An authorship puzzle

I posted this a long time back on Facebook with no response. The author "D.R." wrote a column on birds in the The Bombay Chronicle. Any information on the identity of the author is welcome.
 

This one is from 26 April 1949. p 6.

And another

 

The author apparently died in 1950 as mentioned in a comment to the editor.

 

Reflections on gadget-birding

A few weeks ago I was invited to join a survey for birds in the Maley Madeshwara betta region, a vast savannah and forest region around the Kaveri river valley that was once the legendary home of Veerappan and his band. It is hard to find a balanced version of what factors led to his lifestyle but if one could live for that long in this area, it would be a good indicator of the water, wood, and wild foods to live on. The region was recently consolidated into a wildlife sanctuary and this was apparently the first time that there was an attempt to find out what birds lived within the boundaries. A very large number of young bird observers had been recruited for the exercise, apparently based on their contributions to ebird. Many sported fashionable hairstyles and some toted hard trolley bags that would have been more at home at an airport than in a forest. Most of the participants were less than thirty years of age and the kind of personal connection that some of us knew from the much smaller birding networks of the pre-internet past was not apparent. I was randomly assigned to a location that was 70 km away from the Kollegal forest headquarters and we stayed at an anti-poaching camp (APC). The camp itself was a far cry from my past experiences of roughing out in APCs in Bandipur. Here was a solid building with several rooms with a perfectly functional toilet and bathroom.  It had solar powered lighting and power systems that could even run a borewell pump in the daytime to fetch water. The well-head was carefully covered in a heap of stones and decorated with the best selections of thorns to keep away elephants from doing what they do best in these parts - rewilding - by removing the debris of civilization.

Along with another volunteer, we spent a full day and a half  walking two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening to collect data on bird detections in 15 minute sampling intervals. As usual more birds are heard than seen and my fellow volunteer was equipped with the Merlin app and recorded data on ebird. The Merlin app runs continuously and detects bird calls based on the ML model that it has and comparisons are assisted by a shortlist of birds of the area. While it took a while for the app to pick up many calls, I was quite impressed with the accuracy of the commoner birds that it detected. It did make serious mistakes - such as identifying a Yellow-throated Sparrow as a Eurasian Tree Sparrow, but I think it was far better than what I had expected! More importantly it was able to keep up the monitoring process without fatigue. Now one can see how a system like this could actually be incorporated into an automated monitoring setup and entirely do away with human labor and expertise. There is a certainly place for that kind of monitoring, meant for long-term institutional work. There is however a lot of scope for nuanced observation that continues to remain for those of us who are not in institutions!

Apart from gadgets that seemingly compete with humans are those that enhance humans. Many years ago, one of our friends obtained a night-vision scope. We made a trip one evening to the place of Krishna Narain (KN) on the outskirts of Bannerghatta to see what might be revealed. KN was impressed and he shortly afterwards got himself another of these gizmos. The next time we met, he mentioned that he observed a courtship display of the Common Indian Nightjar and declared that it was similar to and as exciting and amazing as a Bengal Florican in display. Unfortunately he did not give sufficient details and he never published his observations. He died in an unfortunate accident. Years later, on this recent trip, I remembered KN's observation since I observed something that might take years before someone gets to observe it again and perhaps takes a video as evidence. Fortunately for those of us trained on pen and paper, free form descriptions still work, the kinds that does not fit squarely into online databases with drop-down options and pre-made lists of exclusive options to select. 

The camp where we stayed in the MM Hills was wonderfully dark. February was getting warm and the evening quickly saw the dusk calls of birds going to roost and the crepuscular shift getting into action. There were three species of nightjar that were all calling in full strength as the sky darkened. There was the constant chucko-chucko of the Jungle Nightjar, there were more distant Ch-whoo calls with a vibrato to the second part of the Jerdon's Nightjar and then there was the more widespread and familiar stone-skipped-on-ice call of the Indian Nightjar. At one point a Jungle Nightjar landed close to the boundary post of the camp and I was able to shine a torch beam onto it and observe it through my binoculars. It was perched on a low tree along the length of the branch and facing away from the trunk of the tree. It emitted a long series of rapid chucko calls and then it stopped calling, raised its outstretched wings above its body (about 60 degrees between the left and right wings, ie a dihedral of 60 degrees) and facing into what appeared to be a headwind, it rose slowly, almost vertically, and effortlessly, apparently without making any downstrokes, above the branch and then it lowered its wings to a more normal flight position and glided down the valley. As it glided down it produced a low "ghostly" ho-po-po-po call that I don't think has ever been described! I imagine it is some kind of territorial display. 

I wonder however when this display might be seen again and described in better detail or supported by video footage. With the lack of encouragement for nuanced observation and an excessive emphasis for adding data points to structured databases, we can be sure that even if observed, the motivation for recording it in print is not nurtured or encouraged by most online or even straight-jacketed offline systems of journals with their presumptions of exactitude. 

PS: I discovered that I had a recording of the calls of the Jungle nightjar mentioned in the display above and have posted it to https://xeno-canto.org/975662

The sketch should give some indication of the behaviour and calling sequence.

Wikipedia, social insects and super-organisms

I routinely point out in my outdoor naturalist explorations that one of the great innovations in evolutionary history is indirect communication - communication via the substrate - rather than one-to-one communication. What this does is to make the information more reliably transferable and the overall information on tasks to be done more permanent and the colony functioning less vulnerable to the death of a few individual organisms. It is the reason why you cannot destroy an ant colony by stomping on the workers walking on a trail. New individuals discover the trail and follow up on the chemical information present in it.

You might see that, to some extent, this is what internet forums do, or what books do, they pass on information even after the death of the originator. But books are not location specific, I cannot find out who has walked at a specific spot, the way a dog or tiger might find out by sniffing a tree. Books are not sensitive to temporality - the dog or tiger might find out by the scents left on a tree how recent the last passer by was.

Social insects like ants and termites have evolved indirect communication to coordinate the activities of individual organisms without the need for centralized command and control. The terms stigmergy and stigmergic collaboration have been used for this and here is an explanation I found online (slightly edited):

Stigmergy is a word used to describe a particular type of control: the control of the actions of a group of agents via a shared environment. Crucially, the agents do not directly communicate amongst themselves. Instead, each agent is caused (by its environment) to act upon and change the environment. These changes in turn alter the later actions of the agents.

The word stigmergy comes from the Greek stigma, meaning sign/mark, and ergon, meaning work, capturing the notion that the environment is a stimulus that causes particular work (behavior) to occur. It was originally coined by zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé,who explained the mound-building behavior of termites by appealing to the stigmergic control of the mound itself.

So if a termite mound is breached - the workers passing by might use a chemical marker saying - there is a breach here - as more and more workers pass the point, the chemical scent becomes stronger and it recruits workers who specialize in fixing breaches to the specific breach location. Workers might also mark trails towards the breach for others to follow. Once the breach is sealed, the trail scents and breach indicators fade away, leaving workers to follow their other activities. Notice that there is no central control and that chemical markers of different kinds may be produced by agents who may not know how to deal with the specific situation. Agents that do know how to deal with the situation are guided to a specific location. 

Insect societies have task specialization - some workers specialize in foraging, some in nest care, some in defense and so on. Task specialization is sometimes based on the age of the insects, with older ones taking up risky activities.

I have tried to excite the developers of software systems such as MediaWiki - and among some in the Wikipedia community. Agents need to be able to indicate centrally about areas of Wikipedia that are undergoing disturbance. Other agents need to be able to find, act at the areas of disturbance. Currently Wikipedia does this through central bulletin boards where agents explicitly post their notices. Unfortunately this is too taxing for a naive or overwhelmed agent. WikiRage was a third party system that could detect increased editing activity and show articles that were currently "hot". There is no real-time system that shows articles that are currently highly visited. There is no system for identifying highly sought content that does not exist either - this might be something for a search engine company like Google/Bing to think of. Looking at this also from the point of view of an agent with specialization - I as an editor might only act if I know that I can help, so overwhelming an agent with too many stimuli might only push an agent like me into confusion and inaction. If I were a specialist editor working in a particular cluster of articles, I should therefore be able to filter out and help focus on a rise in activity within articles of interest. Ideally I shouldn't have to declare my own interest explicitly but article clusters should be determined from linkages or past editing history and so on. For a while now I have sought a rather simple means to detect traffic spikes in articles that I have on my watchlist. Now some software designers will immediately object that such as system could impinge on user privacy - although much of this information (other than mere reading) is already public in the MediaWiki system. I think many of these security concerns can be reduced by "aging" - the deletion of data over time - also in a way simulating the dispersal and weakening of scents in social insects. Further such a system could perhaps be designed as a browser plugin, keeping data entirely local and off from the center. For instance if I wanted to look at what is hot on my watchlist - I could easily do with some kind of coloring and sorting of entries on my watchlist with a factor  = yesterday's (or the last available) traffic / (average of the previous N days of traffic) [dealing of course with division by zero etc.] - that might help me narrow down my responsiveness to improve articles that I have an interest in. It would also make the system more responsive to user needs.

A super-organism - the term used for colonies of social insects - needs to have mechanisms for how its agents act as sensors, how those sensations are quantitatively expressed, how those quantitative expressions tip thresholds that drive actions or reaction.

Note: I have been bumbling with these ideas for a while and my knowledge of software development for implementing this particular idea has been rather limiting. I hope some talented software developer feels inspired to create something along these lines. I for one would be grateful for it! 

PS: WikiRage went defunct and there is now a site called WikiShark which gives trending pages globally (for the English Wikipedia) but there is still a role as mentioned above for what is trending in what one can contribute to - ie based on task specialization.

Ramblings on iron and steel

In the last few weeks I have stumbled on various little bits during Wikipedia edits that I thought were worthy of airing! One of them was a re-realization of the boon and the curse of iron and steel. It starts with something I heard a few years ago by economist Sashi Sivramkrishna and others who were following the trail of Buchanan Hamilton in Mysore (listen to the talk here) and they were apparently impressed by the impact of iron production particularly on the destruction of forests in southern India. And last week I found a Wikipedia entry that someone from Parangipettai had written as a draft and which had been left languishing. I went and ensured that it got moved from a draft version to a mainspace entry - it was on the Porto Novo Iron Works, one of the first large-scale iron smelting enterprises in India. The venture, started by a J.M. Heath, did not last long, one of the big factors being the lack of coal for smelting, and he had to make do with charcoal. In a few years, he ran out of charcoal, after depleting the forests of several districts nearby, and the factory had to move to the west coast near Calicut (Beypore). The first director general of forests Dietrich Brandis also noted the role of iron smelting in deforestation. 

Now to Josiah Heath, who is a real character and it is quite a surprise to see that the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not even have an entry for him, and there appears to be no available photograph of him (at least online). Heath sent out skins of various animals to the Zoological Society of London and there is a species of bat named after him. More interestingly it seem the fishing cat was described based on a specimen that he sent from India - which it would appear from all likelihood to have come from the Parangipettai region - more likely Pichavaram (wonder if the species still exists there). He also collected a specimen of a Eurasian Griffon Vulture from the same region. Heath apparently was impressed by traditional ukku (better known as Wootz steel) steel-making near Salem where he was initially posted and he seems to have discovered an important factor which he patented. It involved the use of carbon and manganese and he made money initially by distributing packets of his mixture - and later made the mistake of giving its composition. The steel makers of Sheffield, England quickly started using his technique and decided not to pay him any royalty - and he died in poverty. Of course today we could ask whether he actually stole the idea from traditional Indian blacksmiths and whether it could have been patented at all in the first place or of the numerous other injustices involved in all of this. 

Herr Meves

In another Wikipedia-related iron-connection, I found a little-known ornithologist who now has a Wikipedia entry (Wilhelm Meves). Meves was a German pharmacist turned ornithologist - and he decided to treat the brown feathers of lammergeiers with hydrochloric acid and tested them for iron and found that the colour was largely due to iron oxide. He found that this coating was on the outer surface and that the inside of the feathers was largely iron free. He suggested that the birds were bathing in iron-rich waters. Meves worked in Stockholm and mostly wrote in German but some of his findings made their way into the Ibis in English - thanks to John Wolley. And it seems both T.C. Jerdon and A.O. Hume were careful readers of Meves' works. Jerdon was aware of the bleating sound of snipes being produced by air-flow induced vibrations of the outermost tail feather. And Hume even repeated Meves' chemical analysis on his lammergeier specimens from Shimla and confirmed the presence of iron. Hume however noted that neither he nor any of his "intelligent native sportsmen" had ever seen a lammergeier bathe in water and suggested that the red staining may be derived from the blood of dead animals. Hume's original text (emphasis mine):

In the Ibis for 1862, it is mentioned that Herr Meves had, by a simple chemical test, ascertained the red colouring in this bird’s feathers, as also the rustiness observable at times in the feathers of the common Crane, (Grus Cinerea) to be due to a superficial deposit of oxide of iron ; as also, that the colouring matter on the eggs, arose from the same cause. Herr Meves suggested, that the stain on the feathers might be owing to the birds bathing in water containing iron in solution; but my belief is, that the Lammergeyer is a very dirty bird, (it swarms with vermin to such a degree, that cats and the like will seldom touch it when dead,) and never washes! I have been watching this bird, off and on, for the last twenty years, and I have never yet seen it bathe ; nor have I ever yet met with any one, amongst the numerous intelligent native sportsmen whom I have had to do with in the Himalayahs, who has witnessed such an operation. Certainly iron does enter into the composition of the colouring matter of the feathers, (I have tested it myself) as also into the red colouring on Neophron’s and kite’s eggs, but my idea is, that in both cases the iron is derived from the blood, and not from any ferruginous streams. Many birds, notably the grey goose and the common teal, very often have the feathers of the lower parts strongly tinged with rusty, and here too an oxide of iron enters into the composition of the colouring matter. How it gets there, is a question well worthy of investigation.

Anyway, it seems that India's large iron-deposits have a habit of lying in regions rich in biodiversity and ethnic diversity often on ancient tribal lands. It is little wonder that the steel industry barons are involved in disempowering tribal peoples or paying governments to water down environmental laws. I was truly surprised by the amount of work from around the world on related topics.

• Goucher, C.L. (1981). Iron is iron ’til it is rust: Trade and Ecology in the Decline of West African Iron-Smelting. The Journal of African History. 22(2):179-189. https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019393 
• Siran Liu, Thilo Rehren, Dashu Qin, Jianli Chen, Wenli Zhou, Marcos Martinón-Torres, Xin Huang, Wei Qian (2019). Coal-fuelled crucible lead-silver smelting in 12th-13th century China: A technological innovation in the age of deforestation. Journal of Archaeological Science 104:75-84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2019.01.004
• The impact of ancient iron mining and smelting on the landscape balance on Elba Island, Tuscan Archipelago, Italy - Fabian Becker, Raphael A. Eser, Philipp Hoelzmann, Brigitta Schütt (2019). The environmental impact of ancient iron mining and smelting on Elba Island, Italy – A geochemical soil survey of the Magazzini site. Journal of Geochemical Exploration 205 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gexplo.2019.04.009
  
• Iles, L. (2016). The Role of Metallurgy in Transforming Global Forests.. J Archaeol Method Theory 23:1219–1241 https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9266-7

Someday I ought to visit Parangipettai and Pichavaram!  

PS (June 2024): Apparently the idea of sustainable forestry is associated with a German term  Nachhaltigkeit - a concept introduced by a mine inspector named Hans Carl von Carlowitz who wrote a book called Sylvicultura oeconomica in 1713. It was based on fears that deforestation for agriculture would destroy the mining industry! And he was likely influenced by John Evelyn who wrote Sylva in 1662.

An old fishing trip

 

Tranquebar, the Danish version of Tharangambadi had long been on my list of places to visit. So many species from India have the scientific epithet of tranquebaricus, all because of the Danish settlement from where specimens were carted off to Europe to be given binomial names. So on a visit to the place in December 2022 I checked out some of the big names including Christoph Samuel John who I had been researching both for his Wikipedia entry and for a little chapter on fishes that has recently been published by McGill University Press (see here). I was rather disappointed to see that C.S. John's grave had either no markings or was possibly damaged a long time ago.

 

 

John collaborated with the German fish specialist Marcus Bloch in Berlin, sending him fishes in spirit by the ship load. His notes on the difficulties with finding containers, arrack, and corks is worth examining! Remarkably many of his specimens are still held at the Natural History Museum in Berlin. Bloch named some fishes after John (including the genus Johnius) and it would appear that John had a native artist draw some specimens. Unfortunately there appears to be no trace of any original drawings by Indians in the archives of the museum in Berlin.

The New Jerusalem Church with
the monogram of the Danish King Frederik IV

Another collector who worked in this colonial Danish region was a man with the impressive name of Dagobert Karl de Daldorff. Daldorff died somewhere in Calcutta, I doubt anyone has found much about his life there... Interestingly Fabricius named a dragonfly species collected by Daldorff as Tholymis tillarga - people looking at the etymology of "Tillarga" have apparently drawn a blank - given its abdomen colour I wonder if it is from Thilak - thilaka - somehow Latinized as tillarga. 

Here is a comment from Endersby and Fliedner (2015) :

The genus Tholymis seems to be an amalgam of parts of other genus names. The species name was capitalised and, at the time of its naming, the practice of capitalising proper nouns used as species names was still in vogue, so Tillarga was probably the name of a place or possibly a person. No amount of searching has revealed its origin -

 

Tholymis tillarga - photo by Rison Thumboor

Useful sources

• Endersby, Ian and Heinrich Fliedner (2015) The naming of Australia's Dragonflies. Busybird Publishing. p. 5.
  
• Zworykin, D.D. (2023). Anabas testudineus (Bloch, 1792), climbing perch (Anabantidae), and its discovery in India. Archives of Natural History 50(1):22-34.