Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park

We're Hiring for the post of 'Nature Educator' at Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park!
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If you love spending time outdoors you love working with children, this role is for you. Scan to QR code to apply!

Hello folks, we've recently started rearing moths at our Visitors Centre. The objective is simple: learn, understand and document the close-knit relations between semi-arid moths and plants.

While there's a good amount of documentation available for butterflies and their various life stages -- with photographs, info on host plants, and so on -- there's simply not enough info our there for moths. So we're trying, in our own little way, to document some of it!

We're taking it slow, trying to look after baby caterpillars well, feeding them, and being careful about releasing them back into the wild after the adults emerge.

For the curious folks out there: come visit and see our set up!

In these images is a nephele hespera moth, whose host is Carissa spinarum (junglee karonda)

Special walks in August!

Latest from the park and its inhabitants: Part 2

1 - shield bug eggs. Look closely and you will see--what we think is--a parasitoid wasp laying its eggs inside the shield bug eggs 😮 Egg inside egg. Nature's version of stacking russian dolls

2 - that's Missi, or Striga, a plant that shows up on Thhor roots every monsoon. It takes all its nutrition from Thhor, and therefore has no need for Chlorophyll; a plant that is not 'green'

3 - planting Oropetium in crevices that we'd made on top of our blue trail entrance gate at Jaswant Thada

4 - baby Indrokh seedlings, a rare and mysterious endemic tree. Scientifically called Terminalia coronata, though some of you might be more familiar with the old name Anogeissus sericea var. nummularia. Uff, taxonomy!

5 - Yoga pose (of an Orb weaver?) If you know this spider, pls tell us in comments who he/she is

Latest from the park and its denizens
1 - An indian owlet moth, a first for the park. Its host is an Albizia sp.
2 - We set up a light trap to spot moths last Sunday, celebrating National Moth Week
3 - A red flash butterfly, another first for the park!
4 - Paper wasps making their paper nests at our Visitors Centre. Not just our naturalists, we have many other folks waiting to welcome you at the VC!
5 - Slurp slurp! A shield bug devouring an unlucky caterpillar
6 - Paper was close up
7 - Hairy (and how!!) caterpillar of a tiger moth

The granite inselberg rises out of nowhere in the far distance, stretched convex as we see it refracted through the windshield that seems to melt as raindrops coalesce on its face. Every few seconds, wipers swipe the hill back into clear view: a gentle, grey dome of bouldery rock, growing in size every passing second on our approach.

There's something about granite hills which makes their presence feel like a big, warm hug. They don't have jagged edges or neat, defined foliations. They are gradual not abrupt, swirly not sharp, they rise slowly not unexpectedly, they’re inviting not constricting. They’re boundary-defiers that don’t fit into pre-conceived notions of size and shape, and even in their making, they're one of the last to form: unhurried, slow-cooked deep in the earth’s belly.

We’re out collecting mats of rock grass, Oropetium, that look like tiny tufts of green hair, latching precariously onto a thin layer of soil on the boulder-face, like dense masses of round hedgehog-backs. Oropetium is one of the first vascular plants to colonize the surface of rock. But its flourishing is made possible only because of the decades of work put in previously by 'biological soil crusts'. Soil crusts are curious amalgams of unrelated microscopic beings (cyanobacteria, algae, bacteria, fungi etc.) that come together and ‘work’ the mineral make-up of bare rock, and use it to slowly create the biological make-up of soil. Soil crusts can be thought of as the ‘living skins’ of a giant rock-organism, and Oropetium its ‘green fuzz’.

So parts of this granite hill are now successfully ‘ensoiled’, and it is only after soil-crusts and rock-grass have accumulated a thick enough layer of soil that other grasses, herbs, shrubs can germinate and occupy the various niches they prefer. We’re picking up a few mats to take back to the park, where we’ll place them on rock to help us kickstart this process of 'ensoilment', perhaps skip a few years of the process of succession. We aren’t sure if it’ll work…

Vinod and I climb up towards the top, searching for Monsonia and Drimia, both of which we find, and Cyanotis that we don’t. Bisari kneels on the slope below and scrapes out a few mats that he carefully places in a tray. Another granite hill, clearly visible from the top, is ravaged by mining scars and sculpted into a cone. Counter tops, floors. Swirls flattened to slabs. Our need for order and straightness, for the inert, is that hill's demise. An old Moringa tree stands tall on the lee side of the hill we're on, its branches wide as it receives misty rain. A danaid eggfly lands beside us, perhaps slurping up nutrients and water from the micro-holds formed by granite crystals.

Oh how extra special the rain is, on this parched land.

Some exciting walks coming up in July!

To register, call/whatsapp 9571271000

The Gully and Hathi Nahar

Every year before the rains, our team of khandwaliyas led by Devendra and Vinod, armed with pick-axes and shovels, rakes and trovels, carry out the laborious task of cleaning up the Gully.

The Gully doesn't just run inside the park. What visitors see is a small sliver, its last stretch, the final section of a long transect carved through a large rocky catchment before it opens out into Ranisar talab. Much of it lies outside on govt land, and it's that unregulated section that needs sweeping and cleaning every year. Shattered glass, eroded stone, twigs and stumps, throwaway items of all kinds, sometimes dead animals. Most of all, plastic.

The gully is over four centuries old. Since then, every monsoon, raindrops falling on this land have softened the rockscape, flushed the plants-scape, and replenished the mindscape (of generations of desert folk) before gathering--for a brief moment--as a seasonal stream cradled by this handmade aqueduct. The stream is exactly as old as the gully-it birthed the same year the gully's last stretch was hewn. All its flows of centuries past are etched in the gully's eroded, steep rock-face, its scent memorized in the gully's nooks and corners

The gully gives water a way, and water gives the gully meaning.

Rainwater seeps through cracks, saturates soil, wets roots, streams over boulders, meanders, sheet-flows, cascades. The land is the rain's canvas, and the canal its final stroke, where it 'signs off'. And for a brief while after the intense gush, the gully holds the residual stream-water in embrace in its many puddles.

Water belongs here, wholly, and even though it's a monsoon visitor, it calls all the shots on this land.

Plastic, on the other hand, is new, its familiarity with the gully only a few decades old, at best a century. The gully does not know where and how far, how to, carry this lifeless matter. Plastic clogs, chokes. It does not seep, flow, nourish, or speak the language of this land or its people. An alien material made in a far-off place by a handful of industry-folk, thrust into the hands of clueless local folk who do not understand its processes of making and un-making.

So it's chucked away, left entirely to the devices of 'nature'. The ephemerality of the gully is marred by the perenniality of plastic.

Every year the gully must be un-clogged, painstakingly, so that the gully's most endearing visitor can flow unfettered down its most familiar path. The long-standing relationship between the stream and gully now needs a restorative hand, and it is provided by the descendents of the very people who birthed this relationship more than 400 years ago

Plant native this World Environment Day (5th June)!

Ever year we put in huge efforts to go out to the desert and collect seeds of native plants, so that YOU can plant them in your gardens. The list of plants and seeds are in the link below, along with our contact details.

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1R7ItvGJMfvlC_LyPzRkdlX9F-JY4kY7L

Hello, folks.

Every year we organize a week-long Botanical Art Workshop at Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park in Jodhpur, during the Monsoon. It's happening again from 10th-16th August this year!

It's a celebration of the Thar Desert and its plants and ecology. A week spent under the mentorship of some of India's leading botanical artists, with daily walks led by Pradip Krishen through the park. And presentations and celebrations every evening!

The workshop culminates in an exhibition of all the art work made during the workshop, inside a gallery at Mehrangarh Fort!

And the best part: you don't need any prior experience in painting/drawing!

Here's the link to download the brochure, with instructions to apply to the workshop: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zRFcv-jwlF-_3B7AgBl_tnygrfym3zYQ/view?usp=sharing