Purple Sunbird (male)

Purple Sunbird (female)

'Walk the line' Crow-Pheasant

Blue-tailed Bee-eater.

It feels great to actually have something to put up on urban babblers after an eternity! All the photos were taken by me except for the one of the Coucal doing the tango, which was taken by my friend, Sanjana Sharan. The two sunbrirds were clicked attempting to build a nest in our backyard, which they abandoned later on. The Blue-tailed bee-eater was photographed at ICRISAT.

A flurried word

It’s a ball of fur…it’s a silver Snitch…no, it’s a Bulbul!

Since I started looking, I’ve seen quite a few birds do that fluffing out trick they do. But the Bulbul outside my window just now was something else! Some rapid movement caught my eye and I turned to look. All I could see was a greyish globe shaking violently. When my eyes adjusted to the movement I saw a small black head peeking out of the churning ball. I watched fascinated for more than a minute while this flapping grey ball just became bigger and bigger. And then suddenly within a blink of my eye there was nothing. The bird had evidently swooped down behind a wall, but it certainly felt as if it counted disapparation among its talents.

I am not complaining. A little morning-magic can last the whole day.

Rangrej mere, sab kuch rang de...

This is an article I wrote for Jetwings in their March 2007 issue. They were having a Holi/Colours special and I thought it would be a nice idea to include some colourful birds.

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Birds of a feather

By Sheetal Vyas

India is the land of colours, we hear all the time. There is colour in our culture, our traditions, our clothes. Even nature is colourful in India. We have vivid landscapes, flowers in rich, deep hues and getting to the point of this article, birds in every hue.

The Indian subcontinent offers a rich variety of bird species. Making up about 13% of the world’s species, there are close to 1300 species found here. They are everywhere: out in the open grasslands, in our forests, our water bodies and our gardens, feathered bipeds are plentiful and varied. Birds come in an astonishing range, some with wing-spans the size of a tall man, some no bigger than a fist. What’s more, they come in an impressive array of colours – iridescent blues and purples, greens that shock the eye, and yellows to out-dazzle gold.

What is the point of so much colour in birds? Well, the answer is complex, and the subject is still being studied. However, the primary reason appears to be communication. Colour announces species and sex as well as status and health of an individual. In birds, as with so many other forms of life, the male of the species is often more beautiful, more ornate. The female, Nature seems to tell us, simply needs to be; it is the male who is put to the trouble of being attractive. Quite opposite the state of human affairs but of course, that is a different story.

If we were to start cycling through the most colourful birds of our country, first honourable mention must necessarily go to India’s National Bird, Indian Peafowl. Symbolising vanity through the ages, the peacock is a truly exquisite bird. The male, which can be as big as 230 cm from tip to tip, sports a long neck of a most brilliant turquoise-tinged blue, with a royal crest on the head. The tail is a long affair, trailing back lavishly, made up of predominantly green feathers, each with an ‘eye’, a concentric pattern of yellows, blue and black. Scientists use words like structure and interference to explain precisely why this graceful bird shimmers as it does, but that doesn’t take away our delight at such beauty. Oh, the peacock knows it’s beautiful. If you are lucky, it will sometimes choose to wow you by bringing up that remarkable tail in a breathtaking fan and dance… slight movements back and forth, and a delicate frisson calculated to catch the light over its iridescent feathers. Once seen, never forgotten.

Nowhere as widespread as peafowl, but equally spectacular is the Himalayan Monal. The pheasant family is known for colour and glorious plumage, and the National Bird of Nepal is one of the more vivid examples. Sometimes called ‘the bird of nine colours’, the adult male is a live colour palette and sports a metallic bronze-green and purple with crimson and yellow on the neck, green on the shoulder, white on the rump with a bright cinnamon tail. A hardy bird that can be seen at heights up to 4500 m!

You’ll have to go the Himalayan belt to see Monal in the flesh, but there are other colourful birds that will come to you. If you’re fond of the colour green, there are the ubiquitous parakeets, the shrillest visitors to any garden. The commonest of these, the Rose-ringed Parakeet – Tota to you – is a darling of a bird. Fruit-eaters, they are, and if you have a guava or mango tree, they’re sure to turn up in some numbers squawking and shrieking companiably. There is another greenish bird that is capable of setting up an equal din – the Common Tailorbird. A charming little fellow with green upper body, rufous head and a perky upright tail, this warbler is a notable nest-maker. If you keep an ear cocked for a persistent cheeeup, this one is easy. Giving these ones a run for their green are the leafbirds and the green pigeons.

If green blends into the foliage, orioles have a yellow that will stop you in your tracks. The field guides call it golden and verily, as beautiful as a sunbeam. When people see their first oriole, there is often a feeling of disbelief; that we should not only share space with something as glorious as this, but actually get to see it! Also among the yellows are the weavers, commonly-found sunbirds and the beautiful ioras.

Then there are the blues and the purples. If you drive by the countryside, and glance at the wires, be sure to look out for this flash of cerulean blue. Chances are it will be a White-throated Kingfisher. As it sits, it is the white throat and distinctive beak that draws the eye, but as it lifts! the blue is breathtaking. The Indian Roller is another that’s dullish at rest but it is stunning in flight, shades of azure glinting in the sunlight. In fact, in Andhra Pradesh it is considered auspicious to see the Roller during Dussera, and it is often captured and brought around in cages so that the populace can see them. A list of bluish birds is incomplete without mention of the Verditer Flycatcher and the very common Purple Moorhen.

Moving now inevitably to the reds and oranges. Along moist reeds and grasses in many parts of India, you might chance upon the Red Munia. In breeding, during the monsoons, the male takes on a dramatic red stippled with brown and white; unfortunately, its bright colour also makes it a very popular cage bird. There is also a smallish forest bird found mainly in Indian hills that redefines the colour red – the Scarlet Minivet. The male of this one is so spectacular, it hurts the eye. Cousins Small Minivets are found all over the country, and if they’re a more diluted red, they have the most interesting shades of orange thrown into the mix.

Of course, colour isn’t the only interesting aspect of birds: there are sober-coloured birds that are as fascinating. Still, the colourful ones lend the glamour; they reel us in, dazzling us and luring us into their world, inviting us to see if we will, what bustling activity lies behind the romance. And with watching birds, starting is all it takes to keep going.


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What causes the colour?
Bird colour is caused by two systems that work together – chemicals and structure. By chemicals, we mean pigments that absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others. Melanins, carotenoids, and more rarely porphyrins are deposited in the feather and are responsible for most bird colour. Parrots, easily the most brightly coloured of all bird families, have a pigment all to themselves: psittacins, which they manufacture to colour their plumes.
Curiously though, no pigment ever turned feathers blue – that is all the work of the structure of the feather. Structure is what makes up a feather, small branches called barbs and barbules that scatter reflected light. Green is even more special, in fact one of the most complex colours birds produce, because it combines blue structural colour overlaid with yellow cortical pigment.
Iridescence, the rainbow effect, is again because of structure, where the barbules in the feather are arranged like reflectors, spaced and shaped so cleverly to give off an array of hues. And you thought colour was easy!
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Hello again!

The large-billed reed warbler (Acrocephalus orinus) really seems to be coming out of the woodwork. After the finding in Thailand, another specimen was discovered in the collection of the Natural History Museum at Tring, in a drawer of Blyth’s Reed-warblers, specimens collected in India in the 19th century.
Now another sighting has been reported from Narendrapur Sanctuary, though still unauthenticated. The full story's here.

Somethin' preyin' on your mind...

Pointing you in the direction of birder Jochen, who reviews about half a dozen field guides on raptors here, on his blog Bell Tower Birding.

Sometime in the last century, treecreepers made a discovery that changed their sleeping habits for good. Dating mainly from Victorian times, majestic redwoods from North America were widely planted as ornamental trees in parks and large estates throughout the British Isles. The bark is soft with a texture like cardboard. For the tree the spongy exterior acts as a protective fire blanket. Somehow, treecreepers chanced upon an alternative use as a deep pile mattress. Using their toenails, the birds scratch out a neat, body-sized hollow and flatten themselves against the trunk. Birds from a wide area converge on mature specimens and several may be found clamped on a single suitable tree. However, the species' ingenuity doesn't stop there. Over time, each makes not one hole but several encircling the trunk. This means that, depending on the direction of wind or rain, a bird will always have dry, draught-free overnight accommodation

Read the entire article here.

From the 'Photocopier'

White throated Ground Thrush,
12th july 2006,
Source: Photo in Sanctuary Asia, August 2003

Lets have some Pun.

A man was charged with stealing ducks from a local pond in a small English village.
When in court, the judge asked how he pleaded. He replied 'Not guilty Mallard'.

Touched by Thoreau – II

This was going to be a comment on Aasheesh’s beautiful post on Thoreau but my responses came in fractured slivers and turned out longish, so I thought they had better be put into a post.

Have you been touched by Thoreau? he had asked.
When I first read of Thoreau in school, his life in Walden, his eccentricities, his individual spirit, he felt like a kindred soul. Everybody has Guardian Angels and he seemed like he could be mine.

Many years later, I was stuck in a job and in a life I disliked, feeling trapped and very unhappy. I had wandered into that situation and had no idea how I must extricate myself, whether I must and indeed, if I could. Then:

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

I had only Henry David’s word for it. I had been having altogether too many ‘common hours’ but then I thought, he must know. With that one sentence drumming in my mind, I escaped the life I had so dreaded and since have indeed met with success I could not hope for then.

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Talk of Thoreau inevitably calls up another memory. I must’ve encountered Enid Blyton’s Tammylan around the same time I met Thoreau and to my young mind, they frequently meshed.

Siblings Rory, Sheila, Benjy and Penny go to live in the country in Blyton’s The Children of the Cherry Tree Farm where they encounter wild man Tammylan. As they become friends, Tammylan introduces the children to the inhabitants of the English countryside: rabbits, hares, badgers, otters, foxes, voles and squirrels. It is one of my most-loved books, but most of all, I fell in love with Tammylan’s homes, both of them. One, a cave for the colder months and a tree house for the summer that I would have given anything to live in.

It was by a backwater of the river – a quiet peaceful place, where moor-hens bobbed about and fishes jumped for flies. “A Tammylanny sort of place,” Benjy thought to himself…

It was a most extraordinary house. Tammylan had planted quick-growing willows close to one another, and used their trunks for walls. He had trained the top of these branches across for a roof! Between the trunks of the willows he had woven long, pliable willow twigs, and had stuffed up all the cracks with heather and moss. It was the cosiest house imaginable.

To me, Thoreau's cabin at Walden has always seemed like that tree house. Very one's own.

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In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

‘Wildness’ (with the extra whump) reminds me of this book I enjoyed recently and a small aside in the story that captured my imagination even as it saddened me. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan is a fantasy for young people, in which contemporary USA meets the Greek Pantheon. Racy and very entertaining.

But the aside that interests us comes from Grover, a satyr in the tale who is, like many satyrs before him, desperately seeking a Searcher’s License. The search is on for Pan, the God of Wild Places. Even as they speak, our hero Perseus feels a change in the air.

A strange breeze rustled through the clearing, temporarily overpowering the stink of trash and muck. It brought the smell of berries and wildflowers and clean rainwater, things that might’ve once been in these woods. Suddenly, I was nostalgic for something I’d never known.

In Greek mythology, Pan is the only god who is supposed to have died. However, the news was dubious, though certainly Pan seemed to have disappeared. Grover explains his quest:

When humans heard the news, they believed it. They’ve been pillaging Pan’s kingdom ever since. But for the satyrs, Pan was our lord and master. He protected us and the wild places of the earth. We refuse to believe that he died. In every generation, the bravest satyrs pledge their lives to finding Pan. They search the earth, exploring all the wildest places, hoping to find where he is hidden and wake him up from his sleep.

All those years ago, Thoreau was right: the preservation of our world does depend on how well we protect Pan’s domain. Wake up, Pan-God, reclaim your kingdom. Before it is too late.

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Not one mention of a bird here, or birding, and this a blog about birding! But I plead your indulgence and quote in my defence CLR James who said: ‘What do they know of cricket who only of cricket know?’ So it is with birders – our interests scatter wide and how do you stop a ripple?

Touched by Thoreau

"In Wildness is the preservation of the World."

Those words cleaved their way forcefully into my being in 1983, the first time I read the great sage of the woods. I had bought a copy of his 'works' at a book sale in Bharatpur, yes, my first visit to that avian shrine, and on returning to Hyderabad, spent numberless hours, blissfully sipping such verbal novelties, such novel ideas, written with a pen that seemed to spring from my very heart, that I trembled unabashedly in the passion and ardor of the author. I feel that the lodestone of his philosophy is encapsulated in this immortal phrase.

Notice, the great man used the word "Wildness", with a capital 'W' and not 'wilderness' as he is often misquoted to have done. That word, 'Wildness' has that extra whump to it, which transcends it into a meaning that is completely different from 'wilderness'.

I have read him whenever my fancy yearned for it or when my beliefs tottered in this material world, between the here-and-now of unfettered consumerism and the purity, the virginity and strength of Thoreau's Wildness, I found myself standing penitent in front of the bookshelf, tilting the masterwork into by palm, reading the tome from the page that fell open, instantly mesmerised, purified, calmed by the clarity and simplicity of his language.

"I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock spruce or arbor-vitae in our tea."

"Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him."

"Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man, -- a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit."

American nature writers are a class in themselves and Thoreau their godfather.

History lesson

I’ve been reading Stephen Moss’s A Bird in the Bush these past days, which as the tagline says is a social history of birdwatching.

This is a highly informative book, rich in anecdote and birding lore. My one grouse is it is predominantly Britain-centric apart from some references to developments in the Americas, mostly North of course. However, once I’d put that disappointment behind me, I was absorbed by the view this book afforded me of birders and birdwatching in times other than this one, in their context, their mileau, with their values and resources.

Starting with the Reverend Gilbert White who made his home patch so memorable with his work The Natural History of Selbourne to the latest advances in bird ringing technology and optics today, Moss traces it all. He also peppers his account with passages by birders and naturalists and it serves to vividly bring their times to light, not merely by what they're saying but with how they're saying it as well. Birders, if these quotes are anything to go by, seem to make charming raconteurs, because these men are articulate, prone to description and frequently poetic. I'm taking the liberty of quoting a few pieces here because they're so telling.

For most of us today, birding is also a social activity. There is an insistent feeling of community flowing along a line of birders with their bins raised to the flighted ones.

The companionship too of those who are prosecuting with zeal and enthusiasm the same path of science, is not the least delightful feature of such excursions... the pleasing incidents that diversified the walk, the jokes that passed, and even the very mishaps or annoyances that occurred – all became objects of interest, and unite the members of the party by ties of no ordinary kind.
JH Balfour, on a similar pursuit, the search for rare flowers.

That doesn’t mean to say that it can’t be enjoyed alone, of course; it is glorious to be on your own, feeling the sun on your shoulders and all the time in the world at your command as you commune with a woodpecker, or even an owl:

Before that moment I had, like every young keen birder, compensated for experiences of the real thing with long hours poring over bird books and bird pictures. But on Goldsitch Moss I realised, perhaps for the first time, by how much life can exceed imagination. A Short-eared Owl had entered my life and for those moments, as it swallowed me up with its piercing eyes, I had entered the life of an owl. It was a perfect consummation.
Mark Cocker, Birder: Tales of a Tribe

However, there are times when you must, absolutely must have someone to tell what remarkable birds you saw that morning. And so, it was curious for me to see the loneliness that hung over many early birders. It was oddly brave of those early birders to persist in birding in complete isolation, in making meticulous notes of habitats, markings and observations in a time when it cast you in dubious light to carry field glasses (only race-goers sported them, apparently).

It has long been my misfortune never to have had any neighbours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender progress…
Gilbert White

It was a bit shocking to know that even as close as the early 1970s, there were closet birders.

At the time, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll were far more alluring… As such, the last thing I would mention to anyone was that I enjoyed watching birds – it just wasn’t, well, cool!
Neil McKillop

It was the standard joke when people heard I was interested in birds – ‘oh, the two-legged kind, I hope!’… That kind of constant crass innuendo made me wary about disclosing my bird interests.
Mark Cocker

Moss talks at length also of the shotgun naturalists and the egg-collectors – a period that by the simple expedient of holding the (dead) bird in hand, added much to the collective pool of scientific knowledge – and the social and ecological values that led to their condemnation.

Particularly thrilling for me were accounts of young men in Britain and America who stepped out to explore their worlds with dogged single-mindedness. Specially the story of American birder Kenn Kaufman, who at the age of 17 dropped out of high school and took off with fifty dollars in his pocket to travel his country looking for birds. Then there were Britons Nigel Redman and Chris Murphy who charted a 10-month epic journey of more than five thousand miles from Britain to Nepal via Europe, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.

Moss presents the debates around the more recent day obsession with twitching also. Even as I wondered at listers for not seeing the woods for the trees in their pursuit of another tick, I couldn’t help gasp at Phoebe Snetsinger and her haul of 8500 species when she died in 1999. Diagnosed with cancer and told that she had less than one year to live, she fought back and continued in her quest for ‘lifers’ till she died in a freak bus accident in Madagascar.

The book narrates many such stories, engrossing to anyone who’s interested in how birding came to be what it is today. Fascinating stuff.

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A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching
Stephen Moss (2004)
Aurum Press, London

Close encounters of the bird kind

The best moments in birding are probably when you get so close to birds that you can reach out and touch them. Our garden and the Gulmohar tree growing in front of our home, is frequented by Koels, Ashy prinias, Sunbirds and Red-vented Bulbuls. I have seen bulbuls pluck caterpillars from the Oleander tree and bang them on the wall and eat them from a meter away. The Ashy prinias are the best. If you sit still enough the bird comes to you. Calling out its jingling and chiming notes merrily. After mum waters the plants a prinia comes regularly to drink water from little pools and drops dripping from the ferns. Once it hopped across the little garden and came ever so close to me, that I could see every feather and every mark on its body. Give a sudden jerk and it flits away into the neighbour’s garden, out of sight. The morning glory creeper gives a shudder and you know it’s another Prinia bouncing among the tendrils. The creeper hides our drawing room window, so you can see the bird from the room separated only by a glass pane. The bird is totally oblivious to your presence and goes on hopping about and suddenly stops directly in front of you and you are staring it in its eye. I love these close encounters and every time they happen I can't stop smiling for the rest of the day! And recently a Prinia was stitching two leaves together in the Ixora tree with a strand of dry grass. I could see it punching holes in the two leaves with its beak. It however abandoned making the nest. Perhaps the leaves were too tough to hold together.

Starting off: The Kawal article

One of BSAP’s newest members, Ludwig, messaged me this week: ‘Golden oriole, fem. What is wrong with Begumpet?’ I gave him that old birding truism: ‘Birding gives fresh eyes.’ But it isn’t just that, you know.

What it is is also beginner’s luck. Take a newbie with you on an outing and if they’re even halfway inclined, you’re bound to see all manner of species short of Rhodonessa caryophyllacea, all of course just to make sure they’re well and properly reeled in.

With me, it was the Scarlet Minivet. Tyda, Eastern Ghats, Andhra Pradesh. The first day on the trip left me a little overwhelmed – I knew I hadn’t the best eyesight but people were apparently seeing things with the speed of light. There! There! they went, and all I saw was bouncing branches. Till we stumbled upon a hunting party and saw what seemed like a forestful of birds – nuthatches, orioles, verditer flycatchers, minivets, chestnut bee-eaters.

I’d written this account of a trip to Kawal, interspersed with general remarks on what a beginner can expect from birding. Published in India Today Travel Plus in July 2005. It also belongs here.
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Two in the bush

By Sheetal Vyas

It’s early morning, and still dark. A group of soft-footed people walks along forest trails, a sharp ear out for a rustle here, a chirrup there. As the dawn grows lighter, noisy screechy parakeets zip across the path and bulbuls raise a din. Binoculars raised, the birders communicate in near-silence or murmurs, tapping each other on the shoulder to point to a woodpecker or a sunbird. A couple more hours in the strengthening sunlight and the morning’s session is done. Notes are made and compared. A birdlist is made, coffee is drunk, and all’s well with the world.

Fact of life: there’s no such thing as a former birder. Once you’re hooked onto observing or identifying the feathered ones, one way or another it’s an affair that lasts a lifetime. Why, though? What’s the deal with birds? They’re cute and all that, but why should watching them be so addictive?
There are many reasons: nature, knowledge, activity, community… but there is one word that is never far away when you mention birding: joy. The sheer joy of it. The grace of a heron soaring across the horizon, the flutter of geese as they flush, the flash of colour as a jay takes flight… yes, the most enduring reason to bird is the pleasure it gives.

We were ten birders on this trip. Our destination: Kawal Wildlife Sanctuary, Adilabad district, Andhra Pradesh. About 900 sq km of dry deciduous forest, and reportedly one of the best sanctuaries in Andhra Pradesh. I was excited.

Kawal is a charmingly untouched place. In these times, when you find tourists milling around the smallest hill station or jungle lodge, it was refreshing to find a place still off the beaten track, still undiscovered. No resorts, no guided tours; just a government rest house and forests that are… just forests. Our trip was linked to two wildlife organisations, the Birdwatchers' Society of Andhra Pradesh (BSAP) and the Hyderabad Tiger Conservation Society (Hyticos).

Birding is done best early in the mornings and the evenings, which makes it important to be up early and in the field as the birds stir. Our first foray was to Dongapalle, a Telugu name that translates roughly to ‘village of thieves’. The first sightings were of the more common ones: red-vented bulbuls, small green bee-eaters, rose-ringed parakeets and a white-breasted kingfisher.

Common, did I say? There was a time, a few years ago, when any bird that wasn’t a crow or a pigeon was ‘exotic’ to me. It took one birding trip and a little ‘tuning in’ to realise that red-vented bulbuls dropped by my garden every single day… I just hadn’t seen them before. As do purple sunbirds and common tailorbirds. Shocking, to know they had been right here all this time.

I have progressed a little since then, but there are still aggravations. At Dongapalle, I was engrossed in spotting what may have been a woodshrike, when violent ‘come-quick’ hand signals from the others sped me on. They’d seen a Tickell’s flycatcher, a lovely blue bird with an orange throat. As it always happens, it had quite disappeared by the time I got there. I’ve never ever seen the dratted bird, and it always appears on the consolidated bird lists.

It takes a while for a wet-behind-the-ears birdwatcher to get the hang of birding. First there’s the little matter of spotting a timid little flutter in dense foliage. Peer as you will, you can’t tell if there is really a living creature in there. If you do manage to get a clear look, then comes the noting of its size, form, colour, beak, markings – all on the basis of a single, very fleeting glimpse. Then comes the job of pinning an identity on this bird, which means wading through the 1300-odd species in India… it comes, they tell you encouragingly, with experience.

Our afternoon session was at Kadam reservoir. Kadam River, a tributary of the Godavari, runs along Kawal’s southern boundary. Soothing waters, surrounded by forests and a long walk along the bund itself. Plenty of water birds: open-billed storks, ducks, herons, egrets, cormorants, lapwings. Also, gulls by the dozen, swooping about, and beautiful to watch.

Make no mistake, birding can be frustrating, especially when you’re getting started. There! someone will exclaim, a pied kingfisher! And you swivel madly, adjusting your binoculars as you go, trying to get a fix on the exact location. Minutes later, you come to a bare-looking stump. Look around you and everyone’s finished with the now-missing kingfisher and moved on to the river terns. Speed, I learnt quickly, is of the essence!

As dusk advanced, so did we towards a gond tribal hamlet in Mysempet. We were now in the heart of the forests, glimpsing black bucks and a herd of chinkara as we passed through. The hamlet is accessible only by four-wheel drive and is quite a vantage point over the surrounding forests. The adults stared at us and the children followed us around noisily as we walked in. The houses are all made of timber – it felt odd to see solid timber worth the-lord-knows-how-many lakhs sheltering cows and poultry; but so it is.

We were put up in the local school, the only concrete structure for miles. No electricity, and so a good fire set the mood perfectly. The night was as clear as we could hope for and we lay back and toured a few constellations. After dinner was polished off, we sat around to campfire tales. There was just a light nip in the air and the fire crackled comfortingly. There had been a tentative night outing planned, hoping to see a few owls and nightjars perhaps, but the full-dinner-and-hypnotic-fire combination put paid to that and we wandered off to our respective charpais and sleeping bags.

Waking up was a comedy of sorts. We were four women altogether, and all the alarms we’d set mysteriously refused to go off. At 6.30 – the hour we should have been setting off – there was a banging on the door and what a mad scramble there was! I see no shame in confessing that no baths were taken on that morning – it would have been a greater shame to miss out on the wonderful morning light. The day was still young and we made good time.

As we set off, the ubiquitous Indian roller greeted us good morning. This is a brilliantly coloured bird, splashed in electric blue: it’s attractive enough as it sits, but breathtaking in flight. Also, the state bird of Andhra Pradesh.

We saw plum-headed parakeets also, high up on a perch, their bright heads catching the light beautifully. Then we something that caused much consternation: distinct grey heads amongst the plum. How could this be? After all, the grey-headed and slaty-headed parakeets are never found in this part of the country. A quick consultation with the guide books solved the mystery - the female of the plum-headed parakeet is actually grey-headed, see? The sexes in many species look completely different, adding yet another complication to the already challenging task of identifying a bird.

The technicalities of birding needn’t bog down novices, though. Birds enrich even without your going into species, habits and habitat. You begin to absorb more without knowing how. It’s a learning curve that never quite ends, for no matter how many years you’ve been at it, there will always be some bird you’re seeing for the first time. Birders have been known to cross continents to see a single bird so they can tick off yet another in a long wish-list.

We had just sat down to a snack in a clearing when I saw my first, my very first paradise flycatcher. It’s heartbreaking to miss rare birds that others have sighted, but equally maddening to miss out on one particular fairly common bird at every outing. Oh, I’d seen the female – an exquisite, brown flighty creature, but unless you’ve seen the white male, you just haven’t seen this bird. So, there he was, in all his glory, flitting about the reedy growth, his delicate streamer-tail swooping behind him in utter grace. I got a nice, long leisurely look. Worth the wait? Every minute of it.

We saw about 55 species in the three days we spent in Kawal. That isn’t a bad count, but go to the Eastern or Western Ghats, and we could easily double that number. Bharatpur alone can give a count of over a hundred in a single day. I came away thinking that is remarkable what ‘tuning into’ birds can do to your life. It’s almost like an additional sense and more friends. I’ve developed a tendency to scan the skies, with a casual eye out for a raptor. It’s a comfort to register that there’s a set of babblers in my garden, parakeets on the guava tree or a coppersmith at the very top of the Ashoka, flinging his soul into the air.

The fairest of them all

Discussing which might be the most beautiful bird we have, Salim Ali, in his The Book of Indian Birds, says, ‘…As a family, the pheasants occupy a high place for colour and brilliancy of plumage and adornment possessed by the cocks of most species.’ That should have tipped me off. Certainly the peacock is a brilliantly coloured bird – the turquoise hurts the eyes and the dance mesmerises. The others seemed pretty too. But the field guides hardly ever do justice to vivid colours, and I’ve only seen junglefowl in the wild, so the Galliformes were a bit of a surprise.

A bit unprepared then, this Sunday at the Nehru Zoological Gardens in Hyderabad, I ran to the aviary with the pheasants in them. Painted spurfowl, Khaleej pheasants, red and grey junglefowl, green peafowl, golden pheasants, silver pheasants, Lady Amherst’s pheasants… a series of birds each more spectacular than the last. The brightest, most unashamed of colours; the wildest of combinations that would have come off looking gaudy in the hands of a lesser designer.

Why are they so ornate, pheasants? Is beauty such a priority with nature then?

*

We had a bit of a dilemma at the Zoo. A twitcher-type dilemma. We were seeing many species for the first time, and even with birds we’d seen, certainly this was a closer look than we could ever have in the wild. These birds didn’t retreat at the sight of us, if anything they came closer emboldened by months of no harm and treats from visitors. Was it okay to tick them on your life list? Or was that unfair? In an older time, naturalists regularly shot birds to have a closer look and I imagine they went right ahead and ticked them off. Yes, it was caged, but I have seen the Greater Flamingo, haven’t I? A close, unobstructed long look at its colours, its beak.

Well, this problem is somewhat hypothetical seeing I don’t have lists of any sort yet. In case, it doesn’t matter.

A Second Helping of Chicken soup for the soul

Cartoon

I got this out of Chicken soup for the soul!

The Seagull

A hole in the cliffs
Is my nest but the sea calls me,
And I cradle my dreams
In the hollows of the waves.
The role of Your ocean
Is with me in the sky,
Where I swing
On one wing, then the other,
And plummet
Like a stone
On the living flash
Of a fish.
Lord,
Does my poignant cry
Echo the endless travail
That beats on Your shore?
I am the bird
Like salt,
Grey and white,
A bitter tang
That does not fade;
And the ships
Outward bound
Watch me out of sight,
A little handkerchief
Waving goodbye.
In the restlessness of my kingdom,
Lord,
Let the storm spare me.
Amen
--Carmen Bernos de Gasztold
Translated from French by Rumer Godden

The Pelican Chorus

The pelican leitmotif continues with the inimitable Edward Lear:

King and Queen of the Pelicans we;
No other Birds so grand we see!
None but we have feet like fins!
With lovely leathery throats and chins!
Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelicans jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still!

Lear describes the bird:

...her waddling form so fair,
With a wreath of shrimps in her short white hair.

heh heh. The rest of this delightful poem is here.

Two on a scale of 1-10

Bad joke but I hafta...
Q: What does the birder sing when he first catches sight of a pelican?
A: Peli peli baar baliye, dil gaya haar baliye,
Rabba mainu pyar ho gaya...

:-DDDDDD