Winged wonders: of butterflies and helicopters

THERE WAS SOMETHING in the air this autumn… From the Beriwala Bagh in Harinagar of New Delhi to Haridwar to Rajaji National Park, it kept making its presence felt everywhere. I was perplexed as to why I had not noticed it in previous years.

It all started from a trip to the Harinagar Sports Complex, New Delhi, in the late morning hours of a fine October Sunday. The purported agenda for me was to try out my newly bought Digital camera (my first). Excitement was in the air, as for years I had continued with film cameras. The avi-fauna in the complex was nothing exotic to write home about—the usual Mynas, parrots and of course squirrels. However, it offered me some good subjects for experimentation.

Just as I thought I was done, a bed of yellow and orange marigolds caught my attention. The subject looked ordinary, yet something drew me close to it.

I noticed that the place was abuzz with some energetic activity on the part of our most beautiful of winged insects. There was a whole army of them—different regiments (read different species). They kept flitting from one flower to another offering some wonderful up and close views! It was as if they were competing with each other to garner the nectar of life but enough was there for everybody! The result was any Nature lover’s delight. There were couples chasing each other, butterflies hopping from one flower to another, some rather too absorbed in the drinking activity! The most amazing one was coloured blue, black and white from inside and rusty-brown and white from outside. It was as if a festival of butterflies was on!

A festival I had never quite seen before on this scale.

A couple of weeks later saw me in Haridwar as my mother was to undergo surgery in the BHEL hospital. The campus of BHEL is located practically in the lap of the Shivalik Hills with the BHEL hospital in particular located within 30 metres of the hills and about a kilometre and a half from the entrance to the Ranipur Range of the Rajaji National Park. The visits to the hospital and a walk around its periphery did not make me forget the festival of butterflies that I had seen at Harinagar. For here too, not one nor two nor three but bevies of butterflies could be seen flitting all over the place…chasing each other or sometimes moving in groups of three or more!

After two solo visits to the Rajaji Park (Ranipur Range) from the hospital, just before leaving Haridwar, I decided to take Ranjanee (my eight year old daughter) to the park as well. The plan was simple. The idea was to go to the FRH at Ranipur (dating back to 1896) which has a machan next to it. The two previous solo trips had seen me going up to it. Never in the last thirty years that I have been frequenting this place, was the resthouse ever made open for staying over by tourists. So when a Forest Guard told me that now water and electricity are being supplied there and that from the 15th of November 2010, they would open the FRH to tourists, I was simply delighted and started imagining a night stay already! A pair of Golden oriole (Black oriole) up and close with their melodious song had greeted me on my first visit the previous week, while the festival of butterflies seemed to be on during both the visits, even though the venue had changed (from the Beriwala Bagh of Harinagar to the Rajaji NP)!

Ranjanee had developed a fancy for catching butterflies and had, much to my surprise, also developed some sort of talent in being able to actually catch them and not just imagine capturing them.
However, the morning did not get off to a bright start. The newspapers reported a tragic accident at Motichur Range of the park. An elephant had trampled three persons—a man and his two grandchildren, to death! As we entered the park at about 9 am, I enquired from the Forest Guard about the movement of animals around the machan and the FRH. To my dismay, the chap replied that a group of elephants had been there all day long at the FRH the previous day and was likely to be there in the morning as well! However, he suggested that we take the cemented road to the Sureshwari Temple. The entrance to the Ranipur Range earlier used to read ‘Rajaji National Park’ but now it read ‘The ancient Sureshwari Devi Temple’. The guard told me that the temple folks had obtained some sort of order from the courts, as a result of which the entry to people inside the park was thrown open in order to visit the temple. The roughly 1.5 km-long cemented path to the temple is wide enough to enable four-wheelers to use. How good or bad it would be for wildlife is not too hard to imagine!

We however proceeded on foot on this path, with Ranjanee hoping to increase her tally of butterflies caught (and released). There was a continuous chatter of Barbets that kept echoing in what looked like a very quiet place. It did not remain so for very long. We had barely moved 100 metres down the road. Ranjanee had started paying heed to my advice to remain completely silent but for the occasional whispers. Our silence was very shortly interrupted with a not so loud sound. A few seconds later it dawned upon us that it was some sort of a roar—not of elephants but of a large cat. Rajaji is not really famous for population of tigers…a few seconds more and a real fear enveloped us…the park has more than its share of leopards. We slowly retraced our steps. Ranjanee’s grip on my hand had tightened all this while. Any doubts that I had about retracing were firmly but politely rebutted by Ranjanee.

As we came out of the park, a Forest Guard informed us that leopards tend to come, very often, face to face with them in the fringes of the park. This, he informed me, had been going on for quite some time in the recent past! In my heart of heart, I thanked Ranjanee for pulling us back. He however added that leopards, on seeing the humans here, do not go away for long and neither do they advance. So the stalemate continues for long at times! The situation up in the hills is however different. Absence of a significant prey base up there (cheetals/other deer), sometimes makes the big cats turn man-eaters.

We now proceeded once again into the park, on the same path. We were in our car now, moving not swiftly but slowly. We crossed a couple of monsoon rivers (with not much water in them at this time of the year). A monkey was having his morning siesta by the banks of one of the rivers. The road terminated at the entrance to the Sureshwari Devi Temple, built over a small hill. We decided to munch a bit of breakfast before proceeding further. Just as we were about to enter the temple, yet another rivulet (a broad but very shallow one) was to be crossed. A loud te.te. ter… call from a Red-wattled lapwing by the banks of the rivulet welcomed us. There were large stones already out there to help the devotees cross the rivulet. However, even before we took the first step in this direction, we were stopped and detained for about 45 minutes. The culprit was not one but an entire army of yet again some beautiful insects. No, we are not talking of butterflies here—they were what Ranjanee called ‘helicopters’. These were the charming dragonflies coming out in all sorts of colours—from unadulterated red to black with a maroon tail, from light blue to dark blue, from a black and green one to a greyish black! They would come and bask in the sun by the river on those very large stones which we had to use to cross over.

Many a times they would spread all their four large wings, drying them up in the sun and absorbing some heat as well. Very often, one could see them trying to displace differently coloured cousins of theirs from their seats.

While I would be shooting some on the river, suddenly Ranjanee would call out and draw my attention to some new one that had landed in the opposite direction!

After about fifteen minutes, I was suddenly face to face with a strange looking and rather too large a ‘helicopter’! A second look revealed what it actually was—a pair of the black and green ‘helicopters’ tightly locked in an embrace, their tails and their front probes both locked. The combined ‘creature’ had eight wings, four in front and four at the back! The pair even flew together and on and off, it kept changing locations. It was a treat and luckily the courtship display lasted for quite some time, enthralling me and my camera!

A climb up to the temple was rewarded by a good number of butterflies. Ranjanee, after much ado, did eventually manage to capture a small little butterfly but released it in no time as it was too tiny to hold, without damaging it.

As we approached the top of the hill, a familiar face was descending. The gentleman was accompanied by his family and children and turned out to be a classmate of mine from the days of our primary classes in school, more than 25 years back! Later, while his family was having a sort of picnic breakfast in the temple complex, we reminisced some lost times over a hot cup of tea!

On our way back home at Shivalik Nagar in BHEL, I and Ranjanee struck a deal! She would be the first to give the breaking news of the ‘Call of Leopard’, while I would do the same for the “festival of ‘helicopters’” that we were lucky to be privy to!

—Text & photography by Deepankar Aron

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Category: Travel