanism. stars come handy for this purpose. All good but what about the feeling that its MY calendar? Well, I can choose my year start to coincide with start of any month, preferably one that is kind to human life. Indeed when I look around, there are different lunisolar calendars starting at different month.

I haven’t managed to understand either solar or lunar calendars yet – not even sure if there is much to understand there. Solar looks like talking about a year, a period that is approximately 1/12 of a year and a period that is approximately 1/365 of a year – really wasted opportunities to make sense of both month and day (though, in our far from nature lifestyle, where active hours have lost its relation to daylight, I don’t have much to argue against fixed length day starting at any random minute. OR, probably is it more a reason to argue against it because switching back to real day definition can prove a very useful tool to correct our disconnect from nature?). At some point, (when it didn't even used to occur to me that you can say east/west looking at Sun), I would have thought it was simpler and lunisolar a complex calendar of the two. Today, however I think that what gets defines naturally and is rule based is much more simple than something unvarying for sake of it and requires memory not logic/cycles in nature to describe. Despite being such a inefficient calendar, you do see this blog dated per one anyways. I think calendar we use tell us something about time we live in too.

Some shots around Gaillardia flowers

My first camera was a mobile camera and when I bought it, I was still long way from fully discovering that my happiness varies directly with my closeness to nature. I used that mobile camera as someone having no appreciation of either photography or nature uses but anyways among those initial pictures, flowers turned out one of the main subjects. My interest in flowers have gone through few iterations since then. To start with ANY flower anywhere was interesting - and mostly what I saw were city flowers -those decorative ones. with time, I started preferring those in more natural setting and later developed more appreciation of seasonal flowering of trees but didn't fully lose attraction to decorative, human managed flowers till recently.
Off late though with macro range introducing me to those beautiful weed flowers and thereby making more sensitive to natural flora around me overall, I also started asking - which flower is that? I haven't managed Identifying more than small numbers yet but it kind of signaled start of proper interest in flowers/plants. and then, managed, decorative plants suddenly started looking.. very artificial, unnatural, something that I should ignore completely.

Then my view changed again very recently. credit goes to my time spent around Gaillardia flowers few weeks back. I will come back to reasoning a bit later but let me first share few shots of and in/around the flowers. 

Gaillardia

Common Silverline

Indian common shot silverline

I saw this different looking silverline on the flower other day. its first time I saw it - somewhat bigger than common silverlines (or at least the silverlines commonly seen here). its just fitting in the minimum magnification I get with my reverse macro set-up. it also behaved differently to common silverline - it sat and sat there, had no effect on me taking shots from macro range except that after a while it noticed me, must have thought I was a big flower and tried landing on my head that I politely resisted. looks like Indian common shot silverline.
On one of the sunny day, I was looking for some insects and noticed this very small spider.

Initially, the spider itself appeared very small to me but as my sense of scale got normalised wrt to spider, I noticed lots of movement just under the feet of spider. I feared fate of whatever was moving there but soon suspected I wasn't seeing full picture. a little more time and it looked like those somethings - transparent ants were actually pretty safe. for spider and they existed at almost non overlapping depths.

I had seen these ants before too but I think below are probably best shots I managed so far.

I think you can never be happy too long while working with macro range. Sure enough as I managed to take ant shot, much smaller aphids were around as next challenge. (Aphids: Sap sucking insects - I tried to read wiki page -couldn't understand much but in short they sound like bad things from certain perspective and are one of the successful life forms) I thought they were ant nymph initially. Unlike most ants and aphids I had seen before, ants, either those in above shots or other bigger black ones weren't interacting with these creatures. two in below shots look different kinds.

Did I give impression that aphids were small enough? well, how about below shot? they were nothing more than white dots to unaided eye. an aphid exoskeleton? One flower had large number of them. probably syncronised shedding of exoskeleton.

There were others too enjoying their existence on the flowers. below individual for an example. this pollen bathed hairy thing was doing some slow form of dance. it kept swinging from side to side while keeping its legs firmly attached to surface. also walked around slowly and just as I termed it a slow walking creature, it flew away.. I sure remember it flying away but dont see any wings on him leaving me unsure of its flight ability.

and this tiny spider. It initially reciprocated my interest in him but later got going with his business. Evaluating a jump to upper floor here.

Caterpillars are something I don't usually manage to see and was happy to see this beautifully coloured individual. Colours not only matched that of flower, it also looked so much like one of the fallen leaflets from tree above that were everywhere. see photos below.  

Plus if you recall, there were some shots in and around these flowers in previous post of insect shots.
I found these flowers so interesting that spent nearly two weeks only around them. They again changed my view that non native, human planted decorative flowers are only showpieces. These plants appeared to feel completely at home and well accepted by others too. so like before, I again may find myself clicking all kinds of flowers native or decorative so far as they appear happy with rest of nature around them.

An encounter with a globally local bird

Few days back, I got to know that there was one amazingly beautiful white round faced owl sitting on ground in golden Sunlight and it wasn't even shy of people - sat there even as few people looked on from a road nearby. I was expected to pick up the camera and run. I instead declared it wont go anywhere (I hadn't seen any such owl so far and had no wish to miss it still..) and only next day headed to search for it - to a place different from where it was seen day before. My wishful thinking suggested it should move from full public view to some place free from humans. (I had no idea if owl wanted to avoid public or not, but I surely did..) and, I walked straight to Owl on a shorted possible path. of course, with due help of local birds after I selected right general direction. 

It was sitting just some three feet above ground and view was highly obstructed. Not to mention that low light had replaced golden sunlight. I was still happy to see that the owl's ideas matched mine and it selected same place to be as I selected to search for it. I even congratulated myself that its not that I just call birds friends, we can actually understand each other too.

What I missed in my initial excitement is that friendship is a mutifaceted concept. and, It doesnt have much scope of either politeness or formality. What do you do if a friend comes visiting when its time to rest and relax for you?

okay, sight is not what they use primarily and can even hunt by sound so closed eyes are no proof that I was ignored completely but it still did appear to me relaxed and half in sleep for most part. As I look up Barn owl in wikipedia, it tells me its one of the most widespread species in the world, a local bird across the globe. How cut off from nature we usually are that I see it now for the first time ever.

He went off next day and even if he had to stay longer, I may have never been able to see that amazingly beautiful round face - for from what I have known from seeing two owls so far is that more unsure of environment are, rounder and innocent their face looks so that face of first few minutes or hours is what you never see again. Reminds me of last year's encounter with another owl - on seeing him I had wished so strongly that he goes away and this year he has been most missed bird by a huge margin.
Last year's encounters - here and here.

Where I and We are synonymous

Call it T-few weeks. I saw a series of ants going up and down on a thin stem of a plant. It took a while (actually not until I had passed from same place once or twice again), for my untrained eyes to see where they were going and coming from. Now, I had not seen ant nest before and therefore was so excited to find a nest of about a size of coffee mug created by joining leaves. it was very much in view but still difficult to notice unless you look for it. after a day or two, ants movement wasn't seen but I found one or two individuals around and the nest intact so guessed that once construction and moving in was complete, they were going on with their business inside the nest.

T-2 or T-1, not far from where spotted Ants previously, I see some two three dozens of individuals moving on a plant. While this post is about time T and not T-1, when I look back to the whole sequence, it was probably this moment that made the strongest impact on me. I didn't need trained eye or any knowledge to see what they were up to. Very clearly they were inspecting the site, taking measurements, drawing up blueprints and detailing construction plans - all that without use of any tool. and let me stress, I had No prior knowledge of Ant nest building process yet looking at their body language, it was all very obvious. Random and irrelevant prior knowledge however did interfere with thinking soon enough and I was left with questions like why they were inspecting such a large area (i.e. almost 10 times that of the only nest I had seen before) - probably they will narrow down to most suitable part of it.. and, how long should it take for them after this inspection to explain details to non expert workers and start building? How long would be construction phase? must be non insignificant time, after all, they are building home..

I see this next day.

It was an amazing sight. They all seem to be knowing what is needed exactly. Co-ordination and co-operation appeared spontaneous and complete. where one individual's length wasn't enough, they readily made chains and if you look closely, they held each other using those jaws so ruthlessly and yet without causing any comfort that you wonder if you should actually define unit of life at a single ant level or at a group level. Even younger members joined with dedication.

and, of course, while everyone was ready to join others where required, no one needed that others must join for them to do what they can.

Around most leaves, their work was neat enough that I couldn't see any marks of how leaves were joined. but I think they had a small setback in this project. Here it seems to me that either they could not pull leaves to touch/overlap each other or they couldn't be held together with this white paper like joining material. Why I say it appeared a little project hurdle is that one of them was removing this paper like gluing material away from this place as in next photo.

Seeing them was an experience that cant be captured in words or photos fully but still, if I have to single out one moment that can somewhat share the experience, its given by below set of shots.

Four individuals on one side and others on the other were doing their best to pull a leaf. Now, their positioning was not perfect and their combined strength not enough. Left most individual tries to take a step back so that leaf can be pulled more. but he struggles to find foothold.

Within seconds scene changes as follows.

Output of this amazing effort? Well, a nest much bigger than what I had assumed with very little signs of glue material visible from outside. One effect of this neatness was that it was difficult to spot the nest even as it was very much at outermost part of the plant. yes, I have shots of nest too, but if you haven't seen one yet, wouldn't it be great to discover the first one all by yourself in real world? and when you find one, do remember to watch from far and not disturb it in anyway (or attract anyone's attention to it who can potentially disturb it)  as its result of hundreds of dedicated individual's joint effort and a valuable home that deserves its privacy be respected.

Swallows

After my encounters with both Munias, I was a very happy birder, and happiness is good thing. Makes you work harder, can even encourage you to attempt what looks waste of energy at other times. Now, I did not really believe that if you point your camera towards those tiny birds shooting across sky in all directions in completely unpredictable way, you can actually take a shot with one of them inside the frame. but that touch of extra happiness made the difference and I attempted some shots. and guess what? I did get some, actually many of them inside the frame in next three or four days.

I know there are hundreads of better shots of swallows and swifts taken by many others, and still I was so very thrilled to get these shots as for me it wasn't the question of how well these shots can be taken instead it was more primary journey from what I thought was kind of impossible to possible. Adding to the excitement was the fact that it turned out a mixed flock and I ended up with a first shots of not one or two but good half a dozen species!

Barn Swallow

Red-Rumped Swallow

Red-Rumped Swallow

Dusky Crag Martin

Streak-throated Swallow

Streak-throated Swallow

Asian Palm Swift

? - This doesn't appear in my field guide to birds of Indian subcontinent

Barn Swallow

All these are of course heavy crops, not very far from 100%. a full frame of above looks something like below. bird is only marginally bigger in most other frames.

Biggest hurdle to my attempts was very poor availability of clear sky. All I had were one or two patches of open sky. I often ran into frame like above by the time bird was in frame and at other times by the time bird emerged from behind trees, it was too late to attempt capturing it. Overall, however, I know that you cant have each and every factor in your favour so I am not complaining. One thing however, I am not sure if it was I can do something about - I think I needed to expose at least +1EV or slightly more to get details (air was as clear as it could be - but it wasn't totally haze free and one of the days was completely cloudy) but if I overexpose, it kept hunting for the focus till I reduce overexposure to around +1EV or less. Is that normal or I was doing something wrong?