A felled field and a trippy feast

 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 .