Offbeat (09): A tryst with birds

By John B. Monteiro
Bellevision Media Network

Even the blackest of them all, the crow,
Renders good service as your man-at-arms,
Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail,
And crying havoc on the slug and snail.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, US poet and scholar (1807-1882).

13 August 2012: One of the photos I offer to visitors at Johnlyn Cottage, a cozy garden enclave on the upper edge of a forested valley inBondel, is while watering with a hose the birdbath that I have installed in our garden. The birdbath is my pride because it was designed by me and got fashioned by a receptive fabricator at Yeyyady. To my knowledge, it is the only one such in Mangalore. It involves some work of filling it every second day because, in the current atmospheric heat, there is quick evaporation. Besides, the crows who bathe in it splash and waste a lot of water. Yet, it is a rewarding experience.

 

Though it was conceived for use by the variety of smaller and prettier birds that visit us, the crow has emerged as the dominant customer. The kingfisher that visits us is not looking for water to drink or bathe but for feed. It sits on the TV cable passing over the birdbath and, finding no fish to swoop down and catch, makes a disappointed exit. But, like hope lives eternal in the human breast, it revisits with hope despite it earlier experiences of zero success. It is a pleasure to watch when the large white-breasted brown kite descends on the birdbath rim to have a drink of water.

 

But, the most ungrateful nocturnal visitor is the toddy cat which, apparently after drinking the water, leaves behind its excreta to be cleaned by me. Toddy cats have a reputation of being served by others and not offering thanks. Take this rustic story, for instance. As the name suggests, toddy cats climb the palm trees and drink the toddy from the vessel toddy-tappers install to collect the alcoholic sap. This time around, the toddy cat had too much to drink and could not balance itself. It fell into the slushy paddy field and got properly embedded and went into toddy-induced long sleep. Next morning, when the toddy-tapper came, he saw something sticking out of the slush. He went closer and lifted up what turned out to be the tail of the toddy cat. He turned round to go away. Then the toddy cat, soiled with slush, called out and said:” Muttini daye,ithe deckked budu” (Why did you touch me? Now wash me”). But, I have lurking sympathy for toddy cats. They are an endangered species. With tiled houses making place for concrete structures, they have lost their habitat in the crevices under the tiled roofs. Also, some people poison them – as I have seen several dead toddy-cats during my morning walks.

 

Watching birds from the vantage position of our wide window is now part of my tryst with birds which had started disastrously at the age of 10 on our ancestral farm in Bantwal. My uncle had shot down a crane and I rushed to pick it off the ground where it had fallen. Holding it up, I mouthed some sympathetic words only to be rewarded with a hard peck with it long and pointed beak, in its desperate dying moment, on my lip, just below the nose. Profusely bleeding from a deep wound, I let off the crane and ran for first aid. Since then, I have had repeated nightmares of cranes pecking my eyes -  blinding me for life. But, that experience and the nightmare have not dimmed my interest in birds – or butterflies for that matter.

 

When we shifted, on retirement, in 2000, from Bombay to Bondel, a suburb of Mangalore, it was a transition from crows to koels. In Bombay, the crows used to wake us up at dawn with their incessant cacophonous cawing. And, as I went for my morning walk at Gateway of India, the crows would be there cawing and scavenging. There would be people feeding the crows to get rid of their sins and in quest of moksha.

The transition from a pokey flat in Colaba to a spacious Johnlyn Cottage in Bondel is akin to a shift from crows tokoels. For, in Bondel koels wake us up with their melodious love calls. It is difficult to make out who calls first – the male or the female. It could be the female because she hasn’t got the colour to attract her suitor. She is close to the crow in colour, whereas the male has attractive silver-spotted plumes. It is one of the mysteries of nature that the male is beautiful and the female is unattractive.

 

 

There is, of course, a rationale for this odd natural phenomenon. The sweet-singing koels are lazy workers, as are all creative artists (and females?) of the human kind. They don’t bother about building a nest of their own to hatch their eggs and bring up their progeny. The black female koels use the crow’s nest to lay their eggs and the dumb craws incubate, hatch the eggs and feed the tiny featherless chicks as their own offspring. Wisdom downs only when the chicks grow and the male ones sport silver-spotted feathers. The crows feel cheated and chase away all the chicks, the black females and the spotted males, out of the nest. By this time, the chicks are feathered enough to fly on their own, with the helping and protective umbrella of their parents.

 

While the koels entertain us with their melodious love-calls, they also extract a price. They come to know when our papayas get rife before we know - based on visual change of colour. They gobble up the fruit, leaving us frustrated. Also, the toddy-cat robs us of our fruits, and unlike the koels, offers us nothing in return except their trade-mark excreta. We get to hear the high-pitched cries of the peacocks from the surrounding forested valley; but only have rare physical darshan when they occasionally transit through our garden. A pair of crow-peasants (red-eyed Kopul) do duty in our garden from dawn to dusk picking and eating insects. For them, eating is a 12-hour day-time cycle without break. There are other exotic birds with their distinctive voices that pay passing visits to the garden.

 

Chew on this!

 

John B. Monteiro, journalist and author, is Editor of his website, www.welcometoreason.com (Interactive Cerebral Challenger) – with provision for instant response. Try responding!