Vapi Animals - Domestic and Wild

OK, I'm a sucker for animals.

To keep my nerd credentials current, I'm conducting an informal animal survey in Vapi. I'm counting all the dogs and cows/buffalos I encounter on my daily walks. Most of my walks are about 2 km each way, so I'm scaling up to get an animal density per square km. It's not exactly scientific sampling, but since I walk a mix of busy roads and residential roads, I think it's reasonably representative of Vapi. I figure that averaged over, say, 100 walks, I can at least get order-of-magnitude results.

Regardless, I've taken quite a few pictures of animals in the last week or so.

Buffalo seem to be particularly skilled at walking the center line down the road.

I don't think these two were waiting for a tuk-tuk. Surprisingly, they were ignoring a man who was trying to give them some food scraps. Normally cows are eager for such quality hand-outs.

It appears to be calf season. (Puppy season, too, but no photos.) This very young calf is one of two I routinely see while walking through one neighborhood.

Here both calves are resting.

On to the dogs.

This concrete pad is a favorite spot to put out food scraps for cows. There's usually a half-dozen or more munching here in the morning. Of course, the dogs also know where food can routinely be found.

The dogs seem to be spending more time napping. This one has made a nice bed of dry leaves in the gutter.

And this dog found an even better bed -- a cast-off blanket. Almost looks domesticated!

"Wild" animals get their perks, too. (If you consider pigeons "wild".)

There were two spots in the parking area where we take our Hindi lessons. As we approached, I thought the bricks were probably marking off repair zones. Instead, they are to make sure no one hurts the pigeons as they come down to eat the grain spread for them. (And I wonder how much of the grain is actually consumed by rats.)

And for a final note, today I saw my first mongoose in Vapi. We've seen mounds of dirt with mongoose-sized holes in them, but until today, I only suspected that they might be mongoose dens. So maybe there are a fair number of mongoose in Vapi. They wouldn't go hungry with all the rats here.