It is October, the days have shortened and the mating season is on the wane.
The egrets who sported orangish neck for the whole of monsoon are slowly and surely turning white.
A maidan with full grown grass was bristling menacingly in the backyard. At its glory, a six foot tall man was likely to disappear in its depths with nary a ripple.
There is no telling what types of wildlife, creeping snakes, lizards, generations of chameleons , and nesting pairs of mongoose the grassland hid in its bowels.
One fine drizzly day , a tractor was sent in . Armed with sawtoothed rotatory blades at its underside , it got to work, hacking grass , spraying the cut sheaves, this way and that.
But what was most remarkable in this entire operation were the egrets .
Hordes of them . An egret public address system had somehow gone off, and now there were hundreds of them flying before the tractor feeding on frogs, lizards , crickets and grasshoppers flushed out from beneath the dense grass .
Crows, the ever vigilant scrounger, were also joined in by cautiously high stepping lapwings . I thought the slow movements and generally sad demeanor of the lapwings meant a general loss of habitat and possible destruction of a few odd nests.
That was before I saw them hog several dragonflies , wings still piteously beating clamped into determined beaks , that I realised that the field had been flattened into an enormous avian smorgasbord .
The bright green grass have pale whitish undersides .
So the field looked, in the aftermath of clearance, a large pale swathe of death festooned with the most delectable morsels .
The egrets look like grandpas , with baggy throats quivering with anticipation as they feast off their own dining table. Heads are pulled back and jutted ahead with each careful , deliberate step, like a nonagenarian badly in need of a walking stick.
It is easy to mock an egret till you watch it unfold its long, pristine white wings and take off with a whoosh .
You watch heavenwards , tethered to the land ,puny human .
