"This is a wonderful day. I've never seen this one before." – Maya Angelou

Author - Kabir Sabde Pune, November 2025 At the Kasarsai Dam near Pune, we had a brief encounter with a Russell’s Viper (Daboia Russelii). While it was brief, one of our family members spotted it basking by the swampy area. When I went there the RV started rapidly moving because of the loud gasp I made when I heard it was there. It was gone in a flash! For those who are curious, a Russell’s Viper is a venomous snake in South Asia. It’s one of big four dangerous snakes in Ind

The butterfly that found us this morning was a Romulus —one of the female forms of the Common Mormon. She carried on her wings the delicate deception her lineage has perfected over millennia, a Batesian mimic  of the inedible Crimson Rose. In the wild, survival often depends on the art of resemblance, and she wore that inheritance with a kind of understated grace. Romulus Common Mormon She moved lightly through the tagar , those simple pinwheel flowers that have stood in our

The more time I spend outdoors, the more the world reveals itself—small truths unfolding at the pace of a bird’s wingbeat. From space, the Earth shimmers blue, and one might imagine that blue pigment runs freely through nature. Yet it is almost absent. What we read as blue is rarely pigment at all, but the physics of light , shaped and bent by intricate structures we can scarcely see. Some creatures wear a blue that shifts like heat on a horizon—the iridescent flash of the Pu