We all know what it feels like to change pace. From weekday to weekend, from workday to holiday, from city to town to village to the middle of nowhere, our movements in time and space are linked to shifts in how quickly we move through life. Adjusting to these shifts is tricky — waking up grumpy on Monday mornings must, I imagine, be near-universal. But if the day-to-day changes of a single human life can span such a range of speeds, imagine adjusting to the varied paces of the rest of nature. To watch animals, however, we must adjust. Watching animals depends on looking at the world from their perspective, understanding that they too live their lives according to rhythms that vary by hour, day, month, season and year.
Sometimes, watching animals means mimicking their daily routine. As a lizard biologist, I spend the summer months leading a lizard-paced life. I get out of bed at sunrise and reach the forest or park or field where the lizards live just as the sun’s rays become warm. As the lizards bask serenely in the sun, waiting to heat up before beginning the day’s activities, I can spend a little time waking up fully myself. As the day gets hotter, the lizards become more active. They start running down tree trunks to snap insects out of the grass. They begin interacting with each other, the males putting on a show to advertise their presence at a certain spot, courting females and chasing away rivals, if any. My own activity levels rise concurrently, as I rush to keep a video camera trained on the lizard I’m watching, or quickly move from tree to tree to write down what the lizards are doing. By noon, however, things begin to slow down for the lizards and me — it’s too hot for both of us. Afternoon naps can be a good idea for humans and animals alike.
Sometimes, watching animals means moving much further and much faster than them — driving across a landscape in a sturdy jeep on a safari, for example. I’ve only ever been a passenger on safaris, but I imagine that knowledge of the biology of all kinds of animals in the landscape must enter into a complex calculation within the jeep-driver’s head — if we drive 6km east and reach the waterhole by sunset, how likely are we to see the pack of wild dogs that we spotted there two days ago? Like the convergence in time of afternoon naps, here a spatial convergence between humans and other animals assists us — many animals choose to move on the same roads that we drive on. My most memorable animal sightings have occurred on roads — tigers sprinting and leopards calmly walking across roads; a two-foot-long, impressively armoured giant plated lizard basking on a sandy road; a whole troupe of baboons stretched across 50 metres of road, grooming themselves and each other in fading evening light.
And, sometimes, watching animals means slowing down completely, waiting for them to come to you. This works best if you position yourself near something that you know the animals want. Often, that ‘something’ is water. I once had the chance to sit for a full day at a waterhole in Kruger National Park in north-eastern South Africa. Over the course of the day, we got to know many inhabitants of the savannah quite intimately — a stately fish eagle surveyed the water from its perch on a dead tree, inquisitive hornbills hopped onto our jeep and peeked in through the window, waterbuck sipped carefully from the edge of the waterhole before turning away to show us their white bull’s-eye-patterned bottoms. I watched a pied kingfisher dive into the waterhole again and again and again, never striking fish but nonetheless so determined that it remained oblivious to the two young male elephants play-fighting in the water nearby.
The animal interactions I’ve described here are the times when my changes in pace paid off. But like the pied kingfisher I watched at the waterhole for whom the perfect match between dive trajectory and fish location remained elusive, I sometimes feel out of sync with the creatures I’m trying to watch. On cloudy days, for example, my sun-based scheme for watching lizards fails miserably. It is then that the sheer variety of nature comes in handy — with so many creatures, each moving at its own pace, it is overwhelmingly likely that my pace, whatever it may be, matches the pace of something. The first rains of the monsoon may signal the end of the lizards’ season of maximum activity, but it marks the emergence of the red velvet mites, and there will always be an animal to watch.
( Ambika Kamath studies organismic evolutionary biology at Harvard University.)