Helon Habila

Helon Habila Ngalabak (conceived 1967) is a Nigerian author and writer. He acted as an issue and columnist in Nigeria before moving to England to turn into the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. In 2002 he distributed his first novel, Waiting for an Angel. His work has won numerous prizes incorporating the Caine Prize in 2001. In 2005/2006 he turned into the Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College in New York.

In 2006 he co-altered the British Council collection New Writing 14. His 2nd novel, Measuring Time, was distributed in 2007.His 3rd novel, Oil on Water, which manages ecological contamination in the oil-rich Nigerian Delta, was distributed in the US in 2011. His treasury The Granta Book of the African Short Story turned out September 2011.

Habila learned at the University of Jos and at the University of East Anglia where he was a Chevening Scholar and now shows exploratory writing at George Mason University.

Habila is an establishing part and as of now serves on the bulletin leading body of African Writers believe,"a no-profit element which appears to set up and unite African scholars in the Diaspora and authors on the landmass to advance imparting of abilities and different assets, and to cultivate information and adapting between the two gatherings."

Helen

Helen Jairag Richardson is an Indian film actress and dancer of Anglo-Burmese descent, working in Hindi films. She has appeared in over 500 films. She is often cited as the most popular dancer of the item number in her time. She was the inspiration for four films and a book. Helen was born on November 21, 1939 in Burma to an Anglo-Indian father and Burmese mother. She has a brother Roger and a sister Jennifer. Her father died during the Second World War. The family trekked to Mumbai in 1943 in order to escape from the Japanese occupation of Burma. Helen told Film fare magazine during an interview in 1964, "We trekked alternately through wilderness and hundreds of villages, surviving on the generosity of people, for we were penniless, with no food and few clothes. Occasionally, we met British soldiers who provided us with transport, found us refuge and treated our blistered feet and bruised bodies and fed us. By the time we reached Dibrugarh in Assam, our group had been reduced to half. Some had fallen ill and been left behind, some had died of starvation and disease. My mother miscarried along the way. The survivors were admitted to the Dibrugarh hospital for treatment. Mother and I had been virtually reduced to skeletons and my brother's condition was critical. We spent two months in hospital. When we recovered, we moved to Calcutta". Helen had to quit her schooling to support her family because her mother's salary as a nurse was not enough to feed a family of four. In a documentary called Queen of the Nautch girls, Helen said she was 17 years old in 1957 when she got her first big break in Howrah Bridge.

Description and ecology

Adults have a blue-grey back and wings, white underparts, a black cap and short yellow legs. Juveniles are browner above and streaked below.

These birds stand still at the water's edge and wait to ambush prey, but are easier to see than many small heron species. They mainly eat small fish, frogs and aquatic insects. They sometimes use bait, dropping a feather or leaf carefully on the water surface and picking fish that come to investigate

Striated Heron

The Striated Heron, Butorides striata, also known as Mangrove Heron, Little Heron or Green-backed Heron, is a small heron. Striated Herons are mostly non-migratory and noted for some interesting behavioral traits. Their breeding habitat is small wetlands in the Old World tropics from west Africa to Japan and Australia, and in South America. Vagrants have been recorded on oceanic islands, such as Chuuk and Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marianas and Palau; the bird recorded on Yap on February 25, 1991, was from a continental Asian rather than from a Melanesian population, while the origin of the bird seen on Palau on May 3, 2005 was not clear.

This bird was long considered to be conspecific with the closely related North American species, the Green Heron, which is now usually separated as B. virescens, as well as the Lava Heron of the Galápagos Islands (now B. sundevalli, but often included in B. striata, e.g. by BirdLife International); collectively they were called "green-backed herons".