The great bird chase
06 March 2017
Back in the early 1980s when I lived in Karachi, I spent my weekends wandering about the wild places of Sindh. While old ruins where a favourite haunt, my other preference was the hundreds of small lakes and canals of Thatta and Badin districts. There were birds, birds and birds that I had never seen before. If truth be told, that was when I learned that the pariah kite is not the only hawk-like bird!
Referring only to wildlife, my ten years in Sindh until December 1988 took me to the Khirthar Mountains on one side and to the lakes of lower Sindh on the other. Those wonderful years form a kaleidoscope of heart-warming images: upward of five hundred flamingos in a lake barely off a road somewhere in Badin, a golden eagle on the prowl above the Khirthar crags, a male Pallas’s fish eagle bringing food to its mate on eggs, a desert cat near Naukot Fort and leopard pug marks in the lower Khirthar Mountains. There are also memories of virtually hordes of marsh harriers, Brahminy kites, jacarandas, and migratory ducks of a dozen different species almost within arm’s length.
Read more »Labels: Birding, Birds, Sindh, Wildlife
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The shade that scorches
22 July 2016
An ignorant military dictator and his equally misguided ministers first forced the Forest Department to increase forest cover in the advent of the 1960s. Since the survival rates of local saplings were as low as 15 per cent, the eucalyptus – imported from Australia and not fed upon by any subcontinental animal – was favoured; thus starting the practice of destroying forest cover with wholesale plantations of water-guzzling eucalyptuses.
Trees being felled from Gulberg Main Boulevard to make way for the signal-free corridor project
Towns expanded, chewing up what was once forest and farmland. Large tracts of well-forested land were cleared of trees hundreds of years old, and were replaced by new roads and newly laid out parks. Hills that were once clad with pine trees, but had since been denuded due to erosion control post-Partition, were generously carpeted with eucalyptuses. When the old intercity road, once passing under tunnels of acacia, neem, pipal and shisham, was widened, the old trees were cut and replaced with eucalyptus trees. By the late 1970s, eucalyptus was seen from Sost, on the Chinese border, to Jiwani on the Balochistan seaboard, and from Nagarparkar in Sindh to the hills of Bajaur and Swat. Yet, no one connected the drying up of springs to the introduction of the ever-thirsty tree.
Read more »Labels: Birds, Ecology, Herald, Lahore
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Open season in Punjab
28 January 2016
Indeed, in April 2013, this writer saw frequent groups of grey partridges feeding fearlessly by the side of the less frequented roads of the Soon Valley.
Read more »Labels: Birds, Punjab, Soon Valley
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:30,
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And no birds sing ...
21 December 2015
Growing up in Lahore in the middle of the last century, any child would have taken the drone of grey hornbill wings overhead, the mocking laughter of the golden-backed woodpecker and the oh so beautifully honeyed flute of the golden oriole for granted. They may not have known the names of all these birds, but the songs, these and many more, were familiar. These songs were heard from the Mochi Gate garden through The Mall and Davies Road. Lawrence Garden and Governor’s House simply tossed them out like embers from a lively fire. Gulberg echoed with them and the cantonment was just one huge ecosystem alive as alive can ever be with birdsong of a hundred different notes. And Model Town was simply very much more of the same. Barely 10 kilometres from the city centre, villages like Bedian, Shadiwal or Bhekewal were primal forest.Labels: Birding, Birds, Ecology, Lahore, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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We who hate shade trees
23 July 2014
Pakistanis hate shade. And by extension they hate shade trees. The sight of a banyan or shisham or mulberry sickens them and their first instinct is to chop it down, destroy it. They will happily do it even when they do not stand to gain anything and doubly happily if there are only a few paltry rupees in it. In my fifty odd years have seen countless trees fall victim to unthinking greed, so-called development and just plain foolishness. Sadly all these trees were indigenous species planted by the farsighted and prudent white man when he ruled over us.
These indigenous trees grew wide crowns that provided much needed shade against our burning summer heat that lasts no less than seven months a year. In their stead, we imported that accursed water-guzzling eucalyptus from Australia to sully our land, a tree that is good neither for shade nor for birds to nest in. Look into the millions of eucalyptus around you and you’ll have to do a good deal of looking to spot a bird’s nest in this damned tree. The rare nest that you do spot will be that of a crow’s.
Read more »Labels: Birds, Ecology, Lahore
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Ignorance is Bliss
26 October 2013
My neighbour in the upstart residential society where we built our home several years ago is a seventy-three year old man. His initials are NAT, but we can safely call him Nut – an entirely apt title as will be seen presently. Last year when he was building his house during the summer, he would park his Suzuki in the shade of the shisham we had planted back in 2000 and which today stands well over eight metres tall.
Full of himself, the man was forever blowing his own trumpet, but one day he paused in his spree of self-praise to tell me how much he appreciated the trees and creepers in our one-kanal (500 yards) home. Knowing well enough what people like him generally thought of trees in Pakistan, I half jokingly said, ‘See that you don’t plant any in your own garden.’ That was cue enough for him. ‘When I worked for Anjuman Himayat e Islam,’ he trumpeted, ‘I had all those hundred year-old trees chopped down.’ Before he could finish his sentence I completed it for him, ‘And you had them replaced with shrubbery.’
Read more »Labels: Birds, Ecology, Lahore, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Transplant drive
08 February 2013
I was telling a relative of mine about the one dozen different species of birds that nest in my garden (and it’s a one-kanal house) and at any given time the song of twice as many species. He, a retired judge of the superior court, living in Judicial Colony near Thokar Niaz Beg was surprised that there was a total absence of birdsong in their area.
I told him that the birds were missing entirely because of the absence of indigenous species of trees in the locality. The entire colony is choc-a-bloc with all sorts of exotic trees. There is not a single peepul, neem, amaltas, to name only a few.
Read more »Labels: Birding, Birds, Ecology, Lahore, Wildlife
posted by Salman Rashid @ 14:29,
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