Birding...

My interest in birds is gradually increasing! Though I have not yet done any formal ‘bird-watching’ yet, I have just been observing all the birds around office and home. Luckily my house as well as the office is outside the city, in the remote outskirts, where the birds are not yet extinct. There are many parakeets, bulbuls, robins, barbets, cuckoos, etc etc.

I must confess it was only recently that I watched cuckoos closely and could identify them. I had earlier mistaken a Drongo to be cuckoo. And whenever I heard the cuckoo’s ‘koo’ I had not been able to spot one at all. I didn’t know that the female is brown with whitish spots and made shrill ‘kwi-kwi-kwi’ while the male was bluish black with red eyes and sang ‘kooo’ in summer and also made the ‘kwu-kwu-kwu’ sound....

It’s an amazing world of birds, that’ll keep you fascinated once you get hooked on to it... Also, little Hima gives me good company in bird-watching! When she’s woken up early, she accompanies me to walk down the road and find birds; we took her out to a remote layout one evening where she spotted and showed me more birds than I could find myself, and so on. I was elated when her mom said yesterday that she showed her a cuckoo and explained to her that it was a ‘kogile’ and made ‘kooo’ sound. And she was excited about a group of parrots and told her mom ‘Wow! geen color pakshi’ (green bird)!

And this bird watchin fever has spread to my friends at office too! One team mate of mine told me that a little bird is building a nest on her exhaust fan and so she’s stopped using the fan and has been watching them. She has to frequently clean her kitchen slab because the birds are dropping some strands of grass all over! And at tea time my mates show me birds around and say they were never like this before!

Recently bought this book on birds by Poornachandra Tejaswi - ‘MinchuLLi’ meaning Kingfisher. It’s about different birds, facts about them and the author’s personal experience with some of them. Loved reading it and got to know quite a lot about some of them. There is a second book by him, which also we bought which I’ve just started reading. There is quite a bit of information that is presented, along with some interesting facts. It’s more like reading a blog with pictures than reading a book!

So, that’s about it.... but unfortunately I’ve still not been able to go birding with Chandu and his group :(..... not sure when it’s possible....