Hot wet rainy and dense canopy of trees. Trees which are as
tall as 11 floors. I think Dev or Samar one of them lives on the
11th floor.
Well; all of us here in transition class are a flying frog. Each of
us has big red eyes that can see left right and at the back.
Suction cups on our feet and we are mostly green in color
because we camouflage but when we don’t need to we have
many colored stripes. Some of us have dots and all of us have
the letter of our name on our backs.
Look at us we jump from layer to layer in the rain forest.
The emergent layer has clouds Prahan loves being there. In
this layer we have butterflies and big birds who need to
spread their wings eagles, toucans, scarlet macaw,
butterflies. We all love the toucan song and drew fantastic
toucans; their beaks are so colorful. The rain forest is filled
with color. Look at our drawings the vibrant color makes the
forest sing. Not to forget our rainforest song and green
anaconda. Singing listening to rainforest sounds and water
detailed drawing has been intense learning. We really need
to understand the forest and learn about it so we can save it.
The lessons have made us think why we should save the
rainforests a lot of us like the biodiversity and understand
how it holds life together. We understand that rain forests
give us clean air and take up all the carbon dioxide we emit.
Leaves give out water that forms clouds. And most of our
medicines have stuff from the rainforest a plant a root a
bark. Sick people get well with these things this appealed to
Freya.
The best place where we as flying frogs liked to sit ,is in the
canopy layer. The vines are exciting ,swinging with the
orangutans looks like the most fun. When we come up
against a viper entwinned in a tree , OUCH we do need to
camouflage. The canopy is so green.
It takes a long time for the rain to hit the dark forest floor, it’s
a long way down. There are may night parties here. Fruit
eating bats, millipedes and leaf cutting ants. We have drawn
many dead leaves and ants on the floor. Prahan drew an ant
eater and an okapi some people drew a bush baby. It was a
rocking party. There are mushrooms on the floor too but
none of us quite like mushrooms. An occasional tiger was
encountered and the flying frogs had to camouflage then
though Samar felt he could jump fast enough and kept his
stripes on.
So, we have drawn our flying frogs and mounted them on a
stick , and we can place them anywhere in the forest.
It’s a pity we could not camp in the forest in our tents. Once
we can vacation we will go to a rain forest ,there are many ,
Indonesia, amazon yes, we can develop ecotourism we know
all the layers and can show you some more things like
flowers. Orchids we like and some stinky bromeliads and
lilies. I think we did not draw the flowers as flowers cannot
stink that does not sound right, but we have a take home
video on the sun bear and the bromeliad flower. sunbear
likes to eat the ants Maybe somethings will make sense when
we holiday in these forests like beautiful flowers can smell
bad.
Meanwhile we imagine elephants on the floor tigers and
maybe a big anaconda 300 feet long, with anteaters’
mushrooms ants and owls and oh my god there is a very big
party on the forest floor.
We have not drawn many tall trees because the canopy is so
dense wet and trees are so tall that the scale of things was
not quite fitting on our paper but we did look at buttress
roots, triangle roots and leaves with tips pointing downward
for the water to drain out.
Papaya and rubber trees, we know coffee trees chameleons
and sun bears, howler monkeys and more it’s been an
intense time singing listening drawing and thinking how little
we know about our planet Earth so many more animals to
discover. So much more rain to be soaked in and so much
heat. The weather here in Mumbai helped us feel some of
the humidity and wetness yet the national geographic
footage we looked at was stunning.
EARTH, we love you and here we GO GO wish us luck!!!!
