Take a chance where stars dance

Hindustan Times

15-06-2025

One by one, creeping out of cosmic crevices, the stars appear out of nowhere to chandelier our night. Just as the meadows and moors of the mountains are all starred over by tiny flowers in a trice of spring's sun rays. Blood-deep corn poppies love churned up soil. These iconic flowers had sprung virtually overnight from the torn asunder battlefields of Europe in World Wars I and II. The instant poppies had inspired the in situ poem, 'In Flanders Field', and the Polish war song, 'Red Poppies on Monte Cassino'.
I was in the foothills of Siswan, stealing in by twilight to watch fireflies by a minor check-dam. As the moon deepened ray by silver ray, one by one the jugnoos came to flicker on bushes as if an invisible hand had lit a thousand diyas out of nowhere. It left the eye bewildered because these insects were invisible during daylight in the same foliage.
The pulsating stars of the jungle flew in a choreography of on-off flashes with male jugnoos bidding to attract females who returned the flashes, if allured. It was the love songs of jugnoos translated into flashes, a twinkling fireworks show in miniature, it was the night winking coyly, it was a shimmering and blinking jungle, it was embers drifting from an invisible jungle fire, it was stars who had come down to dance in silence.
From the dam unfurled a stream, whose passage was no louder than a beehive's hum. The waters crystal, pure, and in the moonlight I could see slim, moss-green fishes darting and halting. A firefly glided over the water. Its reflection when cast upon the stream bed got refracted and enlarged. Below the flitting fishes, the reflection looked like a diaphanous white moth in flight. For just an interlude in eternity, the firefly had reincarnated into an ethereal spirit dwelling under ripples, a fair mermaid, a passing comet for the fishes.
It was a tender night without an artificial light in sight. But disaster looms over the pristine foothills like a moon about to be permanently eclipsed. It is unchecked destruction by colonisers, palatial farmhouses and mining. One day, this stream will see its fish choking with plastics and kingfishers evicted by bobbing bottles of Kingfisher beer.
Birding junoon in June
June has been an exhilarating month for tricity birders with two new species, the Black-crested bulbul and the Little bittern, added to the formidable avian checklist for the Inter-State Capital Region (ISCR), an area encompassing a radius of 50 km from Chandigarh's centre.
Anu Garg, a birder based in Chandigarh, discovered the bulbul in the Thapli jungles of Morni Hills on June 7. It was a pair of these pretty birds with both the male and female sporting an elegant black crest. This is the second solo record for the ISCR by Garg, who had in February 2023 unearthed the migratory Chestnut-crowned bush warbler from Chandigarh's northern sectors.
The bittern was discovered by an accomplished nature photographer, Chandan Bhardwaj, in a Zirakpur wetland. Interestingly, while the bulbul is a species whose geographical range is more to the east of the ISCR and then across nations and seas, the bittern is one whose standard range is described to the west, north and south-west of ISCR and across oceans and international borders.
The bulbul has been encountered in Himachal Pradesh, such as Kasauli Hills, and the Kalesar National Park in Haryana. But Garg's record is a first for the ISCR. There are no records for Punjab and Chandigarh (UT), as such. 'I caught a glimpse of this beautiful bulbul while birding in Thapli. The pair flew away but I persisted and later got a couple of good photographs to evidence the finding. One braves the heat and dust of June birding for just one such spectacular moment,' Garg told this writer.
While the Chandigarh Bird Club lists 444 species for the ISCR, that number suffers from updating issues and is not inclusive. So, the accurate number for the ISCR is higher than 444 species, notwithstanding the two recent additions.
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