I’m off on a month-long assignment to film snakes at the Madras Crocodile Bank. Its an Icon Films production for the BBC.


What’s the film about ?

World Health Organization estimates suggest that over one million people are bitten by snakes in India each year; between 20,000 and 50,000 of these prove fatal, as many as the rest of the world combined. Although shocking, these statistics are still just estimates and as such sadly hold diminished weight. There is presently no conclusive data that confirms exactly what the situation is. But this is all set to change later this year when the Registrar General in Delhi announces the findings of the most extensive survey of snake bites in India ever.  The results are rumored to confirm the most extreme predictions.

So WHY are so many people in India still dying from snake bites each year? India is home to only one of the World’s 10 most deadly snakes yet the number of fatalities far exceeds this statistic.

SNAKE BITES will probe the fascinating natural history that lies behind the report’s findings. Herpetologist, Romulus Whitaker, will unpack not only the statistics but the particular species of snakes that are driving them, taking us on an eye opening excursion through the world of India’s venomous snakes. From the Hook-nosed Sea Snake of the Gulf of Mannar to the Black Cobras of the deserts of Rajasthan, Rom will get up-close and personal with these magnificent animals.

Personally, I’m very excited to work on the project because of the excellent team. We will also be working with some amazing gear. From very high speed Photron SA-3 cameras which were used in Planet Earth to film the sharks, to time-slice rigs which were used in the Matrix movie to get the bullet time sequence.

One of the frustrations that I go through as a photographer is when people do not think what you do is hard work. I hear comments like “All he has to do and click some snaps with a camera”. Thankfully in wildlife, people cannot complain much, but in India I know how badly photographers are treated.

Infact people go out and spend a lot of money in buying paintings. But when you ask the same for a fine art photograph, they say..”Oh he just clicked it in few seconds.. why should we pay so much”. No one puts the cost behind years of learning and hard work to get that photograph.

Anyway came across this cool video. See how it feels like

Monsoon brings out all the moisture loving plants and the Impatiens which are the beautiful group of flowering plants come out in full bloom in this season. There are about 76 species of Impatiens which are endemic to the Western Ghats.

Nikon D3 with Nikkor 105mm VR macro

Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to be invited to be part of an expedition team led by Dr AJT Johnsingh. The trek was from Mukurthi National Park in Tamil Nadu to Silent Valley National Park in Kerala and the primary purpose was to evaluate the importance of the two national parks in the conservation planning for large mammals. A delightful and detailed account of the expedition has been written by Dr AJT Johnsingh in the Frontline magazine.

While I had no scientific expertise to add to the mission, I did have ulterior motives. This route goes via the famous Sispara pass. Sispara was used by the British as the shortest ditance between Ooty and Kozhikode.

Now this is where it gets interesting

Around the 1830s a British officer of the Bombay Army named Stephen Ponsonby Peacocke was in India with his regiment and was in Ooty up in the Nilgiri Hills convalescing from an illness for some time during this period. He had a lot of free time on his hands and since he was good at painting, he created 17 drawings of spectacular landscape views in the Nilgiri Hills. His artwork is known for being lifelike and to proportion and scale. He finally published all of them in 1847. Thanks to wikipedia, you can browse through all of them.

Before the trip, I printed out all these photographs and carried them with me to search for these landmarks which were painted more than 170 years ago. From the start of the walk, I was looking at every mountain, every peak, and every pass, and was trying to compare them with the photographs that I had with me.

4 weeks, 12 locations, 4200 km, 380GB of footage/photos and a big pile of stinky and wet clothes.

What an amazing journey it was. The monsoon rains hit us a lot harder than we had anticipated. We missed out on some wildlife (Paul specifically came down for the Purple frog), but we made that up by capturing some amazing stories and meeting some wonderful people across the Western Ghats who are doing great conservation work.

Paul has been diligent enough to write a lot during the expedition. Over the next few weeks, we will start putting the stories together and hopefully will put them up somewhere where everyone can access them. But for a change, its very nice to be back in Bangalore, in dry clothes.

Well not really, but if you have been following the news, this is the situation in central Karnataka where we have been hoping to film. We just got back to Mysore from two lovely days at BR hills. It’s always nice to be back in my home town and on this trip, we were greeted by an amazing, hour-long bonanza of a small herd of elephants.

The plan is to head up to Agumbe/Jog/Sirsi from here but with these rains it will mean we might not make it till our destination at all and even if we did, the rain would mean no filming/photographing.

What started as a ‘Chasing the Monsoon’ is fast becoming ‘Escaping the Monsoon’. Sigh

We are back in town for a day to dry up, and have managed to put together a quick clip of our tryst with a mugger crocodile at Ranganthittu. This is the clip where Paul has for the first time in his life seen and even got this close to a big Croc. He was in for quite a surprise when this happened.

Lot more stories coming up soon. We are heading to the more familiar jungles of BR hills and Nagarahole for the big wildlife and from there we start driving up the state along the Western Ghats.

Note : Sorry about the bad quality of this video. It’s a quick edit and we will put up much better quality stuff once we get back.

Mandanna came running and said he just saw a leopard next to him, relaxing on a wall with its legs on either side of it. He had gone to pick up something from my Scorpio which was right next to this wall. We all rushed out and went back to see the leopard get up and jump into the tea bushes next to it. We got excited but got back to our work and Mandanna went to drop off our friends at a home stay. When he got back again after an hour, he came in and said that he saw the leopard again, this time sitting in the tea bushes.

Everyone thought he was joking, but when we went back, we saw this guy sitting without a care in the world in the tea bushes. I rushed to get my camera, but my card was out. Then it took me 5 min to find my flash and all along, the leopard was just there. In fact, a very young he or she was as curious about us and was peeping though the tea to have a look at us. We all stood there as I took a few snaps and then it started to rain. We left the guy and came off to have dinner. I also smashed my toe against a huge rock in this whole process.

As I type this, the leopard is still sitting outside less than 200m from where I am. It’s a weird felling when you know there is a leopard so close, yet you are trying to go on with your usual business. This leopard sighting credit goes to Mandanna. If you have met him before, you would know his legendary tracking skills and this time it really paid off.

The last few days have been tough. Tough not because we could not find what we wanted to film, but because it has been raining almost non-stop and because of the high altitudes, it has been bloody cold too. To make matters worse, our cameras froze up – both my still camera and the Sony XDCAM video camera. Both the cameras could not take the continuous 98% humidity, wetness, and I guess, partly the cold. Both of them are back in order now, but not up to their full capacity. We are going ahead, but these things slow you down quite a bit. The dirty and wet shoes, seats, shirts are not making things any easier.

We spent a few days in Munnar and then the last few days at Valparai. Paul has been diligent enough to post about our experiences in each of these places, so I will just link to his blog – Munnar, Munnar to Valparai and Valparai.

After this, we will head back to Bangalore for a day or so and then continue the second leg of our journey up along the Malabar Coast.

If you have been strolling the ‘magazines sections’ of book stores lately (in India), you might have noticed the new GEO magazine. It has come to become my second favourite science magazine after National Geographic. The articles and photographs are great made more alluring by its high quality printing.

Few months ago, T R Shankar Raman wrote a nice little piece about the Brown Palm Civet using my photographs and sent it to Wildlife Conservation magazine. Sadly the magazine shutdown last month, and we had to find a new publisher for our article. We decided to try our luck with GEO and voila! they accepted it.

So the article is out in the July issue. Do check it out. Here is the preview of the article

I think Shankar Raman is one of the best conservation and nature writers in this side of the world. You must follow his essays on the NCF blog. Some of his essays that I really love are :

His essays have inspired me a lot and I hope he writes more and inspires a whole generation of people.