Alone, kneeling, with your hand deep inside a freshly laid nest, you cant help but keep an eye out down the beach for anyone approaching. Some nights I’d see a tall wraith-like figure approaching at a fast and peculiarly-recognizable pace.
Mayavan, dressed in a white-grey shirt, lungi and head-wrap, carrying his cloth bags and (the appendage that made me see red) a metal rod, would walk up, casually hawk into the sand and proceed to light himself a beedi. If I was yet to find the actual nest, he’d hang around and begin to smirk, breaking into a chuckle once in a while. With his years of experience, he knew exactly where the nest would be and never lost an opportunity to enjoy himself at my expense.
I have seen him work; in just a couple of probes with the rod he carried, he’d be on to the nest. Transferring the eggs into his bag took him about a minute and he was off down the beach to find the next clutch. I, on the other hand, worked far more gently with the eggs, had to collect measurements of the nesting site and the nest itself.
His timing in leaving me at my nest was finely tuned, giving himself enough time to get to the next one ahead of me. So while there was time he would alternatively chat about various things while deriding my efforts at locating the nest. A time or two, in absolute disgust, he would use his probe and with unerring accuracy point out the nest and leave.
This went on and in time I got better at giving him some reasonable competition.
MAYAVAN SHOOK MY WORLD ! Though, he did the same thing every night! Between 1983 and 1987, Mayavan was a Conservationist. From 1988 onwards, he was a Poacher.
