I had written two previous blog-posts on my experience with biodiversity documentation ( All things bright and beautiful ) 1 and some sample photos ( All things great and small) 2. Following on with the song by Cecil Frances Alexander, I have named this post after the third line of the song:
All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful
The Lord God made them all
As I had mentioned in an earlier post, my interest in biodiversity documentation arose from suffering a myocardial infarction in 2008 3 – a reminder that some of the painful and difficult experiences in our lives are permitted by God to lead us into a new direction or introduce us to something new that He wants us to experience.
After nearly 30 years at the Makunda Christian Leprosy & General Hospital in Assam, my wife Ann and I have moved to the Christian Medical College, Vellore as consultants to the Missions Department. Our work involves visiting mission hospitals across the country. On most of these visits, we get up early in the morning to walk around the campus of the hospital that we are visiting or surrounding areas to document the biodiversity of that location. This has enabled me to upload a growing number of observations after leaving Makunda to iNaturalist 4 – I have over 20,000 observations of nearly 3000 species on this website from India at present and lead the observers from the country 5. This is a map of the location of my observations from India (till May 2023):
Over the years, I developed a deep curiosity about all living things. This led to photographing everything that I saw, identifying them and learning about them. It led to publication of articles and the writing of short chapters and a growing understanding of God’s wise and wonderful natural world.
In November 2022, I was invited to speak on “Biodiversity Documentation and Research” – a part of the “Nature Talks” series at the Christian Medical College. A recording of this talk can be viewed by clicking on the link below. Please note that there were some internet disruptions during the talk and you can skip over the section between 25.50 and 29.50: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9XVPXJFu-I
I became interested in this activity when I was 44 years old and I am surprised at the power of our God-given brains that enable us to learn something new and do well at it inspite of the passage of time. I did all this work without taking leave from my busy work as a surgeon at Makunda – on early mornings and late nights. I hope that those who listen develop an interest in the world around them and marvel at the creations of a wise and wonderful God.
Christian mission hospitals should be God’s institutions of healing in a world of suffering. They have the potential to ‘close the gap’ in access to healthcare and provide high quality accessible services in the most remote and needy parts of the world to those who need them the most – the poor and marginalized.
In 1993, my wife Ann and me moved to a remote part of Assam in northeast India. We were led by verses in the Bible (Jeremiah 29:11-13 for me and Isaiah 6:8 for Ann) to what God wanted us to do with our lives. Over the following 27 years, God took us by our hands and provided us with all the encouragement, strength and wisdom required to transform a closed-down hospital to a thriving institution bringing healing and transformation to many surrounding communities. (1) We were not alone, God brought many committed staff to join us over the years to make this possible.
I was privileged to be invited to speak at six sessions on “Medical Missions” at the (virtual) South Asian regional conference of the International Christian Medical and Dental Association in November 2020. I am not an expert on medical missions but spoke from our experience in walking with God and witnessing a great transformation take place in our hospital.
Besides running hospitals, our societies and trusts often run schools and colleges as well as nursing and paramedical training programs or have the right to start schools and colleges, this is a good option to consider as there are many benefits. Our founding documents may allow us to carry out many other activities as well.
We can run community health and development programs that benefit local communities either on our own or in partnership with other agencies. A lot of information can also be gained by community observations and this can be used to make our services more accessible to our target communities.
Telling others about the impact of God’s presence in our lives is important, especially when it is this spirit that has motivated us to our lives of service. Our motivation to talk about our personal experience as Christians is due to the peace, contentment and purpose in life that it has brought us and the desire to share this with others. We must however be aware of the changing rules of our nations and know that it is not by spending our material resources into this effort that we are able to talk about the life-changing experience of accepting Christ into our lives but by people experiencing a personal touch from Him. If we can simply live lives trusting and obeying God, opportunities for people to experience such a touch will come simply because God’s spirit lives in us and He will communicate His love for people through our lives.
Some hospitals have significant land and other assets which can be developed, not only for the institution itself but for surrounding communities. Research work can also be done on biodiversity documentation and environmental work, especially when many of our hospitals are located in remote areas where little work has been done over the years. Each hospital will have its own local opportunities which it should exploit.
We should also explore training opportunities to disseminate our learnings, these could be informal or formal and in partnership with other like-minded agencies.
Our hospitals are also good sites for research that is relevant to the low-resource settings in which we function. It is certainly a challenge to engage in research activities when we are hard-pressed for time in our busy hospitals but when situations improve and opportunities come, we should take them. Our learnings should be published so that they can benefit others too.
We should count the costs of missionary work – health issues, concerns about our families – parents and children, fear and security related issues, financial concerns, worldly disgrace – these are temporary trivial inconveniences that we should be willing to face in exchange for things that money cannot buy – contentment in this world and riches in heaven.
Medical missionary life is full of uncertainty and constant challenges but God will be by our side, strengthening and encouraging us and giving us the wisdom needed to take the right decisions.
We should work together to formulate plans to help sick hospitals recover and new ones started in areas of need. I have mentioned the TIRS project which could bring to attention of funders and volunteers the good work being done in remote low-resource settings by our mission hospitals.(2,3)
I close with some concluding thoughts. I hope that this series of talks were useful to those who have listened and there are some learnings that could be applied to different situations. May God bless us all.
I closed that post with this song which we all sang during our school days:
All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful
The Lord God made them all
– Song by Cecil Frances Alexander
This post is entirely filled with photographs that God has enabled me to take over the years. Browse through them and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did when I took them. I have written short notes to accompany each image. If you want to see more of my images, please visit my Flickr site ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/ivijayanand/ ) and if you want to see them as observations, they are here ( https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/ivijayanand )
The Blue-throated Barbet (Psilopogon asiatica) is one of the commonest birds on our campus. This photo shows the rich colouring of this beautiful bird. It is also an example of an ideal bird photo – head turned just right with a good ‘bokeh’ in the background.
This is a Chestnut-winged Cuckoo (Clamator coromandus). Cuckoos are known to lay their eggs in the nests of other birds – brood parasitism. This species lays its eggs in the nests of the necklaced laughingthrushes.
One of the common birds of our campus, the White-rumped Shama (Copsychus malabaricus) – it has a beautiful song. A recording of its call is here: https://www.xeno-canto.org/248160
One of the night owls, the Brown Boobook (Ninox scutulata). It is very difficult to get a daytime photograph like this one.
Birds display behaviour and emotions like other living creatures. Two Spotted Owlets (Athene brama) enjoy sitting out side by side with some allo-preening.
Phayre’s Leaf Langurs (Trachypithecus phayrei) are a species of Endangered primate that is found in our area.
The common Rhesus Macaque (Macaca mulatta) – the first photo shows a couple eating a tuber and the second one shows juveniles at playtime.
One of our campus orchids (Eulophia zollingeri). Orchids are one of the two largest families (along with Asteraceae) of flowering plants. This one is a terrestrial orchid (growing on the ground). The first orchids discovered were terrestrial and had two tubers underground – they were therefore named orchids due to their resemblance to testes.
Another common campus species, this time an epiphytic one – growing on trees – Cymbidium bicolor
Aeginitia indica is a root-parasite. The shoots come up from the forest floor in the monsoon season and soon produce the colourful flowers.
Forests inside our campus are home to all sorts of flora. This is an unusual fern, Helminthostachys zeylanica.
Forests are full of fungi of all sizes and colours – including these tiny vivid red mushrooms – Hygrocybe sp.
North East India is home to unique herpetofauna. This is a pit viper from our campus – Trimeresurus erythrurus
Our campus is home to large non-venomous snakes as well. This is a Burmese Python – Python bivittatus
All living creatures employ a number of measures to survive, including mimicry. This tiny frog looks like a bird-dropping on a leaf – Theloderma baibungense
The largest bats in the world are found across India. This is the Flying Fox – Pteropus giganteus – a mother bat breast-feeding an infant inflight.
One of the common squirrel species here in our campus is the Pallas’s Squirrel – Callosciurus erythaeus
A family of Asian Small-Clawed Otters – Aonyx cinerea – found in our campus as well as in surrounding areas. These are the smallest species of Otters in the world.
One of the common species of Mongoose in our campus, the Crab-eating Mongoose – Herpestes urva
North East India has seen a lot of elephant-human conflict in recent years, not surprising as people encroach into their habitats. These are wild elephants – about to enter a tea-estate bordering jungle.
Makunda has a wonderful arachnid biodiversity. This is one of our tarantulas – Chilobrachys assamensis – about the size of one’s palm.
Another ground-level view of the same tarantula – showing iridiscent blue colouring on its legs. Tarantulas are kept as pets in some parts of the world.
Spiders come in all shapes and sizes. This is a tiny one that mimics ants – Amyciaea forticeps
This spider looks like a piece of thread – Ariamnes sp.
There are cunning spiders too. This one is a Portia sp. – known to be an ‘intelligent’ spider, this one uses different strategies to fool and eat other spiders, including drumming on a web to appear as prey.
Many butterflies are named after Shakespeare characters and ranks of the Armed Forces. This is a rare one from our campus – the Harlequin – Taxila haquinus
We have many colourful dragonflies. This one is especially bright and beautiful with a mettallic iridescence – The Greater Bluewing – Rhyothemis plutonia
Most people think that moths are dull and boring. These are male and female Thyidid moths of the species Glanycus insolitus. Identifying moths is not easy – I still struggle, sometimes not even able to identify which family a moth belongs to – I thank experts like Roger Kendrick who have patiently identified moths for me on Facebook and iNaturalist over the years for my limited knowledge of moths.
Two more spectacular moths. Carriola sp. on the left with its intricate green veins within clear windows and Nevrina procopia on the right with its delicate patterning.
I’m closing this post with a snail. This one has small spines on its shell and belongs to the genus Endothyrella. I hope you enjoyed these photos as much as I did taking them and learning about these creatures – great and small, the Lord God made them all.
In October 2008, at the age of 44, I had a heart attack (1) at our home in the Makunda Christian Leprosy and General Hospital (www.makunda.in ), where my wife Ann and me have been working for the past 28 years. Following this, I was asked to go for daily morning walks to keep myself physically fit. As I walked through our campus, I became interested in the different wildlife (both flora and fauna) in our 350-acre forested campus. Although I had lived and worked there since 1993, I was looking with new eyes – filled with curiosity and wonder at what I was seeing. I had bought a Canon EOS 88 film camera shortly after joining the hospital and a few years earlier, I had invested in my first digital camera, a Nikon D70 with a Nikkor 28-105mm lens – all my photos were of people, developments in the hospital, places I visited and interesting medical cases that I saw. Soon after starting my morning walks, I purchased a Nikkor 70-300mm lens – I was able to get high quality macro photos with my 28-105mm lens but I needed a better ‘tele’ lens to photograph the birds.
In 2010, I was walking past our primary school one day when I noticed a pair of woodpeckers excavating a nest on a large bamboo pole used to hold up the school’s volleyball net. They looked and sounded different from a more commoner species (Dendrocopos macei) and I took photos and posted them on my newly opened account on Flickr (2). They were identified as Dendrocopos atratus, one of the rarest woodpeckers in India (later, some experts disagreed with this ID). I became excited and started photographing and posting all the birds I saw and was excited when one of them was uncommon. I also started venturing out to nearby tea-estates and forest villages to photograph them. The 70-300 lens was a basic one without vibration reduction (VR), so I bought a new one, Nikkor 70-300mm VR. I needed a good computer to process the images and bought an iMac 27”. I also bought a Sony sound recorder and a Garmin GPS. I became active on Facebook naturalist sites – ones on butterflies, moths, birds, insects – to post my images for ID and comment on other photographer’s images. After a few more years, I bought a new camera, a Nikon D300s and a Sigma 150-500mm OS lens. With the new gear, I was able to do a lot of documentation throughout the year. In 2012, I opened an account on iNaturalist and started linking my Flickr images to this wonderful site (3). Experts from around the world commented on the observations and confirmed IDs. These, ‘research grade’ observations could then be used by scientists for their research. This is the wonderful world of citizen-science where images and sounds of wildlife observations with time and GPS details can be peer-reviewed, confirmed and used for scientific advances.
In succeeding years, my gear has been upgraded further as old equipment became heavily over-used and broke down. I now have a Nikon D800 and a Nikkor 300mm f2.8 VRII for telephoto, a Micro-Nikkor 105mm f2.8 VR for macro as well as a Nikkor 24-120mm VR for general use. The old iMac broke down and had to be replaced, hard drives became full and more needed to be added. All this was considerable expense for a doctor couple in a remote rural mission hospital, but Ann approved all the expenses, for their role in my cardiac rehabilitation!
At present, I take photos of anything interesting I see in RAW, convert to JPEG with basic editing (mostly cropping) in Adobe Lightroom and upload images to Flickr. These are stored with a CC license – I noted that many serious people (those looking for images for their theses, articles, websites etc.) often search for the CC mark so that they did not have to write and seek permission from the photographer (4). Today, I have about 17,000 public images on Flickr with over 2 million views of these images! I also have nearly 9,000 observations on iNaturalist which is currently the highest number by one observer for India. Many bird photographers in the Oriental region contribute their images to the “Oriental Bird Image Database” – the best images are accepted and stored online – I have over 700 of my images on this Database (5). I have also contributed to the Internet Bird Collection (6), Avibase (7), ArKive (before it closed), Xeno-Canto (8) and a few other sites. Bulk uploads of my data have been transferred to the India Biodiversity Portal (9) and eBird. My photos have been included in books like the “Woodpeckers of the World”, “Mongooses of the World”, “Parrots of the World”, “Encyclopaedia of Animal Behavior” and many others.
I had soon photographed most of the common birds of our area and started looking at other living creatures. I was introduced to Siddharth Kulkarni, a scientist with an interest in spiders, he was also the country representative on the World Spider Catalog and I invited him to Makunda. He made a few visits and taught us to observe and document the spider biodiversity of the campus.
In 2015, I started the “Makunda Nature Club” – a group of staff and students of Makunda with an interest in documenting biodiversity, creating awareness, conservation work and research. I had published a short note on the “Mating of the Greater Coucal” online in 2011 to the Bird Ecology Study Group (10). In March 2015, on a biodiversity documentation trek in nearby forests, I noted a new bird I had not seen earlier. It was a van Hasselt’s Sunbird – Leptocoma brasiliana sperata – the first time this species had been photographed in India. I wrote an article describing this observation and the distribution of this species (with Praveen Jayadevan – a bird expert) as the first publication of the Makunda Nature Club (11). This was followed by the publication of the observation of a rare spider, Platythomisus octomaculatus, the first time it had been seen in India and the second time it had been observed since its first sighting in Sumatra 120 years earlier (12) and two Coreid bugs (Schroederia feana and Prionolomia gigas) – these observations were made, ID confirmed and published with expert assistance from Siddharth Kulkarni (the Coreid bugs were confirmed by Prof. Hemant Ghate) (13). The spider was found by one of our school-girls – a Class 8 girl from a remote rural school finding a very rare spider – for the first time in India! (14). In 2017, I photographed a rare Ghost Moth (Hepialidae) at my home in Makunda. I searched the internet and found that the global authority on these was Dr. John Grehan from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the USA. I wrote to him and after an exchange of emails, we co-wrote an article on the Ghost Moths of northeast India (15). The “Makunda Nature Club” got its excellent logo from Sukumaran Sundaresan – a design specialist who took a short sabbatical away from his corporate work to spend some time with us (16). The club also has also got its own group on the India Biodiversity Portal (17).
One day, I went to a nearby Jaintia village for the wedding of one of our staff and while waiting for the proceedings to start, met one of our old school-boys (from the Makunda Christian Higher Secondary School which we started on our campus in 2004), Rejoice Gassah. He told me that he had heard that I was going into local forests and that he was also interested. I questioned him, took him along with me on a few treks and found that he was excellent at describing birds and their calls – he had a natural talent. I requested our hospital management to appoint him as a full-time staff to help me. He was a keen-learner and I soon passed on most of what I knew to him. He accompanied me on all my field-trips and we discussed what we observed. The hospital also purchased equipment for him to use – a Sony bridge camera, an iMac 21”, a Sony sound recorder, a Garmin GPS and a Camera Trap as well as field guides. In 2017-18, he applied for and was sent to do the Green Hub Fellowship in wildlife videography – that was excellent training and we thank Ms. Rita Banerji and her team for the great program that they run (18). It is great to work with someone who has a passion for the work, has natural ability, good attitude and is willing to put a lot of effort into achieving excellence. As a full-time surgeon at the hospital, my biodiversity documentation work is limited to Sunday mornings or whenever I have free time after work. He was full time, young and healthy and we could now do field work whenever required and I could do the analysis of the data and write manuscripts for publication. He has been sent to several places (National Center for Biological Sciences, Bangalore and ATTREE to name two) to gain more knowledge and skills.
Publications on the Golden-crested Myna – Ampeliceps coronatus (19), Tawny-breasted Wren-babbler – Spelaeornis longicaudatus (20), Asian Stubtail – Urosphena squameiceps (21) and Siberian Blue Robin – Larvivora cyane (22) have come out of my work with Rejoice Gassah. He has become an expert at observations as well as documentation and has a keen eye for anything unusual. It has been a privilege to be able to mentor someone like him and I’m sure that he has a great future in biodiversity documentation and conservation in the years to come. Writing these articles also exposed me to the world of wildlife research, writing to curators of museums across the world, tracking observations from journal articles in the past and social media in the present to provide a concise description of that particular species and its distribution. Editors like Praveen Jayadevan from IndianBIRDS have helped me to learn to do this well. At present, more research is under way – on mammals, dragonflies, butterflies, birds etc. We have also had visits to our hospital by Prof. Ganesan from ATTREE (23) and hope to start work on research on the floral biodiversity of this area – one of the last bits of semi-evergreen low-altitude dipterocarp forests that remain with significant amounts of wildlife – both flora and fauna – outside protected areas.
I must also acknowledge the help and encouragement provided by Dr. Anwaruddin Chowdhury – a wildlife expert and Secretary to the Government of Assam with a huge amount of academic research and publications to his credit (24). We invited him to open the “Biodiversity Resesarch Trail” in our campus. He also invited me to contribute two short chapters – on the Golden Jackal (25) and Otters (26) in his book on the Mammals of Northeast India. We have also been visited by many wildlife and biodiversity documentation experts – Shashank Dalvi, Ramit Singhal, Jainy Kuriakose, Sankararaman, Shantanu Joshi, Sarala Khaling, Rohit George and many others. I don’t use a tripod and the equipment is heavy, not good for someone with an ejection fraction of 35% to carry – especially the Nikkor 300mm f2.8 VR II lens – I thank Club members, Basanto Fulmali and Babryl Chorei who helped carry the equipment on long treks when I was tired. My wife, Ann and daughters, Hannah and Deborah, have also helped with observations, especially with bird behavior and with rescuing some injured/sick birds and animals. As days go by, more staff see the enchanting beauty of God’s creation, learn fascinating facts and become entranced with the world of biodiversity observation and documentation. More people are buying cameras or take photos on their cell-phones and enquire about the identification or habits of the species that they have observed, this type of activity also relaxes people and makes the overall experience of working in a remote rural situation more enjoyable. I’m sure that this work will continue and bring satisfaction and happiness to many.
Sometimes, God uses shock treatment to help us to look at our worlds through different eyes and that is what happened to me after my heart-attack – whenever something happens to nudge us out of our well-trodden paths, we should always ask why did this happen, is there something that I need to change and is there another road that I need to explore. It is also a confirmation of the fact that God has given us such wonderful brains that someone like me with no interest or knowledge of wildlife could become an accomplished citizen-scientist in a short time – starting at midlife. More of us, whatever may be our background, should consider looking at the biodiverse world around us, maybe that world is beckoning to us too – we need to take that first step and enter into the world of God’s creations, where everything is bright and beautiful.
The Sparrow's Nest 