PPEH presents the Arts of Noticing, Thinking with Doing by Pooja Nayak
The following Field Note is by PPEH Graduate Fellow and EnviroLab member Pooja Nayak, a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and South Asia Studies at Penn. In this introduction to her "Arts of Noticing" series, Pooja invites us "to attune to practices across disciplines, of becoming-student, in the hope of learning how to see, feel, touch, and listen."
"Arts of Noticing" will also comprise three additional parts by interdisciplinary contributors, edited by Pooja and Mia D’Avanza. These pieces will be posted on the PPEH website in the coming weeks.
At midnight, our jeep turned towards the nearby forest patch in southwestern India. The area’s proximity to the mountainous Kudremukh National Park meant the February air was cool. The houses we encountered were separated by forest patches, mostly silent, with an occasional transistor sounding faintly in the distance. We were on our way to collect ‘Mecopodas’, a type of katydid or bush-cricket.
I was accompanying Dr. Harish Prakash, then a Ph.D. student with the Animal Communication Lab at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), in his experiments to study how prey-predator interactions play out in this landscape, where homes, small areca and rubber plantations, forest patches, and paddy fields abutted one another. In the lab’s parlance, the Mecopoda was the “prey”, and the Megaderma spasma bat the “predator”. The lab’s previous analysis of the discards in bat roosts had shown a strong preference for mecopodas as food. Dr. Prakash explained we need to catch thirty to forty mecopodas: as bait, and as model prey.
In the forest, Sudhakar Malekudiya, the local field expert, and his two protégés led our group. We followed, our headlamps casting a milky glow, and stomped heavily to let snakes know we were around. Sudhakar, who belongs to an Adivasi (indigenous) community from the region, shared that though he had lived in the area all his life, he found the biologists’ interest in crickets peculiar at first. His interest increased as he helped with experiments, and his knowledge and relationships in the area meant Sudhakar worked full-time with the research team.
