'Home'less :(

Where did it go? I screamed. And D was also shocked to not find it there. The nest that we had been watching for the last two weeks was not there. It had disappeared completely with just a trace of a few strands of straw sticking to the branch, on which has stood this lively nest, bustling with activity till that morning. We had reached home late that day and noticed it only after dinner.

Nobody at home seemed to be aware of it, and we were given some lame justifications that it was there even in the evening, may be the birds took the nest to a different place, may be a cat would have attacked, may be some street boys had come in and stole it, the wind would have blown too hard, and so on. None of it made any sense, and tears started rolling down my cheeks.

It was the nest of a pair of sun birds, hanging from a branch of hibiscus plant, just below the window lintel, and in a walk way. There was a remote chance of a cat reaching there as there was no support for it to climb up there. More over if it were a cat it’d be interested only in the bird and may be eggs, but not the entire nest itself. And the other excuses were totally dopey, not needing any considerations at all. There was no litter below, as if it had been carefully removed from its place and cast away. It sure was a human act, for only humans can be so meticulously destructive.

The female bird had built it all the way, while the male had given her company. And she had laid egg(s) too, for she was incubating them day and night. How joyful had I been when I discovered it right on the first day. We had observed it throughout the nest building and now incubating period, I even took notes everyday, religiously. And were waiting for the chicks to come out, I had clandestinely planned to take a day off to sit and see them... but that day never came.

I wept and wept, while D too was very upset and started searching around for any clues, or for the nest itself, if it was lying around somewhere. But there was none. Somehow, this one was so close to our heart... We were as joyful as if it were our own home, and it were our own babies to be born soon. And now, it was gone without a single clue. We hardly had any sleep and even the little naps were full of dreams.

And in the morning, I had got so used to listening to their chirps even before I got out of my bed. I can now make out various bird calls, even without seeing them. I know exactly which bird starts chirping first and which follows next, every morning, though I’d still be in bed and listening. And as soon as I heard the sunbirds’ call we rushed out and saw the female fret about around the branch that held her nest. And the male was there too. They frantically searched around as if the gone nest would reappear again. It made me sadder and more tears rolled down my cheeks. After a few minutes, the male signaled and they both flew off, out of sight. I just hoped that they forget about this and build a new nest again at a safer place and restart their family.

But I was wrong. They didn’t seem to have given up so soon. Through out the morning, they came about together, every few minutes, to check if there was any hope. How can there be any?!

They searched around in the bushes, sat on my bike, searched in other plants nearby, cried to each other... I guessed that they knew it the previous evening itself, and still came back in the morning, because all these days the female used to spend the nights in the nest.

Every time I heard them or saw them, my heart broke... I could so well understand their pain...

Ohh! Where did it go?!?!?

Where did it go?! She cried in despair
Soon her partner joined her there
Frantically searching here and there
For there was no clue anywhere

It was their nest, built with love
Hope and passion to raise their chicks there
And also the hard work they had to endure
In building little by little day in and day out

The site was chosen with great care
As they were small little birds
So made it safe from every predator
But entrusted on humans to be guards

Now there were their eggs in it
And she’d sat in day and night
Not even feeding enough for herself
Waiting for the eggs to hatch off

And then on one un-fine day
She came and was aghast
For the branch swayed empty
Without her beautiful nest

Their beautiful home that stood
Full of life and joy till yesterday
Had now vanished completely
As if it never ever existed

There was nothing that they’d find
But still they came on, to look out
Every time bearing more anguish
As they had wrongly trusted mankind

Crow and Cuckoo

The crow built a cozy little nest with her partner, working hard every day. With the nest she built many a dream of herself and her partner, living peacefully and cozily in that little nest. She got in a variety of soft material like pieces of rags, feathers, cotton pieces and so on from here and there, trying to make the place warm and cozy for her little ones. Her kids would be born there, and she would feed them well and teach them to fly. Theirs would then be a perfect little family.

The nest was then built fully; she laid eggs there, her dream getting stronger everyday. Then came in a cuckoo, when the crows were away. The cuckoo slyly pushed aside one of the crow’s eggs and lay her own in place of it and fled. The crow that was totally oblivious of her egg replaced by cuckoo’s, scrupulously continued with her work of hatching the eggs.

The cuckoo’s egg hatched first, way before her own and she was excited. She fed the little one with all her might and saw the little one grow up. By now she realized that it was not her own kid, but she continued to feed the little one, since the little one was born in her own nest, by her own warmth,a nd it was away from its parents. What she failed to notice was that in bringing up her pseudo-kid, she neglected her own eggs and had failed to hatch them.

The little cuckoo grew stronger and faster, feeding on all that was fed by its crow-mother. The crow excitedly gave lessons to the little one on how to fly. In its ambition to fly, the little one had pushed off the other unhatched eggs out of the nest while fluttering its wings. It soon learnt to fly and off it flew, and joined its cuckoo group.
Back at the nest, the crow was left alone with its partner.

Facts:
Cuckoos indeed do find a crows’ nest and lay eggs there. They are cunning enough as the male distracts the crows away from their nest, and the female quickly lays its eggs there. The cuckoo’s egg is hatched first and the little one grows faster. Meanwhile the cunning little one pushes off the crow’s eggs or the baby crows and gobbles most of the food brought in by the parent crows. The crows do realize that it is not their baby, but still feed it. They start hating the young one only when it starts coooo-cooo-ing unlike their kaw-kwas. By then the young one would have grown enough to fly off and join its group. The story repeats again when the little one grows up when it again finds another crow nest to lay eggs.
Facts Courtesy: KP Poornachandra Tejaswi’s MinchuLLi

Hima-Bulbul

Of late, my morning alarm is of a pair of red whiskered bulbuls, a few feet outside our window. They exactly start chirping a little after six every morning! I don’t know if I should call it ‘chirp’... it’s so distinct from other chirps. They make this sweet musical 3-note or 4-note sound like twee-twi-toooo or twi-ti-tu-toooo.....

As I said previously, my little niece Hima is also fascinated with birds now. Or she is fascinated about being fascinated like her atte! One morning I just walked down the road with her and showed her these bulbuls, and their distinct crest (which I told her was a ‘juttu’). She was, needless to say excited about a bird with a ‘juttu’ on its head.

She ran into the room as soon as we got back home and got a comb and a small rubber band. She made me tie her recently cut, short hair into a ‘juttu’. I could manage to bring together a little hair and tied it up for her. She looked into the mirror, jumped with joy and announced to everybody that she was now ‘Hima-bulbul’!

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....

Indian Robins family - Season 2

Well, if you’ve been following my Indian Robin series, then you must be waiting for updates on the Season 2 of their story. But I’m afraid it’s not all happy happy ending this time.... :(

To state it in a fair detail, after I said that the birds had returned to their old nest and laid 3 eggs, similar to last year, they almost disappeared for 4-5 days. I was concerned whether they’d return or not, but they did. And the next day one of the eggs had hatched and the little one was of that black mass of flesh.

Both the male and female birds took care of the nest for the next 4-5 days, the mother, I supposed was hatching the other two eggs and the father was feeding the little one. Even after 4-5 days, the other two eggs did not hatch, and the little one grew faster this time than the previous time.

And surprisingly, the little one flew off the nest in less than a week, leaving behind the two un-hatched eggs. Even the parents disappeared..... It’s almost a week since then, and there is no sign of them.... Wonder why......

Birds are back!!

Yes! All those beautiful birds that had almost vanished in winter are back with the onset of summer! Those friendly Indian robins too had become a rarity for a few months.

And this time we were lucky enough to click a kingfisher, though from a huge distance....

And another one was a woodpecker Hoopoe that came and sat right in front of home, and started singing, nodding its head right and left for a couple of minutes! And lucky enough, it gave us a chance to click one pic.

There are so many other visitors, which I fail to recognize, and couldn’t even take a click...
And guess what?? The Indian robin pair that bred on the terrace is back again! And they are back to the same nest, which had left undisturbed since last year, and today we discovered they’ve again laid a clutch of 3 eggs! Now there’s some inspiration to get home from work early and watch these little beauties..... How I wish I can catch them learning to fly, which I missed last time.....

Will keep you all posted if something special happens....

P.S. Birders, please elaborate on these birds :)

Indian Robin inside the room

Ok, so after these Indian robins flew off their nest, they are still seen around home, often. Though they do no even visit their old nest, they hang around on the same electric wire, on bushes in the neighboring vacant plots, on the terrace, etc. And they didnt seem to be too scared of humans, like some other birds.

One evening when i got back home after office, I started closing the window curtains. Our windows are covered by mesh from the inside and the glass pane mostly remains open. The curtains are kept open through the day, and i close them in the evenings. Now while closing the curtains, i saw some small black thing on the window grill. Looked into it closely and realised that it is the same little bird - Indian robin. Couldn't make out much since it was dark outside. Whew! I was wondering if the bird was asleep there, and it did seem it was.

I didnt want to disturb it, so put off the lights, kept silence and started watching it. No, it didnt seem to move at all. And putting on light again, making noise, moving the curtains too didnt have any effect. I went out, to have a look at it from the other, open side of the window, the place there is quite small and i was prety close infront of it. The bird didnt budge from the grill inspite of all these, and spent the night there. And it was gone by morning, by the time i woke up - er.... i wake up pretty late after the birds.

I was careful the next evening, and slowly watched it, and the same thing repeated. But it wasn't found there every night. Analysing the pattern, I guessed the bird spent the night there on rainy nights or when it seemed it might rain. This went on through out the rainy season - the little bird would sleep the rainy nights on my bedroom window, and wake up and fly off in the mornings. Switching ON the lights, pulling the curtains, talking inside the room did not matter to the bird in deep slumber.

The rains stopped, and so did the bird's sleep on the window. It didnt seem to visit its bedroom too. And it kinda faded off my mind too. After a month or so, we took off the mesh for a routine washing and cleaning process, completely oblivion of the bird. The windows were open too, for the whole evening. Late in the evening, i realized that i need to close the windows, lest there be hundreds of mosquitos inside the house. Came in to the room and pulled the windows one by one slowly. Before i pulled this particular window, there was a sudden fluttering and in a second a little bird was inside the room. And it was a female indian robin!

Oops..... I slowly went out of the room, trying not to scare the little one, got in Dee and inlaws to see what can be done to send it out. The bird was apparently confused, trying to search the way out of this unfamiliar interiors of the room. Hmmmmm... we first opened all the windows carefully, tied the curtains up, making the windows more visible and evident. It couldn't make out the way out since it was bright inside due to the lights, and dark outside.

We then thought putting off the lights linside, and turning on the lights outside would help, but it didn't. Once the lights were off inside, the bird became totally inactive, not even attempting to find the way out in the direction of whatever little light was present out of the window.

Hmmm... it became a huge task for us, not to hurt or further scare the already perplexed bird, and yet send it to its comfort zone. It would just fly from one corner to the other - on the ceiling fan, on the tubelight, on the attic, on my dressing table, and on the window pelmet - just above its window, yet not discover the way out. We tried making sounds from opposite direction, leaving it alone in the room, switching the lights on and off for sometime, all in vain.

Finally we gave up, and decided to let the bird spend the night in our room, with the windows open, and probably it would leave at dawn. And luckily after sometime of leaving it alone in the room with the lights on, it had somehow found its way out, and was again back to its deep slumber!!! And we had no choice but to sleep with the windows open, and without even the mesh on, but we were glad that the little avion was peacefully asleep just a few feet away from us :)

And the next morning, it was amazing to see the bird wake up to it's peers' chirping outside, just at dawn. The little bird saw this side and that, and then decided it should fly out... Jumped off a few inches and then off it flew into the open air into a new day.....

An Indian Robin family on the terrace...

Dee came back from the terrace on a Sunday morning and said there was a birds’ nest in a broken, hollow cement mask (‘drishti gombe,' a mask that's put up so that no one casts an evil eye) on the terrace.

The drishti gombe

I was excited and ran up to check it out. I went and peeped into this mask and out came a dark little bird fluttering its wings in fright. I was as scared as the little bird was! Then, after the bird flew out to a distance, I peeped in, and lo and behold! There was this little nest made of dried grass, and three little eggs in it!

Three little eggs in the nest

And the bird which flew out and sat with its partner on an electric wire started screaming in a rather strange way. I walked back silently and watched them from a distance. The female was dark brown and the male was black. The female sat closer to the nest, while the male was at a distance.

The vantage point

A couple of minutes after I moved away, the female came to the nest, looked around and went inside to hatch the eggs! And it didn’t seem to get out of there. And I too didn’t want to bother the little avians.

About a week after we spotted the nest, two of the eggs had hatched. What were out of the eggs were literally two lumps of black flesh which kind of had a head and a body. (I felt they looked like a zygote shown in pics!). And of course they had reddish beaks, which were always open, hungry for food. After two more days the third one hatched too.

Three new-borns

And now, it was the female’s turn to sit on the vantage point and watch, while the black male with a white streak on wings would fetch something with its beak and feed the little ones.

Daddy with food for hungry li'l ones

This continued, with the female keeping a watch on the nest, and the male feeding the ever hungry little ones, with beaks always open to gulp in whatever their daddy got. Day by day the little ones grew, developing feathers and now looking more like birds.

The li'l ones cuddled

Finally one evening when I went to check out my new little friends, the nest was empty. And along with two birds on the vantage point, there were three more little ones around a nearby bush. They seemed to be highly excited to see the colorful world outside their nest. They were flying and sitting up on a bush, flying down to the ground, picking insects, chirping, playing..... Wow... it was indeed a sight! But I missed seeing the little ones learn to fly.... how the parents got the young ones out of the nest, how long did it take for them to fly.......

These Indian robins, by making their home on my terrace, got a special place in my heart, made me interested in bird watching...... I wish many more birds build their homes around mine....

Indian Robins

Ok.... so these birds are Indian Robins. And not Pied Bushchats as I had guessed. Thanks to the birder - Chandu who pointed it out, and gave me a detailed explanation about the vent - which is pinkish orange, the white patch on the wings, etc.

More information about the birds here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Robin

Well, i do have a couple of interesting experiences with these little birds, and will share them soon.

Till then, Ciao!