My Husband and Other Animals — Animal crazy

November 18, 2011 09:00 pm | Updated November 19, 2011 06:18 am IST

TRUE COUNTRY BUMPKINS: We'd rather be fishing. Photo: Janaki Lenin

TRUE COUNTRY BUMPKINS: We'd rather be fishing. Photo: Janaki Lenin

When we were wildlife documentary producers, we spent three months of the year in Bristol, England, editing the films. The nature of tropical natural history is such that our visits were always during the English autumn, when the air had turned nippy and all sensible birds had fled to warm southern countries.

We became starved for animal contact within a couple of weeks of arriving in Bristol. So acute was the need for such interaction that one afternoon, we watched a fly buzz drowsily against a sunlit window, with the same level of interest that we would have shown a rare tropical insect. That's when I knew we had to do something before we went crazy.

We made occasional weekend trips around the country to go snake and lizard hunting with friends. One of those years, there was a major relocation of great crested newts in Petersborough. A brick company had dug up the soil and the resulting flooded ditches had been colonised by these amphibians. Now that the clay was spent, a large housing project was slated to come up on this vast man-made wetland. Since newts were a protected species, they had to be moved out of harm's way before the builders arrived.

Numerous volunteers and staff laboriously caught newts in buckets. Before the move to the new site, every newt had to be identified. The pattern on the amphibian's belly is unique to each individual and building a databank of identities would help in monitoring the animals in the future.

The photocopier stood out in the car park with its power cord sneaking like an umbilicus to the makeshift office. As buckets of newts came from the fields, each was caught and pressed against the glass while the beam of light scanned the belly. Understandably, it was the muckiest photocopier I've seen. Once copied, the newt went into another bucket which Rom and I happily ferried to the new site.

Another time, we went to Ipswich, East Anglia, to hunt snakes and lizards. It was a rare sunny weekend and we found non-venomous grass snakes, venomous adders and the legless slow worms (a lizard really). Soon we were stinking of snake poo; grass snakes are especially foul-smelling. Yet we couldn't stop as the sunshine was glorious and weather warm.

By far the strangest snake-hunting experience in the U.K. was in Bangor, Wales. On a fairly smallish park, crawling with people doing various outdoorsy activities, were adders basking on tussocks of grass. The humans were blissfully ignorant of the little “mines” underfoot. The weather was already cold and the animals were catching the last bit of sunshine before disappearing deep underground for the winter.

The rest of the time, when we weren't hunched over an editing table, we watched pigeons on Clifton Down, a large public park in Bristol. Occasionally a falcon would swoop down from a height and set the whole flock aflight. Once, one caught a pigeon and, digging its talons into its struggling prey, began pulling feathers out to get to the jugular. An exuberant dog, happy to be out after a long day indoors, burst upon the scene.

The startled falcon abandoned its prey and took off. The dog's owner came upon the half-dead pigeon and looked around guiltily. We averted our faces, pretending to be engrossed in a group of kids playing Frisbee, while surreptitiously watching the man. He wrung the pigeon's neck to put it out of its misery and threw it into the bushes before continuing on his way. The Down was our sole hold on sanity.

We looked for every opportunity to be outdoors, as we were going stir crazy in our tiny apartment. We tried to do the city thing but jostling with people in pubs, theatres, homes, streets and malls only made it worse. We were drugged flies struggling to find our way out of a large trap that was the city. You can take us out of the country but never the country out of us.

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