Indian Wildlife Club Ezine (February, 2006)

'I believe any trip in search of wildlife can be coupled with physical activity and elements of cultural diversity to form a thrilling opportunity ' John H.Eickert

A long journey across the unknown to a place not yet visited creates in my mind a vision. Cities. People. Faces. Lines. Waiting. Sitting. Smells. All of these mental possessions are just images until the journey is begun and those anticipated images become life. Before I ever traveled to Asia I found joy in travel. Our family-two week summer vacation was my happiest time and the planning for each vacation filled my imagination. I would lie awake each night, reading. The blankets would be pulled over my head and I used a flashlight to illuminate my reading material. Once my father announced the destination for the coming summer I would spend hours researching and dreaming of our destination. I spent years researching and dreaming of my first trip to Asia.

The first stop was Delhi. The final destination was Kathmandu in Nepal where I would meet up with a climbing team for an attempt on Makalu. The entire adventure was three years in the planning and three years of exhaustive physical training. I intended to wander the streets of Delhi and then view the Taj Mahal before traveling overland to Kathmandu. I met travelers who informed me the trip to Kathmandu was arduous, long, hard, and uncomfortable with nothing to see. I was informed it was easier to fly. It was an arduous, long, hard, and uncomfortable trip. There was very little to see, the landscape redundant, but I would not have missed it. Well, I could have done without the packed buses with the ear shattering music blasting whenever the bus was moving, but then to fly is to miss Varanasi.

Varanasi is one of the oldest cities in the world and one of seven cites sacred to Hinduism. It was a city by the 7 th century BC and is mentioned in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. It is here that the great river Ganges makes its immense bend to the east. It is here where millions of pilgrims come each year. And it is here where millions are taken to the Ghat and then mourned. I had never seen such sorrow and sadness. We in the West deal with death from a distance, often without emotion. On that day, waiting overnight for another bus, in Varanasi I came to understand the true meaning of mortality and impermanence. I rode the rest of the way on my journey in sober reflection. I learned one of life's great lessons in Varanasi- nothing lasts forever. And sometimes that is a good thing. I was glad to get off the bus in Kathmandu. Makalu did not cooperate and none of our team made the summit.

Ah, but the journey continues and the scent of pending adventure is always in the air. Spring is not far now. Summer is on the horizon. Adventures, big or small, are there for each of us. This is the year. The time to plan is now. All too soon, the journey will end. Cheers.

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- Ragoo Rao

A walk along the shores of a lake or pond, specially in the late evening, one might find a paddy bird sized bird, a little stouter and more dejected looking expression, with ashy grey upper body and white under parts with glistening black shoulders and crest. This is the Night Heron.

Both sexes look alike and they have attractive white flowing plumes from their head. They are more active and vocal in the evenings and night. The lake side will be filled with their raucous and harsh Kwaaak....kwaaak.. calls.

These birds are found all over the country especially around lakes and marshy areas where they hunt for small crustaceans and frogs. Sometimes they enter the paddy fields also specially if there are no humans around. They have the typical heron like gait and they stand still with puffed up crops stalking for any crustacean or small frog to feed on. The moment a prey is sighted they dash out and seize it with yellowish stout bills, and immediately take the dejected looking stance.

Like all herons these birds also colonize favourite roosting spots, on large leafy trees quite far from their regular lakes or ponds.

Nesting is communal and the same trees are selected year after year by the same colony. Nesting season is anywhere between early summer to end of September in the northern part of the country. The southern birds are found nesting around the cooler months from early December to February. The nest is a mass of twigs lined with down feathers and usually has a clutch of 3 to 5 pale green eggs. Both sexes share all the domestic chores.

The young are very ugly and very voracious and raucous. The parents have a tough time feeding them and the young chicks are found quarreling with each other for tit-bits, brought by their parents. Once they shed their chick feathers and don their natural colour, they look so magnificent and fresh.

The flight of these birds is a sight to see, graceful deliberate wing beats which almost appear to be in slow motion. Silhouetted against the darkening sky they are a photographer's delight.

By - S.Ananthanarayanan

Photographers of wildlife will feel good that the next improvement in the quality of pictures may come thanks to living things – bacteria. This is in the form of film based onlight-sensitive bacteria helping photo-film regain the place it once had till digital photography took the lead.

In the early days of digital photography, it was still believed that despite convenience and easy processing of the digital picture, in quality and speed the photo film was superior. But rapid improvement of digital photography has proved this wrong and the digital camera now matches the chemical film camera in every respect.

The Chemical film

This was based on crystals of silver iodide, or similar substances, suspended in celluloid film. The silver-iodine combination is tenuous and even photons of light can break the bond, to leave metallic silver behind. When light fell on a film, a ‘latent' image, of metallic silver deposit was left where the light was strong. The parts of the film where light had not fallen were washed away in ‘developing and fixing' and the opacity that remained where the light had fallen was the ‘negative'.

In colour photography, there are three kinds of photo-materials, each sensitive to red, green or blue light. With the three kinds spread over layers, all shades of colours could be captured, according to the numbers of the different photo-materials affected.

The limit to how sharp the images could be was defined by how small the crystals of the photo-material could be. The best films, with the finest crystals, had agrain size between 8 and 11 microns (a micron is a thousandth of a millimeter). We can readily see that detail finer than about the grain size could not be captured.

Digital photography

In the place of photo-sensitive crystals, usually randomly distributed, the digital camera screen uses an array of photo-sensitive electronic elements. The output from each element, during an exposure, is a record of the intensity of light falling on that element. An electronic circuit can then record the output of all the elements in the array and this list of numbers becomes the ‘image'. For display, the numbers are converted to optical output from light emitting elements in a display screen. Or the numbers could be passed to a printer, or even to expose a photographic film.

We can imagine that electronic imaging and display elements would be cumbersome and were not likely to match the delicacy possible with crystals. It is the marvel of advances in micro circuitry that ‘pixels' or sensitive elements in unit area of a digital screen, have grown so much that the equivalent of a grain size of nearly 5 microns has become possible. Photographers who use both photo-film and digital photography now find little to choose between the two in quality of output. And digital photography has obvious advantages of ease of handling and manipulation.

Enter biological film

Christopher Voigt and colleagues, at the California Institute of Technology have created a light sensitive mat consisting of a genetically modified version of the bacterium e-coli. The scientists first used a strain of the bacterium that contains a gene called lacZ, which makes it capable of producing a black pigment. The bacterium was then made light sensing by adding a gene from a light sensitive organism called cyanobacterium, using methods of genetic engineering.

The components of the bacterium were so aligned that the photoreceptor interfered with the expression of lacZ and prevented the black pigment from being produced. A lawn of these bacteria grown on a base of wax could then hold an image of a light pattern, by keeping illuminated portions light, while the dark portions turned black!

The e-coli bacterium is about 2 microns long and less than a micron across. This enables much finer sensitivity to detail and the effectivepixels count is about 10 times better than good digital photographs. When thebiofilm becomes commercially available it may bring back the older kind of photography with sharper detail and better contrast!

[the writer can be contacted at simplescience@gmail.com]