Tuesday, the third of March is the World Wildlife Day and my way of celebrating it would be to post some of my favourite photographs of birds in flight taken by me. While nature is fascinating and precious to all of us, we have somehow neglected it. Part of the neglect is due to our own obsession with development, success, competition, machines and the internet.
Our blindness towards the state of nature today has resulted from an attitude of complacency and our habit of taking things for granted. Our greed for profits, success, name and fame have resulted in most of our wetlands and forests disappearing from under our very noses. The green tracts that once surrounded Gurgaon have all but disappeared, the wetlands that once were home to a variety of native Indian species of fish, turtle and native waterbirds have disappeared, swallowed by concrete structures, roads and flyovers all in the name of development.
Soon, the photographs of these flying birds will be all that remains of them, even as we gaze with wonder at life-like models and photographs of the actual birds. While few of our future generations will have seen the actual birds, I can claim with pride to have seen them in their real habitats, not just in a state of rest, but also flying into the heavens!
Of course one might claim that ducks sweep into the sky like a lumbering jet, but then the grace of such might be the source of inspiration for bards, painters and poets. The grace of flight might be seen in the smooth take-off, of the ducks a fluid movement that draws our attention. But to see two egrets fight each other, might in some ways frighten, to see the interloper get chased away, two birds, sparring with each other!
I know you've seen these before, but trust me, never the models of the real ones. That, I guess is what we will have for wildlife in the years to come, images, sounds recorded on machines, shapes built out of cement, and plaster of Paris, all for the amazement of gullible children who wouldn't know the real from the reel!
The real pair immortalised in stone and cement did grace the skies even as the real pair did sing with great gusto to the world that would leave aside their work if only to hear them!
And quietly did a solitary Ibis fly into the ether, leaving memories of times when the birds did flock in numbers so great.
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