When Nature Repurposes: Lessons from Velavadar

While I grew up, somewhere between playing gully cricket and fielding questions in a conference room, “going green” evolved from personal envy into collective duty. Today, we weigh the impact our actions have on a world already groaning under the burden of our excesses and “re” becomes the prefix of choice for the conscious. Recycling is something most of us are well-versed with but repurposing still draws puzzled looks. Some of the birds of Velavadar have been setting examples in repurposing that Greta Thunberg would approve of.

Repurposing, for the uninitiated, is when an object is adapted and transformed for a use other than the one it was originally meant for. This gives it a new purpose, saves it from being trashed, and ensures that one less item needs to be made from scratch. Win-win! Much like the nesting pair of spotted owlets that have taken up residence on a boundary pillar right next to the main gate of the Blackbuck National Park, Velavadar. Spotted owlets, called chibri in Gujarati, are small owls with large, curious eyes. They prefer open habitats and their comfort around humans means they often nest in tree hollows and building roofs, with equal ease. They often roost in groups of up to five birds, neatly lined up on a branch as they peer about, waiting for the night to fall. But because the pillar is right by the road, one can see the owlet pair from a closer distance than perhaps anywhere else. And here, we got to see how the forlorn K-1 pillar was being repurposed into a happy home.

The Blackbuck National Park is one of those rare parks that offers accommodation inside its boundaries, which means that watching blackbucks stroll past your window in Kaliyar Bhavan (the lodge is named after the blackbuck’s local name, kaliyar) is a fairly common sight. A few hundred metres down the road are a line of abandoned buildings that were the old staff quarters for the park officials. It is here that we see another pair of owlets that had taken up residence under the tiled eaves at the corner of one of the old homes. The pair looked perfectly at home, peering at us from under the red tiles. A short distance away, the antenna of a cable TV connection rusted away, which was turned into a convenient perch for one of them to survey their property from. The ease with one species’ ruin was turned into another’s repose was reassuring to witness.

Repurposing is not restricted to avian species alone. Some snakes often slither in and make themselves a home in burrows dug by small mammals, as well as in termite mounds. Among mammals, the Indian striped hyena often moves into the old burrows of porcupines, foxes, and other usually smaller burrowing animals. And that is just what happened a few years ago in Velavadar. Amit, my attentive naturalist, told me a breeding pair of hyenas moved into Zone 6 of the park and almost overnight, the resident Indian fox pair was nowhere to be seen. But “moving in” would not be as apt as “evicted” in this case. The hyena pair had established Zone 6 as their territory now and they must have surely dug out and expanded the burrow, adding renovations to this recycling of homes.

But perhaps the most remarkable example of repurposing I observed in Velavadar was thanks to the Indian silverbill, also known as the white-throated munia to birders, and tapusiyu to the locals. This small, rather plain looking bird prefers open scrublands and fields, making the grasslands of the park and the surrounding cultivation a perfect habitat to spot flocks of them in. We were parked on the trail, scanning the grass for movement, when Vishal, our jeep driver, showed me a few silverbills chirping away in an acacia tree by the road. But by then, my attention had been captured by the abandoned nests of the baya weaver bird (sugri to the Gujarati) hanging from the tree’s branches. Amit noticed that I was more interested in these woven marvels of natural engineering and proceeded to tell me why the silverbills will often be found in trees in which these nests hang — the silverbills move into abandoned or unfinished weaver bird nests instead of making one themselves. The weaver birds breed only in the monsoon and the silverbills start breeding as the winter sets in, which means that both species never need to fight over the same resource. This means that a nest could end up getting twice its intended use. Some of the most unassuming looking but highly opportunistic silverbills don’t waste materials and energy building nests of their own. The inspirational symbiosis made me wonder why one has to be a songbird to know how to live in harmony. We could just look at different marvels of nature for a new purpose. From them, we could learn to share our finite resources, and consume them consciously in a manner that would make both, us and the planet, go green for the right reasons.