Orchids are mysterious; being both rare and beautiful and it is easy to see why they can become the target of obsessive attention. That palimpsestuous oddity The Orchid Thief being a case study in the strange pathology that seems to get some human beings when they are confronted with the Orchid family. If you recall that the family name Orchidaceae is derived from the Greek word for testicles (orchis) which is what the tubers of some of the species look like you will note that there is plenty rich and strange about them. By way of example the eminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin, was apparently so shocked when he heard the derivation of the name that he proposed the alternative name ‘wreathworts’ . Ruskin’s ability to be shocked by natural phenomena was legendary, there is a rumour that the sight of his wife’s pubic hair on his wedding night shocked him into sexual abstinence. His predecessors were much more matter of fact about matters of the lower body. John Gerard the Sixteenth Century herbalist based his classification of the orchids on the resemblance of the tubers to mammalian testicles. In this he was following the Classical author Discorides whose classification he rejects as insufficiently complex.

‘Bicause there be many and sundrie other sorts differing one from another, Isee not how they may be contained under these two kinds only.Therfore I have thought good to devide them as follows… Dogs Stones, Fooles Stones, Gotes Stones, Serapias or Satyrion Stones, Swete Smelling Stones or Dwarffe Stones’.

So the Military Orchid is known as Soldiers Cullions.  The precise details of many of their life cycles are only just being unravelled.

There are 56 species of orchid in the British Isles and many of them are at the edge of their European ranges. The two species that I saw yesterday I identified as the Lady Orchid and the Monkey Orchid which are both members of the Genus Orchis. Photos here to show the ‘distinct’ differences between them.

I identified these as a Monkey Orchid on the left and a Lady Orchid on the right. I was wrong ! Thanks to Chris Raper, warden at Hartslock for confirming that the spike on the left is a hybrid of Lady & Monkey Orchid or Lonkey as they are known ! Here are two more photos of the two species.

The first is a Lonkey

The resemblance to a monkey is not exact especially as this is a hybrid with the lady which has much larger and wider ‘legs’.

Here is a Lady Orchid.

This is named for its resemblance to a human figure with bonnet and large skirt !The Lady Orchid at this site (which appeared only in 1998) have been identified as of European origin which suggests that they were introduced deliberately or arrived on the wind (the seeds are very light). The ‘pure’ Monkey Orchids at this site are not yet flowering but I will post a photograph to illustrate the difference.

There has been some anxiety that the hybrids are more vigorous than the smaller and less sturdy Monkey orchids and that they might crowd out the native population. Given the scarcity of the species which is only found at two other sites in the UK (both in Kent and one of which is an introduction)  such concerns are understandable, but would presumably lead to a kind of botanical cleansing of the ‘hybrid interloper’, not an attractive thought.   However Chris Raper has a more measured and optimistic view suggesting that ‘the three species grew all along the south Chilterns in the past with the Monkey orchid favouring the western end, Military favouring the eastern end and Lady scattered amongst them. They probably hybridised much more frequently and the resulting plants were harder to split into 3 distinct species. Far from being a problem, these hybrids might actually be returning the population to a more natural state where occasional mixing of genes between the species was normal’. (http://hartslock.org.uk/blog/?page_id=99).

Yesterday was a very wet day indeed at least in the Chilterns, with the Thames at full spate and almost continuous rain. So a near-perfect day for flower photography, if one has a fondness for mud and rain.

The rather portentous title for this blog alludes to a couple of books that I’m fond of and a region that I have spent too long being obsessed about. The books are A Quest of Flowers, a book about the Plant Hunters George Sherriff and Frank Ludlow and In Quest of Flowers  :A Journey in Northwestern Hupeh by Ernest Wilson. The region is Western China/Eastern Tibet, or as it was famously called by the doyen of all of the Plant Hunters, Frank Kingdon-Ward, ‘The Land of the Great Corrugations’. There may seem to be a tenuous connection between the one of the remoter regions of Asia and the Thames valley but the Goring gap, which is where these photographs were taken is the product of similar geological process to those that shaped the ‘river gorge’ country of south east Tibet. One of (the fascinating) difficulties with discussion of this is that the terms of reference don’t refer to what we  think they do as they postdate the emergence of the objects in question. So River Thames, North Sea and British Isles should be taken with a degree of caution here. With that proviso in mind one can say that The Thames (from the Celtic Tamesas) flowed until half a million years ago through the lowlands that would become Oxfordshire before turning Northeast to flow up through what would one day be East Anglia toward its outlet in what we now call the North Sea.Heavy glaciation around 450,00 years ago blocked the river course somewhere in present day Hertfordshire and with the buildup of glacial lakes caused the river to burst through the narrowest and softest part of the chalk hills that had previously enclosed it. Thus was the Goring Gap created and the course of the Thames that would be variously,  a tributary of the Rhine, a richly meandering course through Doggerland (the low lying landscape now occupied by the North Sea) , and one of the ‘dark places of the earth’ (as Conrad put it) before flowing into recorded history.

It’s an atmospheric and beautiful spot, particularly with the sheer weight of water and the range of wild flowers is astonishing.

I managed to locate the Pasque Flowers (thanks to the warden Chris for precise directions) but in driving rain so the photos don’t really do justice to what is a beautiful flower.

A solitary muntjac watched me from the bottom of the steep slope; the only reason that the rare flora here survived was that this until recently was too steep to plough. The current distribution of the Pasque Flower follows the contours of steep chalk grassland as the most up to date distribution map shows ; http://data.nbn.org.uk/gridMap/gridMap.jsp?allDs=1&srchSpKey=NHMSYS0000462153.

The real speciality of this site though are the orchids and they merit a blog post of their own.

The Pasque Flower (Pulsatilla Vulgaris) that I’d hoped to locate yesterday proved elusive and with heavy rain threatening and the van up to its hub caps in thick mud I drove home wondering whether I will ever see them in the wild. Rockeries in a garden centre don’t count. The flower is supposedly also known as Dane’s Blood in parts of what Edward Thomas called The South Country , due to its fondness for growing on sites associated with Viking battles. Folklore has it growing out of the blood of dead Vikings, although John Clare (Romantic poet and madman of several parishes) links it to even earlier invaders.

‘I could almost fancy that this blue anenonie sprang from the blood or dust of the romans for it haunts the roman bank in this neighbourhood & is found no were else it grows on the roman bank agen swordy well & did grow in great plenty but the plough that destroyer of wild flowers has rooted it out of its long inherited dwelling…’

It’s a rare plant as it needs undisturbed chalk grassland ( a very rare habitat indeed) and flowers at Easter as the name suggests. I shall try again next week  and try harder and fail better. In the meantime enjoy the cowslips.

This is a dominant male in one of the tourist zones in Kanha, nicknamed Muna by the guides after one of their colleagues.

Muna is probably the most photographed tiger in Kanha, particularly given the odd pattern of stripes on his forehead which are instantly recognisable. Detail here ;

Despite the obvious size and power of an adult male tiger (large enough to tackle Gaur Bulls and Sambar Stags, dominant males do appear to spend rather a lot of time patrolling their large territories (around 60% larger than female territories). Tigers are polygamous so each male can and will mate with several tigress whose territories overlap with his. In purely biological terms this makes the most use of his relatively short period of being fertile and of having access to receptive females. Hence tigers who control a larger home territory have more opportunities for mating and of passing their genes on. Females, once impregnated by the resident male are occupied with cubs for the next two years.

Males accordingly defend their territory in a variety of ways. Firstly there is extensive scent marking which acts as a warning and method of communication between tigers. I’ve seen but never photographed the curious grimace known as Flehmen where a tiger sticks out its tongue and draws back its lips to bare its teeth, which wafts the scent to an organ in the mouth (Jacobson’s Organ) that interprets the pheromones. These scent markers identify whether it was left by a female in oestrus, or a male rival or threat and the tiger will then respond accordingly. So a smaller male will probably avoid contact with the dominant male unless he is feeling particularly lucky or brave, or emboldened by a whiff of a fertile female. You may be imagining here a feline version of the British advertising campaign for Lynx bodyspray; documentary realism if you are a teenage boy and wry comedy for everyone else and you’d be about right.

Secondly, of course there is always the option of brute force and tiger fights are by all accounts extraordinary events and high on my list of things that I want to photograph. Typically in these fights between dominant males and interlopers the powerful forearms and paws are used. There are some terrific photographs in Valmik Thapar’s excellent book Tigers -My Life, which I managed to carry on as hand luggage on the flight back from India last week.

One of the younger males in Kanha that I photographed has what appear to be claw marks from a fight on the inside of his left forearm. I chatted to several guides and its hard to imagine what else these wounds could be. This is the male on his way to rest in a pool. The wounds are a reminder of the power of the beast.

I’ll leave the last word to Fayrer’s The Royal Tiger of Bengal, who points out that ‘Those who have seen the tiger when stripped of his skin, can hardly fail to have been struck with the grotesque resemblance to a gigantic human form which is presented by his sinewy and muscular frame as the arms are stretched out on either side. The vast shoulder, arm, forearm, wrist, and hand have a wonderfully anthropoid appearance’.

To which my immediate response is what is so wonderful about the apes, but that will have to be for another time !

Another superb couple of days at Kanha, with 2 sightings of Jungle Cat (I prefer the much more expressive Hindi of ‘Jungli Billi’) and 3 Tigers, a six second encounter with a pregnant tigress this morning and longer views of two large cubs last night. This really is the best time to be here for Tiger sightings despite or rather because of the heat.Old ‘Blaster ‘Forsyth 1838-1871) as I’m going to call him for obvious reasons, has this to say on the subject

the hot season, the height of which is in April or May is the most favourable time for hunting the tiger.

He goes on to add a eulogy to the whole thing that save a change in the verb any tiger photographer or tiger watcher would recognise:

there is a stirring of the blood in attacking an animal
before whom every other beast of the forest quails, and unarmed
man is helpless as the mouse under the paw of a cat
a creature at the same time matchless in beauty of form and
colour, and in terrible power of offensive armature which
draws men to its continued pursuit after that of every other
animal has ceased to afford sufficient excitement to undergo
the toil of hunting in a tropical country.

I’m still thinking about that and whether the wildlife photographer is a worse dressed Big Game Hunter!

Oh and this poor birdwatcher who will never earn his twitcher badge has made it to 90 species here. I’m most pleased with the Indian Roller photos that I’ve been after. It’s a very common bird but has beautiful wings that flash when it flies. I’ve found it hard to photograph in anything other than sitting pose, like this one here.

I prefer this one which is the same bird but displaying.

It seems that the evolutionary history of the Tiger is as yet not fully understood. It is now classified as Felis Panthera Tigris. That is Genus, Family, Species.  The Panthera Family includes the Lion, Tiger, Leopard and Jaguar. The taxonomic status of the Snow Leopard remains problematic, with some recent DNA research suggesting that it is in fact closely related to the Tiger and slightly less closely related to the other members of the Panthera Family (or Roaring cats.) To complicate things further the Snow Leopard doesn’t roar.   The Tiger as we know evolved sometime in the Pleistocene (2 million years ago) in Asia. The earliest ancestor is a smaller cat from China but the earliest true tiger (also smaller) is from Java 1.7 million years ago. The evolution of the Tiger is closely related to the emergence and explosive radiation of the Cervid (deer) and Bovidae (cattle) families during the dramatic climatic shifts of the Pleistocene. Both Deer and Cattle did extraordinarily well during the Pleistocene. The ancestral or prototype deer was something like the familiar Muntjac or Barking Deer found throughout Asian forests (and on target to become, as a fertile and exotic introduction, the most populous deer in Britain ! ). The family rapidly expanded and diversified to exploit the emergence of forest-edge and grassland zones – exactly where you find find deer today. In Asia the range of deer body types and size runs from the diminutive muntjac (at around 50cm tall and weighing 10kg) right up to the Sambar at 165cm tall and weighing 450 kg). The Bovidae includes both the true cattle (Gaur, Bison, domestic cattle etc) and some curious oddities like the Nilgai or Bluebull and the Chousingha, which is a four-horned antelope. There is a huge variation in size from the Chousingha (60 cm and 20 kg ) to the Gaur (the largest wild cattle in the world standing 2 metres at the shoulder and weighing 1000 kg. The earliest ancestor of the Bovidae is thought to have been something like the Chousingha in size, shape and behaviour, which is regarded as the most primitive living form.  The Tiger evolved to prey on all of them and continues to do so. Their hunting technique is that of an ambush predator, consisting of a ‘concealment, stalk, a sudden rush and despatch of their prey’. The wide range of prey from 20 kg Muntjac to 1000kg Gaur means that a wide range of techniques are used, from frontal assault on smaller prey to attacking from the rear in the case of larger prey. The full sequence of a Tigers hunting is rarely seen but back when baiting of tigers was a regular technique for both hunting and viewing they were observed to approach the unfortunate tethered cow or domestic buffalo as silently and stealthily as possible and then attack from behind and try to bite through the back of the neck. I don’t know of any observations of Tigers hunting the larger prey such as Gaur but it seems likely that this is how they tackle prey that is more than capable of inflicting a serious injury. For a predator an injury can mean an inability to hunt so a degree of caution is prudent. Recent analysis of predator scat at Nagarhole in Karnataka, suggests the selection of prey items is a considered choice. Leopard scat shows very little wild boar remains and tiger scat shows very little langur. Why is this ? I asked various guides here and all of them suggested that the boar is too big and dangerous to be prey for leopard. Boar after all have been known to chase off tiger and there are a handful of cases of one killing a tiger by disembowelling it with their lethal tusks. As for the Tiger/Langur question, opinions were mixed, one suggestion being that ambush predators lash out in anger at the noisy forest sentinel.The most likely explanation is that Langur are too difficult to catch and don’t provide enough nutritional value to be worth it.  

Some more details of yesterdays fantastic tiger sighting.

The mahouts had located a male tiger following his pug marks and the alarm calls of chital. This is the usual method of finding tigers. There is a forest early warning system and with practice it is possible to identify the specific warning calls of both Chital and Langur. The two live in a relationship that is sometimes described symbiotic as both provide effective alarm calls in the presence of two highly effective ambush predators (tiger and leopard here in Kanha, other species elsewhere). Is it actually symbiotic though ?  In addition the langur has untidy eating habits and as they feed in the canopy they drop a lot of potential foodstuffs that are otherwise unavailable to the deer. I’ve seen a paper that suggests that langur will drop around 4kg of foodstuffs daily that it is regularly foraged by chital. Associations are more common during the non-monsoon seasons (either hot or cold). Chital are much more vulnerable to predator attack than Langur as they are vulnerable to tiger, leopard and dhole (the three major predators here at Kanha), whereas Langur tend to retreat to the safety of the canopy, and are rarely predated by tiger (presumably because of size and their arboreal nature. It is clearly advantageous to Chital to associate with Langur, both for dietary reasons and for security but what is in it for the Langur ?

At the Park entrance at Mukki is a shrine to Durga under a Banyan tree. As it has tridents I’d assumed it was a shrine to Shiva but apparently it is Durga who is a Peaceful Form of Kali. Durga is commonly represented as riding on a Tiger, and every morning I’ve noticed the Guides bowing their heads and saying a prayer as we pass the shrine. I’ve got into the habit of doing the same, having a healthy respect for all gods, and particularly those whose worship goes back to the Paleolithic. This morning I had the best tiger sighting of my life; a beautiful adult male with a freshly killed chital in his mouth.

Photo here and thank you Durga !