The Life in a Paddyfield

The Life in a Paddyfield

There have been times when I have sat alone and dreamt of living an agrarian life, not for anything else but for the closeness to Earth such a life offers. Not that my body is built for the arduous routines of farming. When the rice planting is happening at Pathashaala, on a few occasions, I, along with some students, have volunteered ourselves to also participate in it. We are given a contemptible corner of a field far from the main planting. The village women who come at daybreak to do the rice planting continue till the evening. But in my case within half an hour of bending my back about a hundred and fifty degrees from my hip girdle, I start noticing strong symptoms of vertigo and my backbone refuses to return to their original position for a long time. When not too many eyes are looking, I quietly walk out of the field like an Australopithecus. Some of the kids, who have been waiting for the chance to do the same, while also not wanting to be seen as the first person to leave the field, follow behind me.


The cultivation of paddy, right from sowing to harvest, is entwined with the livelihoods of all our countryside wildlife. Many days before the planting, the acres of weed laden fields are pumped with water with a five-horsepower motor so that the hard baked ground becomes tender enough for ploughing. The ploughing tractor arrives one afternoon and I request the driver to allow me to sit beside him while the vehicle works on the fields.  The sound of its engine is to birds, what the lunch bell is to the students. On certain occasions I have counted upto fifty Bee-eaters and Black drongos along with a few Kingfishers, Treepies and Flycatchers, congregate on the wires and trees nearby and almost the same number of Egrets and Pond herons gather on the levees and in the adjacent fields. Over the decades these birds have learnt to distinguish between the noise of this vehicle from all the others. A friend and fellow birdwatcher told me that in his village the tractor would at times be parked by the fields the previous day, since it comes from a distance, and he has observed birds camping overnight in the vicinity even before the machine got to work the next morning.


As the tractor’s blades roll while it rattles up and down the field, it shreds through the overgrown vegetation like a giant horizontal mixer grinder. Centipedes and crickets are tossed up, spiders and rice field crabs scamper out of the way as they lose their cover and many more insects take to their wings to escape the annihilation. Cattle egrets and Pond herons follow closely behind the tractor, not caring about the slush being splashed on them, picking up all the maimed insects and crustaceans and their limbs, carapaces and entrails strewn along the way. Any lucky escapees too are confronted by a fleet of ravenous beaks. All the other birds which have gathered swoop down upon quarry left exposed on the water or catch them mid air as they flee. The greatest spectacle of all is the appearance of Whiskered Terns. One rarely sees them so much inland as they prefer hanging around near wetlands. But once the ploughing begins, I don’t know who sends word, but sooner or later these Terns too turn up for the feast. They may even arrive only the next day to salvage the left over scraps, but they definitely do come each and every time. To croplands closer to the coast the larger Caspian and Gull-billed Terns also drop in at this event but only the Whiskered make it much further inland. Terns are the experts when it comes to catching waterborne prey and they don’t bother getting their feathers and feet wet. So when they arrive on the scene, the Drongos and Bee-Eaters find them tough competition. Black Drongos however are vile creatures and will use thuggery to attain their ends. They sit waiting and plotting amongst themselves on the telegraph wires till a Tern swoops into the water and returns with a grub in its bill. Immediately two or more Drongos pounce at it screeching threateningly and lunge and harass it till the bird drops its catch and beats a frightened retreat. The paralyzed prey on the ground is then consumed by one of the ruffians and then they return to their perch, eagerly waiting till the next Tern rises with a catch. 


More than a hundred women from the village come to the campus to transplant the rice saplings from the seed bed to the fields where they will grow till maturity. They are paid between a hundred and fifty to two hundred rupees for the day’s planting (depending on area and duration of work) and some of my colleagues from the administration skip their meals to supervise the planting. In a crowd like this it is very difficult to see who is working and who is just miming with the group and invariably each time a handful of ladies suddenly turn up on the scene just when the cash is being distributed, claiming their payment for the day’s work.


The mass irrigation of the paddy lands stirs a whole community which has been dormant underground who otherwise wouldn’t awake till the monsoons. Rice field crabs surface from their subterranean tunnels along with their co-hibernators, the Apple snails. So do many snakes. A host of frogs which were erstwhile practically fossilized within the rock solid sun-baked clay, soak up life from the moisture and emerge through the cracks. Soon butterflies like the Evening browns, Bush browns, many Skippers and a vast variety of moths flit about the rice plants, surveying for good spots to deliver their eggs. Some moths lay dozens of eggs on a single blade of rice and die right there post-partum still clutching on to the plant. Look for all their caterpillars hiding within the folds of the leaf sheaths and bored-in stems.


A paddy leaf is a lavish lunch table for many a spider, and hence they too are quick to immigrate into the new crop. Each time I take a walk on the bunds, gazing across the cropland, I see several Wolf spiders or Lynx spiders with Asiatic Rice-borer moths between their mandibles, which are among the principal pests of paddy. Signature and Silver orb spiders build snares across saplings to trap airborne pests. Nursery web spiders surf on the water patrolling for prey near the stems. My partially identified photo-checklist of spiders I have spotted in the paddyfields within the campus has about twenty five species in it. Surely these arachnids are the chief pest controllers for any crop. And to their ranks one must add the Water scorpions, the Dragonflies, Damselflies and their larvae swimming in the water.  Birds like Prinias, Cisticolas and Warblers too do their part in insect and caterpillar control but they appear only after the plants have reasonably grown and their stalks are sturdy enough for them to perch on. One will find that an organic field is of immensely greater interest to the naturalist than a pesticide laden one, which is practically a green barren land with no prey, no predator, barely any life, hardly any drama.





Kanniappan, the late on-campus farmer, used to tell me that the Rice field crabs and the Apple snails are the unseen, unsung menaces to the rice crop. The crabs snip the tender parts of the sapling under the water with their pincers and consume the tasty bits. Especially a newly planted crop is a paradise for the crabs and a crab affected part of the crop has little shreds of rice sheaths floating on the water. The crop over time starts turning brown. Snipes arrive soon to put a check on these crab parties. These birds wait patiently outside the tunnels of these crustaceans and use their long stocky bills like harpoon whalers to stab their quarry when they surface. An empty carapace and a pair of dismembered pincers wiped clean of its innards just outside a tunnel is a sure sign of a Snipe’s presence. But even if the bird is unable to contain them, the local staff from the village frequently take home some crabs in little steel buckets to make a spicy gravy with them at home, to have with boiled rice.


Apple snails on the other hand are more secretive creatures. They are aquatic and host a dense carpet of algae on their shells which helps obscure them from view in the slush of the paddyfield. Just under its eyes are its several tentacles which it uses to execute swimming strokes and grope around for food. When it is disturbed, it has a trapdoor or an operculum attached to the end of its body using which it will shut tightly the shell’s opening and stay indoors. My late friend told me that these creatures graze on the roots of the paddy and over time make them wilt. So if he sees them when he is working on the field, he collects them and flings them one by one over the fence. Some of the locals, the youth especially, prefer having these snails roasted and salted along with their liquor. But he despises them all together. Nature has a custom designed control for these slimy Gastropods. It is more likely to find Open-Billed Storks in cultivations than in marshes or any other wetland habitat, quite possibly because its prey’s preference for habitat is changing too. These Storks forage in flocks but not a single plant do they flatten as they stalk for snails. And I say so with certainty because these birds spend many hours every day in these fields for months together and if they were in the habit of treading on the rice plants, the whole crop should have been underwater within days. The adult birds have a gape caused by the downward curvature of their lower bills but this feature of its bill is not to use it like a nutcracker as is popularly theorized. To know this first hand, do examine a patch of a field attended by the Openbills. You will find that whole and unbroken empty snail shells are left behind by them. The only thing I have seen it use its gape for is to carry a snail it has found away from its snatching comrades, to relish it in privacy. The stork uses its bill instead to wedge its beak into the operculum of the slippery mollusk, and on getting a grip at the creature inside, shakes the shell off and swallows the soft body. Often the bird is nimble enough to silently creep up behind a snail while it is moving around, with its body outside, and catch it before it tries to shut itself in. But for the larger part of the day, the Openbill storks spend their time lazing on bare canopies, with hunched backs and stretched wings, feeling the sun and the breeze, till their breeding duties begin and cut short their leisure.

The other reason I suppose paddyfields attract many water birds, barring its diversified range of prey supply, is that the irrigated water levels are just right for them to wade in and hence one can always find some waders here. Sandpipers, Stilts, Stints, Plovers and Shanks too use these fields as foraging grounds while they spend the winter in our country. The resident White breasted Waterhen is like Shakespeare’s soldier, ‘Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel’ and walks about boisterously like a landlord who has let the rice cultivation on lease for all the other creatures.  The Yellow and Pied wagtails though are content with whatever morsels they can find while they patrol up and down on the levees.


The whole of our countryside transforms its complexion as the rice kernels mature. Like when the Oak forests enter autumn, our Paddyfields turn from a soothing, pacifying green to a gaudy golden shade which tickles the eye in the sun. Change also do the agrifauna as now the stalks of the rice plants have thickened and its panicles hang on every side with the weight of the grain, leaving little space in between them. Few waders can now be accommodated in the fields but the Waterhens and Crakes still skulk about in the grid of archways beneath the crop.


As the grains ripen more and more they require lesser water and one will stumble upon Rat snakes and Cobras frequently on the prowl which take down the Rats which are busy ransacking the grain. Flocks of Weaver birds, Tri-colored, Spotted and White-rumped Munias too, make the most of all the fresh grain available before the harvest. I can’t bail out these seed eaters in any way from all the plundering they do, quite to the acute exasperation of farmers. From what I have seen, much of a farmer’s job on his fields during this part of the crop cycle is to run from one end to the other, yelling and chasing away troops of Weavers and Munias which have descended in. But just as the river gives back to the ocean the moisture it constantly lends it, so too we owe Mother Nature a portion of our harvest so that she can continue to give, so that the cycle is completed. In Permaculture, this is practiced consciously. Called sacrificial farming, a part of the field is left untouched, for giving back. And these little seed-eaters are earth’s own agents. Let us bear in mind that apart from a handful of birds, the dozens of others which visit our fields are beneficial to the crop. It is land greedy Real estate and water greedy Soft drink factories which are the real savage threats to our farmers and our food production.

Harvest is a celebration for us as well as for all the life around. As the enormous harvesting vehicle clatters and chugs to and fro cutting the stalks of rice, the birds once again gather to feast on the fleeing invertebrates. When it leaves, the land is strewn with grain which is food to all the granivores which now can feed without being felons. On Pongal day the whole school gathers and we express our gratitude to earth for giving us our sustenance and eat the freshly harvested rice boiled in an earthen pot. There is a different quality of respect everyone feels when the rice one eats is part of one’s landscape, part of one’s life. The horns of the school cows are painted and are adorned with turmeric and saffron, honoring them for giving us our daily milk. Stumps of sugarcane are then eaten by everyone and the older boys rip the tough skin off the cane and give the juicy insides to the younger kids. And for the next few days endless ant files criss-cross the pathways, each ant carrying a single rice kernel in its jaws, back to its nest.

harvest over…

ants enter their nests

with fresh grain

-       M.Yuvan