User:Nilgirinoble

Born in Nagercoil, Travancore State (now divided between Tamil Nadu and Kerala), India, on April 20, 1932. Father was Dr. William Alexander Noble, MD, who labored for long at the Catherine Booth Hospital in Nagercoil, then in Travancore State. I graduated from Breeks Memorial School in Ootacamund (Senior Cambridge Exam), Tamil Nadu, in 1950. Completed a Ph.D. degree in Geography / Anthropology at Louisiana State University, at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the USA, in 1963. Title of dissertation is Cultural Contrasts and Similarities among Five Ethnic Groups in the Nilgiri District, Madras State, India, 1800-1963. The five groups were the Badaga, Irula, Kota, Kurumba, and Toda. Visited the Nilgiris off and on throughout my career to carry out further research, ending primarily with research involving the Toda at the end of my career. Am now retired and living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States of America. My research thrusts since living here have been toward revealing the stupidity of referring to jungle and tropical rain forest as if they were the same. Have for years worked upon occasion on working out evidence for how the plant genus Impatiens may have spread from India into Africa. Partially involved now in this project is the determining of bird migrations across the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, between India and Africa. We now know something about the round trip migrations of several cuckoo species and the Amur falcon (from the Far East) each year.

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