The Hindu Business Line : Watch them fed, reap the pleasure

Some two weeks ago, one was invited to a lunch at the Yacht Club with its high wooden ceilings, smooth wooden floors, large windows and tiny metal bells on the tables to beckon the waiters.

One sank into the deep sofa to take in the surrounding quiet and make a strong case for Yacht Club being better than the adjacent, showy Taj where everyone is an alien. More than 15 years ago one had walked into the Yacht Club for a round of drinks and the place has not changed much.

My hosts – a busy senior bureaucrat, a wildlifer and his lawyer friend – were quite keen on wildlife with the government official being on a one month leave to write a book. “So what are you doing,” asked the lawyer and one replied, “Nothing.” Being always cramped for time, they could not believe that in the Mumbai of the 21st century one could do nothing and still live.

Yet the fact is one is not doing anything which could be said to add to the GDP of the country or repair the fates of the ill-fated. Film director Alfred Hitchcock got his character to look out from The Rear Window while this writer sitting in an easy chair whiles away hours staring into the skies and the far away hills where one can spot cattle egrets searching for food. They fly over our housing society to their nests on an old tamarind tree at Jayaraj Nagar.

Every year in July, the heronry gets active and the loud vehicular traffic on Link Road does not disturb them. Possibly, the pond herons and cattle egrets on the tamarind tree may miss the vehicular beats.

For some days now, one has been noting the movement of two red-vented bulbuls (Pycnontus cafer); they fly from one rain tree to another, take a flight to the terrace and further on to the cable wires bringing in TV images to the many homes.

They were never frequent visitors to the society; one watched their flight patterns and listened to their sharp beeps. Salim Ali has this to say of the bird: “Common in gardens and light scrub jungle, both near and away from human habitations. Large numbers collect to feed on banyan and peepul figs and winged termite swarms. Has no song as such, but its joyous notes and vivacious disposition make it a welcome visitor to every garden. Its pugnacity makes it a favourite with fanciers as a fighting bird, and large stakes are wagered on bulbul fights. ….nesting season is chiefly between February and May, varying with local conditions. The nest is a cup of rootlets, sometimes plastered outside with cobwebs, in a bush or tree, 3ft to 30 ft. up.”

The bulbuls in my society have put up their neat nest stuck in between cable wires flowing into the seventh floor of the C-wing and is hard to spot. The parents, with worms in their beaks, break journey on the TV wires hanging outside, look around, wait, before rushing through the cement grill to the nest inside, some 15 ft up.

Vidya was the first to note the goings and comings of the bulbuls and guessed at their nesting.

One went up to the seventh floor of the C-wing and was pleased by the tea cup-size, tightly wrung conical nest of twigs; a baby bulbul was moving but one could not see it in detail.

On a second visit, one climbed a stool to look into the nest when out came the neck and head of the chick with the beaks leading to a red mouth.

For a few seconds it waited for its parents before falling back inside. It was the first time one was observing from close the nesting of the red-vented bulbul. In the afternoons one watches the parents feeding their chick and also keep away the crows and even sparrows.

In May, one watched two chicks of the house crow (Corvus splendens) turn adults. The crow nest (spotted by Ganesh) is a haphazard affair with a few twigs forming a wide platform with a slight depression in the centre and the parents chose a branch below the roof of the mango tree in our society for bringing up their family.

The crow is not arty; he is a utilitarian. It’s a hard job for the parents of any bird or animal as the children are ever hungry and need to be fed; the parent crows generally made five to six trips in about every 20 minutes to keep the new generation going.

The parents are never far away from their children. The adult crows, land on the edges of the nest, throw up their food into the waiting, open mouths of their children and fly off for the next instalment. Under a bright May sun, one could clearly sight the chicks with their open red mouths and wished one had kept a diary .

To add to the substantial pleasures are the call of the warblers in the mornings. One has been able to (or rather one thinks) identify the ashy wren-warbler calling excitedly from the top of bushes in the LIC Colony, though one is uncertain of the other warblers.

They are restless and it is difficult to focus on the bird. That perhaps make them interesting for this writer.

Recently, one came across a piece in support of warblers by Madhusudan Katti, studying the species in Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve in Tirunelveli district.

“Are warblers less important than tigers?” asks the author in the piece published in the book Birds of India: A Literary Anthology.

All 18 species of leaf warblers in the Indian subcontinent are migratory, says the author and they are hard to see – being small and jumpy; 80 per cent of the warblers (especially the common green leaf warbler) as well as the next most abundant migrant (Blyth’s reed warbler) spending winters in the reserve come from the forests in the hill regions around the Caspian Sea, from Turkey east through Kashmir, including bits of southern Russia and Afghanistan. If the forests in these lands go, there will be no warblers to visit Kalakad. For most wildlifers, tigers count, warbler don’t, which is a pity.

P. Devarajan

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Watch them fed, reap the pleasure