Bir Camping, tents stay.
Camp Oak View, Bir Billing is surrounded by forest with wild flowers with butterflies, the first flutter is inevitably from the corner of the eye, a sudden streak of colour that confounds the peripheral senses who rush to demand more neurones… one empathises awhile on this mortality in fast forward, but then it flutters across you, a nectarivorous quip on afternoon poetic constructs and their self proclaimed exemplars… wiping mirrors or turning a new leaf…
musing thus i would not have been in the mountains usually, choosing rather to crawl through and haunt the undulations of the woods looking for any avifauna gracious enough to oblige the shutterbug, but then there was this half marathon to run, and all those salts and carbs had to be judiciously preserved…
so despite all the temptations, i let the dark woods surrounding the camps be and rather grudgingly forced myself to stay put with a book or let the three-month old German shepherd gnaw at my hands and feet… but the Lepidoptera would have none of it, enticing one with rather elongated perch times… a soft sigh and one headed back to the tent to fetch the camera….
there was a large colony of clouded yellows, but i was more keen on that flash of blue i had seen a while back… turned out to be a swarm of Peablue … a seemingly inconspicuous dull coloured species with a lush patch of indigo at the base of the wings… but then, there are not that many butterflies that are not spectacular in one way or the other…
for one, these are footloose butterflies, dismissing mountains and oceans with one fall after another… the larvae are cannibalistic and generally only one remains to inhabit a plant, and this one too is literally abducted by ants who milk it for a honey like secretion… a rather skewed symbiosis where it is essential for the larvae to protected by the ants from other predators…
not to be outdone by its childhood form, the antenna like projections on the hind-side of the adult coupled with the eyespots creates the impression of a false head, the back-to-front illusion confusing the predator as the butterfly adopts a head down posture with the false head peering out above…
but the dog was not relenting to the unmoving poise of capturing butterflies, and leaving the insects on their nectar runs, i returned to saving my socks from the dispositions of an overenthusiastic pup………..Path Joshi
