Vision of Life; by Sanjay: Story of a Dead Tree!

“What we are doing to the trees of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.” Chris Maser

Chris is an author, international lecturer, consultant, and facilitator in social-environmental sustainability, he has spent over 20 years as a research scientist in natural history and ecology. He currently lives in Corvallis, Oregon, USA. And no wonder with such connection with nature he can relate human behaviour with trees (read with nature at large) & outcome we are seeing all around us. If you think this is one more cry filled sharing about how we are degrading nature & conservation then you are right & those who are bored with it they can stop reading & watch reels on Insta (lol), But those who have some interest in saving nature & feel their responsibility towards it they can (should) read ahead as what I am sharing today is not some green gyan.com about tree cutting or green cover reduction (by heading you must have judged it) but day to day things happening around us & what we can do about it & more than that saving or say adding beauty in our routine life with presence of a tree, even a dead one!

Well, as the heading says it’s about story of a dead tree & that too a Subabhul tree which grows anywhere in this country & to my knowledge is not even indigenous (desi) tree yet we can see it all around, though not much in our concrete jungle we are calling as our city & yes, it’s about a Coppersmith Barbet pair too, which used to be sat on this dead tree! I stay in a suburb named Erandwavnae, Patwardhan Baug which can be even considered as central Pune also & thankfully the road runs parallel to Mutha river in front of my building & there are still a number of trees which are left here! There is a dried Subabhul tree among the green lining of the trees such as Ashoka, Amaltash, neem along the compound wall of my building & may be that’s why I never noticed this dried grey black dead tree till one morning I heard a sharp cuk cuk cuk sound in my hall. Intrigued by the voice I went outside of my hall on the attached terrace & tried to locate the origin of this sound & soon to my wonder I saw a colourful pair on a grey dead branch of this Subabhul tree which never has caught my attention but here on that tree a pair of green barbets were sitting on top & singing together. I rushed to get my camera & could click some good snaps of the barbet pair which even in forests I couldn’t have got! Reason was, the tree was dry, the barbets usually sit at the top of such a tree & my flat is on the ninth floor so I could get an aerial view of the barbet pair which in the forest is never possible & I was thrilled!

Post that morning it became a ritual to listen to the cuk cuk music usually in the early hours of morning & watch the barbet pair keep sunbathing in the morning sunlight & keeping an eye on the city around which starts its morning ritual & then flew to the shadow of greener trees! Even in afternoons the barbets used to visit this dead tree & I used to wonder what they do in the harsh noon in open & when looked closely through tele-lens of my camera, the barbet was looking for the food in the form of insects below the dried bark of the tree branches, so the dead tree was giving food also to the barbet and not just offering a place for sunbathing! And then one morning one more sound joined the barbet's cuk cuk song, a strong chirping sound it was & to my delight today a hornbill pair has joined the barbets on the dead tree! It was a wonderful sight as the tree has not a single green leaf making the barbets look like leaves on it & the grey hornbills looking like extended branches of the dead tree now! Though the hornbills were there for food but just may have found the dead tree branches as a safe and open landing place to have a look around the habitat (lol) but they too become regular visitors of the tree post that morning & barbets seems to have no objection to that!

Surprisingly grey pigeons which are a big nuisance in the cities of late & kites never came & sat on this tree which is a good thing actually, as they would have drove the barbets away for sure but there are few more visitors such as Bulbuls, Alexandrine parakeets (which most city people mistook as Parrot) & Mainas, on this tree which barbets are used to with. Post pandemic, I have observed an increase in numbers of parakeets around, reason may be anything but that’s a fact & only thing is it should not imbalance the other smaller birds like barbet & sparrows, is my concern. And when the sun goes down, I realized the dead tree becomes host to a few night birds also which my locality is lucky to have around, & they are owls & bats! There has been spotted owlets as well barn owls which are nocturnal & bats, thanks to tree cutting around Karve road near Omkareshwar temple where there used to be a huge bat colony which get dispersed for giving away the trees for a complex (what else), all these bats have taken refuge on the trees along the road of our building! Because of my poor camera skills, I am (was) yet unable to click these night birds on the dead tree but I could watch them & more than that feel very much their presence on the tree at night!

For nearly three years (thanks to Pandemic) watching the barbets & other guests on the dead Subabhul tree had become my best of time (not time pass) till one day the cuk cuk music stopped. By now life has started a new-new normal & I too was held up in my concrete jungle routine yet I realized the cuk cuk music is not there in the morning so I went out & looked down & to my surprise (read as shock) the dead tree was no more, it was gone! I didn’t realize it while walking from the road on the ground but from the top I could clearly see the grey black dried branches are no more there to offer sitting to the barbets & that’s the reason the cuk cuk music has stopped. That day on way to office I asked my building’s watchman, what happened to that dead tree, did it fall-down in rains, he replied, “nahi saab corporation ke loag aaye the, wo ped khatra ho gaya tha isliye tod diya” (that dead tree was dangerous so PMC people cut it down). Well, that’s it, agreed it was dead tree & its branches could have been threat to walkers from the footpath down is what some humans thought & the only logical way they had to deal with this threat is chop that tree as anyways it was a dead tree of some useless specie like Subabhul, right? Sad part is, in this world of humans, when some humans think something is dangerous then it’s for the humans & the solution is thinking safety of only the humans (is what we think) but who cares to ask what that tree was for the barbets or the hornbills or the bats, this is the reason of my sharing! We could have found some solution which would have avoided cutting of the “dangerous tree” from bottom as the tree seems pretty strong, the only threat was its branches could have fallen, so, all that was needed is trimming only the loose branches as well have some net (jali) under such tree for protection of passerby people! I know every morning the barbet pair along with its other friends like bulbuls & parakeets must be now resting on some other tree top as fortunately there are still many trees around but for me, my surrounding & mornings will never be the same without the sight of that dead tree & barbet pair sitting on it!

As usual, coming back to the core of the sharing, it’s our rampant tree cutting which is not restricted to just cities or towns but even once ever green hills in Uttarakhand also are not spared by, we the humans as recently wild lifer Mr Bittu Sahgal shared snap of town of Shimla (a popular hill-station town in Himalayas) & the tree cutting over there saying, “here is where I have been born & look what they are doing to my home town”! I agree, we (read as humans) need space & for that trees needs to be cut but two things, why can’t we plan every structure accommodating existing trees & second, why can’t we plant big trees in every structure we build as the way we need space, the barbet pair also need their space, right? And who is going to remove dangerous human made structures which are dangerous for the barbets but just because they are small tiny birds & they can’t retaliate for we tagging their resting place as dangerous & chop it down, who gave us that right? I know, as usual I will be tagged as fanatic nature lover & I don’t care what I get tagged, I only know one thing, we must think of every single tree which is a life for many species & if we don’t do it then we have no right to call ourselves most intelligent specie but we will be tagged as most foolish specie, by that unknown power which is way above our chopping capacity!

Friends, every morning I see many of the birds taking refuge on the cables which are ample in our city’s sky traversing from one building to another & yet the birds are happy as they have something to sit on. But ask this question to our own self, where you will like to see a bird sitting, on a branch of a tree (even dead one) or on some electric or 4G cable; because in the answer of this question lies the future of not just the birds but our next generations too & then only we will respect (and care) the dead trees also, till then god (only he can) bless the barbets & bulbuls of our city, is all I will pray!

Sanjay Deshpande

smd156812@gmail.com

Sanjeevani Dev.

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