Summer With A Chiropterologist

“Jisne forest ko raat me nahi dekha, usne kuch nahi dekha (one who hasn’t seen the forest at night, hasn’t seen anything),” said Rohit, as Zarif and I sat beside him.

- Suthira Lahiri

A stream gurgled softly in the distance. The dark forest sky, tall trees and distant call of frogs, all added to the surrealism of the night. Perhaps the thing about darkness is that it makes one aware of one’s presence. It was unlike anything that I had experienced before.

The watch read 9 p.m. We sat in the darkness, occasionally switching on the headlamp to focus the light toward the spot where the ‘sound’ had come from. The mist nets were set further upstream, and all we could do was wait. For what, you ask...? For bats!

DESTINATION PANGOT

It all started one fine morning, when a sudden realisation dawned on me. I had nothing to do during the long, hot summer vacation! So I messaged Rohit Chakravarty, a reseacher working in Uttarakhand, in the hope that I could volunteer on his bat study. A confirmation from him set the wheels in motion.

Within days I found myself on a bus to Nainital, and then onward to Pangot, a small, dreamy village 20 km. from Nainital. Later in the day, Rohit and his field assistant Zarif, met me at Jungle Lore, a birding lodge, set beautifully in the village. An alumnus of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, Rohit is currently working on a documentation and ‘call’ library of bat species found in Uttarakhand. Rohit briefed me on the agenda, which sounded interesting and fun (and a little frightening since I had never spent time in a forest at night before).

BAT SIGNALS

We began by surveying the area around the village and decided that the area near a forest stream would be a good site to catch bats. Why a stream? Because its course offers an uninterrupted passageway for bats to fly through the forest.