I will never stop being excited about the Western Ghats.
There, even being woken up in the morning is a thrilling experience, because the bird doing the waking up is the Malabar Whistling Thrush, a bird you will see – or, more likely than not, hear – nowhere else in the world. The Ghats have a stunning sixteen species of endemic birds. For an area that’s not an island, it’s an impressive total; indeed, it shows the uniqueness of the habitats found in the Anamalais – the sholas, the rainforests, the swamps…
Let’s pull some organisms out of a hat and see what happens. Got a tree? There’s a one-in-two chance it’s endemic – betting odds, I would say. Even better, catch a frog? Two-in-three chance. Best yet, tiger beetle? Four-in-five odds. And that’s not even counting the species yet to be discovered. Just recently a species of frog was found that not only hadn’t been seen in a hundred years, but was also proven, after genetic analysis, to be an entirely new genus – as in, a member of a group of frogs entirely new to science.
Ahhhhhhh.
So, no, I will never be annoyed at the Malabar Whistling Thrus, even if it starts singing at 4 in the morning. (It often does.) It’s a symbol of the amazing biodiversity of the Western Ghats, of the enormous and barely-understood treasure contained in those hills’ valleys and peaks – and that, that is something I can never stop being excited about.
somewhere up a tree 