COTTON IN THE NESTS

LT COL NOEL ELLIS

16/IV/2024

It was during one of my morning walks I noticed a shrub which had very distinct maroon flowers. The owners of the house seemed to be away because this bush was laden with dust. It was a very healthy bush with numerous branches and all of them were loaded with flowers.

Had someone been looking after it, the leaves would have glistened. No one bothered to water it for quite some time. When I touched the soil, it was bone dry. A sad state indeed. I must carry a water bottle in my next round, I thought.

Curiosity, they say, is the best way to find out more about anything. On my next visit I took a photo of the flowers. It was a revelation for me to find out that it was a ‘cotton bush’. That meant that if looked after well, there would be cotton pods showing up very soon. I poured a bottle of water which I carried. I started keeping a watch over that bush.

As summers started to approach the obvious happened. Those flowers turned into flaky cotton pods. In a span of a month those pods burst open, revealing white coloured cotton.

I drifted into nostalgia because I had lived for quite some time in a tent next to a cotton field in 1999. In fact, my ‘toilet’ was in the cotton field across a mud boundary wall next to a canal. That land belonged to the sarpanch of the village and he would come and chat with me when he came to water his cotton field once a week. That canal was ‘satmahi’, that is water would flow once in seven days. This was during ‘OP Vijay’, people better relate to it as ‘Kargil’ times.

Those days one did not get into details of the flowers, because our focus was on Pakistan. If I recall, the flowers were yellow. Maybe the type of cotton was of a different variety. This much I knew it was either desi ‘Kapas’ or ‘Narma’ and not the genetically modified ‘Rui’ or ‘roon’ with a higher yield.

In 2025, I wanted to experiment with the cotton seed. So, I plucked the cotton pod from my dear bush. Each pod had cotton seeds which are called ‘Binola’. Once the cotton pod had been dried in the sun I separated the fluff from the seeds. Those seeds were sown in nursery bags and they sprouted.

This plant has dark coloured leaves which look like ‘maple’ leaves. I transplanted them in the common bed infront of our house. Today, those bushes are more than eight feet in height and laden with flower and cotton pods.

On another close inspection I found cotton bursting out of one of those pods. It was such a satisfying feeling. Not that one will make a shirt out of it, but the fact that cotton being a plant of the arid zone where it can be successfully grown with just a little or no care at all.

To tell you a secret, it was when I had found birds and squirrels collecting threads from ‘Sutli’ which I use to tie plants to their supports that I realised that they use fabric to soften their nest beds. The cushion effect it must be giving to the eggs and chicks plus the entrapment of warmth which cotton would provide would be perfect for them.

Imagine, nature is designed in such a way, when the birds are making nests, that is the time cotton is ripening. Now, they would have all the access to cotton to cushion their nests better than previous years.

Now, there are four cotton plants in full bloom. We shall not collect the cotton pods but let them ripen and fall to the ground on their own. Birds and squirrels can reach for them in their own time for their nests.

I never knew that birds and squirrels use cotton in their nests. Did you? I wonder!!!!!!!!