Face to face with our "neighbours"

Over the last several months, we have come face to face with several of our "neighbours": some four-legged, some which crawl. While we are not yet good nature photographers, the pictures that we have managed are of poor quality because we were not quite prepared to take them, and in some cases we were plain scared.

Anyway, here are some of these pictures. You have to really have a good imagination to make out the subjects of some of these pictures.

The "white socks" Indian Gaur: these are huge creatures, often about half the size of an elephant. From knee down, they are white in color causing their nickname of "white socks". While these are known to attack people and even cause death, in general they are said to be shy and walk away from people. Perhaps the attacks happened when they were startled or felt threatened in some way.

The following picture was taken on one of my trips down from the farm, just as dusk was settling. I turned a blind corner and there he was, standing right across the road. 

I waited for a few minutes; the young gaur just ambled along down the road until he found an opening to disappear into the bushes.

One of the rules we as a family have agreed to is to not drive up the hills after nightfall. Well, we were coming back from Kerala and arrived at the foothills at about 8.30pm, and we quickly decided we would break the rule since we were too tired to drive around to the other side, find a place to sleep and so on.

Just a few kilometres from KC Patti, a village close to our farm, we spotted two elephants right on the road, coming down towards us. Of course, they just ignored us as they were busy pulling banana plants from the farms on either side of the road. We stopped, unsure of what we should do...

It was our first encounter with elephants. The camper's high beam fell just short of them (as you can make out from the above pic), and I wanted to go just a bit forward to be able to catch them in the full glare of the headlight. Fortunately, my wife's better sense and screams prevailed :-) As the two jumbos slowly moved down to where we were, we started reversing. We could hear the elephants tear the banana plants they had pulled out to get at the inner core ("thandu"). About a hundred feet behind us, there was a bit of a space to reverse, and we did just that and headed back to the village we had just passed. There, we waited for about a half-hour, when a truck passing the other way told us the elephants had decided to forage into the road side farm, and we were able to head home. Whew!

A few months after this, we were to have an even closer encounter with the elephants. A herd of about 5 elephants (including a calf), being frightened by people in almost all the villages, strayed into the farm right next to ours. Our dogs were barking their heads off in the wee hours, and after daylight we realized we had visitors. We circled the clump of trees where they were, and had some pretty close views - but they probably did not notice us. 

By evening, they were trumpeting and moving away. Eager for another close view (when would be the next time we'd have such an opportunity?), we followed them from a distance. We could see two of the elephants chasing each other and having fun.

We then moved around to where the rest were, and managed a fuzzy picture of one of them. The elephant's head can be made out on the left side of this pic.

And no, the elephant did not like our picture-taking at all. What happened next something we will never forget for the rest of our lives - being chased by one of the elephants for about 100 feet, with the four of us plus a young man from our neighbouring farm running for our dear lives. Twice I looked back to see the elephant running towards us. My wife had the presence of mind to shout out to all of us to head down the cliff, which we all promptly did. That probably saved our lives!

Some of the other animals we have seen but have not been able to take pictures of are the barking deer, wild hares, jungle fowl and just once, a wild boar.

Snakes, of course, have been frequently spotted in our farm. We take a general precaution of watching our step whenever we step out. By and large, we have abided by our philospohy that snakes are important to the ecology, and so we have refrained from killing any of the snakes we have come across.

Here are some of the creepies we have managed to spot:

A large rat snake (said to be quite harmless to humans)

A green snake ("komberi mookan" in Tamil) that is quite camouflaged in the lemon grass 

A tiny Russel's Viper that some of the campers came across...we are told even this tiny snake this has enough venom to kill an adult human. We later came across a full-grown specimen, will add the pic later (could not locate it, have to download again from one of our phones).

Another tiny one, a reticulated Viper. Less venomous than the Russel's viper, but still pretty dangerous.

Finally, a monitor lizard ("udumbu" in Tamil)...this fellow has grown quite a bit since this pic was taken, and might easily weight a couple of kilos now.