Senior priest John Fernandes passes away
The Hindu
He was attached to Mangaluru diocese
John Fernandes, former professor and head of Chair in Christianity at Mangalore University, passed away here on Saturday following a brief illness. He was 85. A senior priest of the Diocese of Mangalore, Fr. Fernandes was born in Udyavara, Udupi, in 1936 and was ordained as a priest for the diocese on March 30, 1963.![](/newspic/picid-1269750-20250217064624.jpg)
When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.