After a long break, a little bit of peace for your morning from the Irrawaddy. Continue reading “River Peaces”
River Peaces
Tag: bw
Portrait of a Cockatoo
Umbrella cockatoos come in screeching numbers, bright white forms streaking across the sky: angels blasting death metal. Continue reading “Portrait of a Cockatoo”
Moss in the Afternoons
Hello Again
Apologies for the very, very long break in blogging: I spent the summer making stories and photographs, a pursuit often located far away from a decent internet connection.
There is so much I saw: a diamond-crusted morning in the mountains, clear and crisp enough to cut. Forest glades hidden among granite, alive with birdsong. The delicate unwinding of ferns into the sunlight. Carvings too intricate to have been made of anything other than human ingeunity. Lakes crystalline in sunset, each bird its own mirror image. Trees aflame with scarlet minivets, orange-and-black flickering blazes.
I can’t wait to share it all. Till then, enjoy this flowerpot abstracted into pure light by darkness.
Evanescence
Portrait of a Gaur
Indian gaurs are the largest bovine in the world. Listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, they are only surpassed in weight by rhinoceroses, hippopotami, elephants, and giraffes. Overhunting has threatened them through much of their south-east Asian range, however, notably in Vietnam and Cambodia.
In protected areas, they flourish – and can indeed coexist with humans, if not disturbed; this individual regularly fed some fifty meters from tea workers in the Western Ghats. It’s not a consistent trend, however – that same area records a death per year from gaurs not noticed in the dark by people wandering off the roadside.
Being able to observe them in their natural habitat is nevertheless a privilege – they hold a dignified air about them, a firmness in intent, and sometimes an almost-human confidence in their glinting eyes.
Abstractions from the Embers
A fire smoulders on a dark night in Bangalore, India.
we burn with unapologetic fury
against the dark, the dark,
the creeping creeping dark;
sing with unrestrained vigor
into the silence, the silence
the humming humming silence;
live with undimmed spark
for the light, the light
it grows and it grows and
it grows
Batty
Raganathittu Bird Sanctuary is famous not only for its multitude of water fowl – but also for its bats. It has a huge population of flying foxes, Dracula-esque beasts that fly around eerily in the sky but are really just red fluffy adorable things. (I LIKE BATS, OK.)
Alight
A Wire-tailed Swallow lands on a branch by a lake on my last birding excursion of 2015.
Monochrome Contemplation
Two students meditate at a kungfu school in Qufu, China.
