Bamboo Rustles Butterflies

Large Salmon arab

A mailer on the “bng Birds” group, prompted us to register for the Bamboo rustles camp on Butterflies. I have never experienced camping before and Al was all too excited to get out of the house again. J

Butterflies! Butterflies might be considered normal for many but for someone who is known for panicking & rushing out (with blood chilling screams.. you should check with my brother for this), this is an “experience”. When I first told my parents that I am going to learn about butterflies, their immediate response was “Why don’t you attend a workshop on Cockroaches also, to get used to them”? Sigh.. If only I was that brave. But knowing more about butterflies has definitely helped get over the fear of their presence.

Pallikaranai Marsh Bird Sanctuary

The Chennai visit this time was quite a treat – Chennai heat has not yet peaked, migratory birds were still around and my parents were on this mission to pamper us with never-ending south-indian meals and snacksJ.

Alton had made a list of birding places to visit in Chennai. From the time we started birding, every place is looked at from a different perspective. I have passed Pallikaranai almost daily while going to office at Shollinganallur, but had never stopped to look at the flying friends.

Show your support to save Bellandur Lake

This weekend was all about Water conservation. Yesterday, we had attended sessions on how to make use of rainwater and value water as a right and not a commodity. Today it was all about saving the existing water bodies.

Bellandur lake is part of the interconnected lake systems built by Kempegowda when Bangalore settlement was planned. It is also the largest of the remaining lakes of Bangalore. The tanks (or what we call as lakes) were man made storage wells created to provide abundant water to the city, which was otherwise far away from other sources such as rivers and the sea.  The tanks were cascading and built along the slopes and valleys to accumulate water and also provide the excess collection to the next tank in line.

Is water a commodity?

Our evening session on World Water Day was an eye-opener. To me, it revealed some ways in which the world works and its difficult rules. 

We reached “Bangalore Film society” situated in Banaswadi at around 4:30 pm. The facebook page had indicated that today’s screening would be a short film on water in South Africa. The film society’s office was covered in green and looked full of purpose.

Rain water Harvesting

For World Water Day 2014, we visited two different events this Saturday – one on Rain water harvesting at Wipro and the other on “Privatization of water” at Bangalore Film society.

The focus of the Wipro session was on how to savor every bit of the precious resource that we receive from the sky and different methods that help in saving water. Wipro had tied up with BIOME (a prominent environmental group in the city) to conduct the session which consisted of presentations from individuals who have implemented solutions in their community or offer consulting on the topic.

The Economics of happiness

Before we attended this event, we had mentioned this topic to a few of our friends. Most of them were bewildered on how tangentially opposite topics, “Economics” and “Happiness”, were combined and curious to know what it is going to be about.

We decided to give it a try mainly because Bhoomi college was one of the organisers of the event. We had attended the organic gardeningworkshop a few days back at Bhoomi.

Goa- Cotigao & Raia Wetlands

We have been waiting to visit Cotigao from Christmas time and we made it mandatory on this subsequent visit to Goa. We were excited about this place because it was part of the all famous Western Ghats – a haven for animals and birds and one of the bio-diversity hotspots of India. We were also expecting to see different species than the one that we would have seen at Bangalore.

This was 20 kms from home – we decided we will leave at 6 am so as to reach there for the birds “active” time. Even before alarms rang, our lovely Cock was Up and CrooingJ. Hes pretty smart and dint want to us to miss on anything for the day.