Hello all,
I've returned from the field, and I have tons of pictures. Unfortunately, you'll have to wait until Monday to see the pics, so please check back some time after then. In the meantime I have quite a few stories to tell.
One day we were walking in Koothankulam Bird Sanctuary, looking for ground-nesting birds in an arid area spotted with a few grungy puddles of water. I'm walking along, and I notice that I had accumulated a cloud of insects at my feet. At first, I was suspicious (because I'm in India, and I'm not entirely sure what creatures can cause me pain or death). But, upon closer inspection, I realized that it was a swarm of dragonflies (sidenote: these happen to be my favorite insect, I think). Then, I begin wonder why these little jeweled fairies were attracted to my feet. All of a sudden, I remembered the cattle egret, one of the birds I'm studying. The cattle egret is known to hang around livestock (hence it's name), gobbling the insects that the cows stir up while mooooving about. These dragonflies were using my shuffly feet for the same purpose. As I stirred up the insects, the dragonflies formed a neat little forcefield around me. It is an interesting way to travel.
While in this same area, I noticed something I've found twice before (usually as a result of being placed in the baseball outfield at family reunions and having nothing better to do than look at the ground): a four leaf clover! I reached down to pick it up, and I realized that the whole bunch of "clovers" had four leaves. Looking around, I realized that all of these "clovers" were the lucky variety; no three-leaf cousins could be found. I'm sure there is a moral to this story. Maybe all Indians are very lucky because of their wealth of four-pronged weeds. Maybe three-leaf clovers are, in fact, the lucky variety, and we have been fooled our whole lives. Or perhaps this plant was not a clover and all, and superstitions make nice bedtime stories.
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3 comments:
Well if we use the knowledge that Science gives us, we know for certain that four-leaf clovers are lucky. I don't think anyone is going to dispute that...it's science.
However, in India, the four-leaf clovers are not lucky, because of their abundance. The law of conservation of fortune tells us that so much luck could not exist in one place, because it must be outweighed by bad luck and/or no luck by a ratio of at least 50:1.
Moral of the story: you should have been looking for five-leaf clovers. But that still leaves unanswered the question of leprechauns in India...with all those gods, one must be a leprechaun.
I'll shut up now. Glad to know you're back from "the field".
no five leafers yet
but still looking
I did find some three leaf ones outside of my door. Maybe they followed me from America.
I hope your new three-leaf clovers aren't invasive! I don't want to hear about India's food supply being decimated by decidedly unlucky clovers.
Also, I think my dad planted the four-leaf variety of clover at some point, then pressed a few, framed them, and gave them to my brother and I as deceiving Christmas gifts. I was pretty excited about it until I went to his house and saw half a dozen others...
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