Longer wait, shorter entry!

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February 22- March 16, 2011

Wow, what a few weeks it’s been. In the interest of saving you all from reading too much more than I usually print, I’m going to skim through the basics for the next bit, and then in the text below (I’ll warn you if it’s going to get long) I’ll give a couple highlights.
Beryl left on the 28th of Feb. evening, heading out in the taxi to Chennai International airport with our French roomie and the son of an American friend; all three had flights leaving at varying times on the 1st. I stayed in the house in the village for a couple extra days while moving our stuff into the house in the forest (hereafter called the cottage). I was waiting for our (other, of several) French friend and her daughter to come home. They were due in after midnight due to delays, so I lit a candle, put it in the window, and had a shining light for them to come home to.
I spent the interim, 4 days, going to the beach and working at the forest and socializing with our male French friend and a young woman who is a communard and social scientist from B.C. Canada. All in all, good times.
I have been interviewing like crazy: My goal is 3 a week, and this is a close average since I started two weeks ago. It is getting hotter, so I plan on cutting back on the forestry, and picking up on the socializing.


To tell the truth, I don’t have too much to tell in the whole “interesting natural work” field because it has been mostly the same stuff: Primarily clearing forest. Now wait a minute, you might say, I thought you were helping the forest, not clearing it?
That is true- but because we are working with an accelerated growing project- that is, one in which we are using fast-growing succession trees to emulate the natural process of slower, gradual succession that usually results in ancient forests, we need to clear out some of the ‘invasive’ trees that have provided shade for the native hardwoods. These hardwoods needed shade to begin their life, but now they need to be stimulated into growing straight upwards to fill in the canopy. We stimulate them by clearing out the fast growing invaders, thus creating cues that there is an opening that needs to be exploited. Because in an ‘adult’ forest, clearings in the canopy come rarely and are filled in quickly, these hardwoods will accelerate their growth for a (relatively) short time. Thus we stimulate, using the trees’ own natural mechanisms, the reforestation of a native forest using selective harvesting.
Through this process, which has been refined and proven through experiments such as these here at AV, the Revelation forest has a relative age appearance of 300 years, but it only took 30 years to achieve. Of course, that thirty years was of hard labor- planting trees in the hot Indian sun, renewing the pached soil, composting and mulching selectively throughout the seasons, and monitoring the rate of growth of native and invasive species of plants. Other forests in AV have used different techniques, which I hope to investigate more as the summer gets on and the actual work decreases- thereby freeing up talking time for those AV members who have stayed through the summer.
I have explored somewhat the forest/farm at Pebble Garden (they have a Facebook page, look ‘em up) and I plan on seeing how things have developed more fully in some of the other forests I have visited, such as Sadhana Forest. Overall, a fascinating group of projects, I think.


Life at the cottage is good; it is quiet in the evenings, aside from an occasional bark from the two guard dogs. This is not the same barking we had at GBGH- instead, there is no competing packs of semi-feral dogs, just two dogs who bark, and then stop when their job is done. As it should be. We also have a kitty- a whitish adult cat that obviously is very used to human company- she pushes herself onto your lap, and is very insistent that she get some lovin’. I was going to go on a rant about people helping domestic animals only to abandon them because I thought for about a week that this was the case with this kitty, but actually she is part of the Gaia family. The dogs and she get a long fine, and she is relatively (for this part of India) well cared-for.
One thing though- even though she and the two dogs have collars, they still have ticks. I think the cat gets them from the brush hedge that surrounds the property. Every day I pick at least one off her as I pet her. OTOH- they are never feeding, so maybe her collar (a black noon-decorative one) is a low-level anti pest collar. Neither she nor the dogs have fleas. The dogs though, have large swollen ticks on them sometimes, so maybe the dog collars are just old.
The man who runs the property is a really nie guy, and he obviously takes good care of the dogs in spite of the ticks (really, we’re in the jungle. What can you do?)- they are fat and happy dogs, Dobermans actually, and they have become friendly to me over the past couple weeks. Before, they would bark and treat me like an intruder, but I think now they are used to me. One even comes begging at dinner time, but since I don’t want to encourage that (and it is obvious they get fed, the porkers that they are) I don’t feed them.
OK, sometimes I throw a crust to the kitty, but she seems to live mainly on lizards. This provides me with a conundrum: I love the lizards, and they eat insects. I also love the kitty. Both lizards and kitty are predators, so whom do I root for? Truth be told I don’t root for either of them, but it does make me happy to see the scrawny kitty get some food in her belly. I think she’s naturally scrawny, like most cats here, not necessarily ill or starving: her coat is good, and so are her teeth.
For wild animals, the wildlife is awesome. I saw two mongoose who froze, rather than run, only a couple feet from me one day. I can sit here just before mosquito time and count 8 different bird species all visible at the same time (and audible too). Also- flocks of hummingbirds. How awesome is that? And there is a small raptor, a falcon-sized hawk who is local. Occasionally the ‘seven brothers’ (a robin-sized bird, dusky brown and beige who are always in groups of several and make a variety of noises, like squeaky bits machinery) will chase it off. And flocks of bright green parrots; a woodpecker with a bright red crest, turmeric-yellow body and brown-black wings and tail; a couple varieties of cuckoo- one glossy black with rust-red wings, another with white bars on its long tail; a few species of flycatcher and bright iridescent blue kingfishers too.
‘Mosquito time’ is from around just before 5 to about 7-ish, AM and PM- these guys come out in swarms of over a dozen, sometimes more than you can imagine. Of course, they prefer the kitchen and the outhouse, which means I try to avoid using the bathroom during dusk and dawn…
To offset the mosquitoes though, we have a fish pond with the world’s smallest frogs- really, they are soooo small…. If you type a twelve-point type number zero, one of these frogs will fit in the space of the zero. When B comes back I’ll get a pic of one next to my finger so you can see. We also have fish, of course, and a variety of amphibians (like, four different toad/frog types), and millipedes, water-skaters and tadpoles (it’s apparently tadpole season).


So, B is due back in India at the end of the month, I am getting lots of fieldwork done and enjoying the hell out of our cottage. One thing annoying though is that the solar system doesn’t have a DC to AC converter, so all my computer work is by battery, or done in the computer lab at La Terrace. This also means more fruit salads and café Americanos… bummer. ☺
Soon, though, I will have a DC charger for the cell phone and the camera, so that I can continue to record interviews and make phone calls. Also, my Gaia landlord is currently (get it?) upgrading the electric system with more solar panels, so maybe in the future the system will be able to charge up the computer too occasionally. Just in case though, I’ve asked B to bring back a solar charger, and what do you know, a friend has lent us his- thus saving us a couple hundred bucks that we don’t really have to spend on stuff anyhow. Thanks I.E.!
And a big thank you to anyone who has sent support to B during this time. Her mom is becoming more stable, and may soon be out of critical care. Again, thank you all so much for your support, well-wishes and positive thoughts.
Peace,
Stacey

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