Scat spotting & scant sightings: The other side of basking in the small joys of nature

It was a thunderous roar. The birds, including the boisterous jungle fowl, stopped calling at once. The Malabar giant squirrel, who'd alerted me to his presence in the canopy just minutes ago by dropping remnants of his breakfast onto the dried forest floor, stopped stirring. The dense canopy seemed unnaturally still. It was very uncanny. Before I'd had the chance to wonder if the sound was emanated by a carnivore, I heard it again.

This time the thunder was followed by pattering rain, and then came the auditory cues of creatures scampering: the birds came to roost, the squirrel presumably retreated to a hollow, a family of langurs skipped across several branches. I abandoned my hiding spot on the dry stream just beyond the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station's (ARRS) campus. The short spell had been late for its date with the spring festival Ugadi. The forest, nevertheless, wore a glistening look upon its arrival. Walking in the rain to the dormitory, I hoped that fellow volunteers and stationed researchers would've been lured from their bunks by the petrichor that had filled the morning air. The homo sapiens, who'd slumbered through the loud whistling of the Malabar whistling thrush just an hour earlier, had now donned gleeful dispositions despite the lack of caffeine in their systems.

It was among the most stimulating mornings (sans the stainless steel thermos of chai or the French press decoction) at the research station during the fortnight a friend and I spent there for a biodiversity monitoring program — recording mammal sightings, setting up camera traps and identifying and collecting carnivore scat. The instructions had been fairly simple: make your way into the forest; remain alert to the slightest of sound, motion and sign that a creature is around; if you spot a movement or hear a sound, stay still and try to get a clear view; upon a clear sighting, observe the creature — size, colour, distinct colouration or pattern on head, neck, tail, etc, before identifying and logging it on a GPS device. Repeat after nightfall with the aid of heavy-duty torchlight. Among the mammals we could hope to spot were sambar, barking deer, gaurs, wild boars, dholes (wild dogs), bonnet macaques, and nocturnal creatures such as civets, flying squirrels and slender lorises. We were optimistic about big cat sightings because others on campus had spotted a leopard and a black panther within days of our arrival.

Creatures of the urban jungle

Oblivious and unaccustomed to forest life, we'd amble on the dry stream in the mornings, crunching under our soles the crisp ochre leaves of the mighty rudraksha and fig trees. The faintest of sounds would have us strain our ears for calls while the swaying of branches would get us excited about the prospect of spotting an arboreal creature. It took a few days until we found our bearings in the forest though, learning to soften our footsteps, soak in the droppings — seeds, scat, feathers, bones — on the forest floor, look for tell-tale signs such as peeled off tree barks, chewed leaves and shrubs; look for tree hollows and nests or moist soil where an animal might've wallowed. After a few false starts, in which we presumed the jungle fowl's call to be that of a barking deer's and insisted the luminosity of a firefly was indeed the eye shine of a slender loris, the forest was generous with its rewards: we'd serendipitously spotted a striped-necked mongoose (the largest mongoose species in Asia), frequently sighted Malabar giant squirrels, plenty of langurs, and on the ARRS campus a flying squirrel, a gliding frog and three species of snakes! In addition, the camera trap had yielded videos of a wallowing male sambar, a brown palm civet and a pack of wild dogs.

On languid days, we'd saunter to the grassland in search of leopard and wild dog scat. We were in the market for fresh turd, but amenable to droppings from days or even weeks ago. The purpose was to trace the contents to understand the carnivore's diet profile. What we lacked in animal sightings, we made up for in scat collection. We'd hit what my friend delightfully described as a "gold mine" on our first outing for scat. Wide grins plastered on our faces, we returned to the station with zip-locked bags of leopard, wild dog and hare poop. Through the fortnight, we came upon such treasures as the excrements of civet, gaur, possibly porcupine, and even a wild dog communal latrine along a jeep track.

And yet it was not these forest essentials or the opportunistic sightings that are imprinted on my mind. Rather, evenings spent watching tiny birds plunge into a brook on the ARRS campus made for time delightfully spent.

From behind a hide overlooking the brook, we'd be captivated by the show put on by the beautiful white-bellied Malabar blue flycatchers, brown-cheeked fulvettas, oriental white eyes and the blue-capped rock thrush that would flit in and out of leafy undergrowth, land in tiny pools of water, dribble their bodies a few times and fly off — all in a matter of seconds. It was truly a performance fit for the stage, for the birds, before they'd plunge into the water, would rehearse, doing swift fly-bys, momentarily sitting on logs or low-hanging branches, scoping out the area for possible intruders before taking a dive. And just like that, the chirrping, tweeting, smaller-than-palm-sized birds taught me the joy of basking in the small joys of nature.

Factfile

- Agumbe is a village in Karnataka's Shimoga district. Located in the central Western ghats, it's a biodiversity hotspot and best known for its King Cobra population.
- Agumbe is the second wettest place in India and is often called the 'Cherrapunji of the South'. (It receives an average rainfall, according to Wikipedia, of 2,647mm in July).
- Herpetologist Romulus Whitaker set up the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station (ARRS) in 2005 with funds he received from his Whitley Award as well as from his mother, Doris Norden.