Phoenix dactylifera was the first scientific name I had learnt in school before Passer Domesticus, Columba livia domestica, Corvus splendens splendens and then onto Haliastur indus, Phalacrocorax niger, Phoenicopterus roseus . Admittedly, I did have a penchant for complicated names, and never shied from bragging the expansions of KLM and KGB. Srikumar Chatterjee was a senior scientist with the Zoological Survey of India’s Calcutta branch and was a co-passenger with my parents to and from his workplace in the same “chartered bus”, during the early 1980s, when I was introduced to him. Much before I learnt about “ornithology” or picked up a Dillon Ripley or Salim Ali, Srikumar’da had introduced me to a group of individuals with a vested interest in nature and conservation. They called themselves “Naturalists” and formed a club “Prakiti Samsad” or Nature Team. My tryst with birds, cannot be complete without a reference to the influence that the zoologist & good friend Srikumar Chatterjee had on me in those formative years, although I must say, that none of these made me a wildlife enthusiast anymore than anyone else. Srikumar Chatterjee was a member of the early Indian expeditions to the Antarctica and while many journals refer to photographs shot by him, there are hardly any of his photographs on the internet. I have a copy of his famous Albratross over the Antarctica shot circa 1982. Having lost touch with him, I tried to track him down a few years ago, when I got to know that he died of depression, a year after he returned from the Antarctica expedition. Wildlife photography is not my forte, but who doesn’t love nature.
