Nature Conscious: Lady Navrangi and the Colocasia

An unkempt, post-southwest monsoon garden, clothed in leaf litter and strewn with moss-dipped twigs and decaying stems of long-dead tropical flowers, is the winter home and live banquet for an Indian pitta (Pitta brachyura) — Lady Navrangi.

The solitary Lady Navrangi makes her appearance in early November. She is bedecked in a subdued green back, relieved by brilliant blue epaulettes, a buff-orange breast, and a vivid red underbelly. That same blue brilliance appears again on her short, almost stubby tail.

She scurries across the ground, stopping to scratch purposefully at the moist soil, tossing the debris in search of insects, worms, and other hidden prey. The leaf litter I leave untouched serves as both shelter and larder.

In the 23 years I have lived near the Periyar Tiger Reserve, perhaps three individual Lady Navrangis have chosen my garden for their winter recuperation.

There have been lean years. Poor monsoons further north sometimes even leave them dead on arrival. I have found pittas on my terrace, small, motionless bundles of blue, green, and red fluff already claimed by voracious ants.

I wished, at such moments, that I could be more than a passive witness with reviving sugar water. I imagined myself instead as a creature able to move between sky and earth, winged, hooved, and half-human, protecting scores of Lady Navrangis and their male counterparts along their remarkable migratory passage from the Himalayan foothills and Central India to these southern winter refuges.

My untended garden is an act of quiet resistance against the manicured lawns and orderly pots that surround my home. I cannot bear the thought of pittas, leaf warblers, and greenish warblers descending onto treeless concrete and swept cleanliness, disoriented by the absence of leaf litter, cover, and food.

My neighbours sometimes observe, “Kaadu aayi” (“It has become a jungle”), their contempt clear at the perceived mess. To them, these seasonal migrations pass unnoticed and unvalued. Only impeccable order is acceptable.

Meanwhile, I cherish the sudden flash of rainbow on earth, as she appears and disappears into the undergrowth. At times, when her back is turned, I have crept closer to watch her pause beside the lily pond, gazing meditatively at the water. At other moments, she perches on a twig framed by broad Colocasia leaves, observing me as I observe her, me, the wingless, hoofless creature who keeps her winter banquet alive every year like clockwork!

Nature Conscious is a series built from reader contributions. It is a collection of fieldnotes, moments or brief encounters with the wild, expressed through words, art, music, photographs or poetry. The series is curated by author and guest editor Aasheesh Pittie.