Monday, September 28, 2009

Life of a Butterfly


Beautiful butterfly may not have a beautiful life. We witnessed it this morning. Cockscomb we planted in June turnout to be wild Silver Spiked Cockscomb. We dont want these wild plants in the front garden so we decided to remove them. I removed few and suddenly Kay saw a butterfly roosting under the leaves. Kay picks the plant and I ran for the camera. Few photos and suddenly she opened the wing and flew off. We saw her flying away and laughed that we missed her photographing open wing. She hardly flew about 15ft away from us and a black object swipes on her and butterfly gone mising. That was our resident Black Drongo from the Garden. We wonder how many of the butterflies everyday gets eaten by the birds in our garden. Black Drongo, Small Green Bee Eater,Long Tailed Shrike, Red Vented Bulbul and Magpie Robin takes the adult butterflies and Common Iora, Tailor Bird, Tawny Bellied Babbler and Red Vented Bulbuls regularly look for caterpillars in the garden.Less than ten percent caterpillars reaches to pupa stage of their life.

Today first time in all these many years, since 1998, we saw a Cobra on our land. Kalicharan saw him near the garrage. He says he saw him with his hood wide open. We all saw him disappearing in the grass and cats chasing him.

Majority of snakes get killed by villagers, whether they are poisonous or non poisonous. For them snake is snake.

1 comment:

वन्दना अवस्थी दुबे said...

कम से कम कुछ तस्वीरें तो खींच सके न आप, वरना तितलियां तो आहट पाते ही उड जातीं हैं. कोबरा की भी तस्वीर लगाते तो अच्छा होता. केरल यात्रा कैसी रही?