Nature's Spokesman

by M Krishnan

  Then there are the garden birds, though the gardens today are few and nominal in this place, and mostly limited to the roadside trees. However, a number of birds find the vegetation adequate. There are honeysuckers where there are flowers, tailorbirds, coppersmiths (there are banyans along the outer roads), flaming golden-backed woodpeckers, looking strangely out of place in this drab setting (building in coconut groves, householders have retained a few marginal trees with thrifty forethought), shikras (they have been included among the sky-birds, already), spotted owlets where there are old trees, and koels and white-headed babblers. The last two are especially plentiful.

  Dewar, writing some half a century ago, remarks on the abundance of koels in Madras. The babblers are a triumph for the axiom that unity is strength. Most babblers babble, and stick together, but each sect has its own distinctive voice and demeanour. White-headed babblers are characterized by pale, watery eyes, weak, tremulous voices that grow suddenly shrill in excitement, a certain laxity of plumage and purpose. They go hopping along to some corner, and one bird turns a dead leaf over while its fellows look on with a critical slant of their white heads—then, suddenly the party dissolves in hysterical squeaks, and whirrs across on weak wings to another corner of the compound, where they proceed at once to turn over dead leaves again.

  Clearly, the birds are daft, but they are a feature of Madras gardens (however nominal the garden) and will always be. By sheer esprit de corps and an inability to take life too seriously they have prevailed where their betters have given up.

  I must devote a separate paragraph to the Common Mynah. It is a highly cosmopolitan bird, and is at home in the bustle of cities, as those who have seen the bazaars of Bombay and Mysore will know. But in this locality it keeps more or less to the roadsides and open spaces, entering dwellings after the rains, when grass sprouts up in the yards and grasshoppers abound.

  Two very dissimilar birds, the white-breasted kingfisher and the rose-ringed parakeet, must go into one group, the garden cum-house group. Thanks to the undependable water supply of the city, many householders here have retained the wells in their backyards, a conservatism that the kingfisher appreciates. This most interesting bird has largely given up fishing as a profession, and prefers to sit up over puddles, water drains and other places (often far from water), hunting tadpoles, insects, lizards, anything that it can pounce upon and gobble up.

  The posts of clothes lines are favourite perches with these birds—these posts are usually just the right height for them, for they like to sit up not too high above ground, being less expert on the wing than other birds that hunt from look-out posts, king-crows, for example.

  The parakeets are loud and numerous. They perch on coconut leaves and promenade the parapets and mouldings of the houses. What do they find to eat here? There are still a few fruit trees that no one cares for in our gardens—mine has three mangoes and a custard-apple tree, the fruits of which I do not dispute with parakeets and squirrels. But, apparently, these versatile birds are much less dependent on cultivated fruits and grain than I had thought.

  Elsewhere, I have seen parakeets taking up permanent residence in terraces and turrets, but here they are not yet our cotenants. Most of them nest and roost in the grove of dead coconuts; the charred, black, columnar trunks there are riddled with holes, occupied by the parakeets—the birds lend a fresh, verdant touch to that desolation.

  On ledges and parapets, these parakeets assume curious attitudes, which they rarely do when on trees. As they walk clumsily across the flat, hard cement, their backs are humped and their tails trail behind them—sometimes, on a narrow ledge, the tail is thrown up spread against the wall by the force of friction, as the bird turns. Parakeets in classical sculpture are often shown in these very attitudes—I have heard art critics, with no eye except for the stone, go into raptures over the rhythmic formalism of such carvings. It so happens that I have a quick sketch of a parakeet on my neighbour’s terrace, in this same pose, with tail spread against the parapet wall. Maybe 2,000 years ago, another artist was so struck by a parakeet in this pose that he depicted it, more lastingly than I can, in stone. Parakeets have frequented towns and parapeted buildings from time immemorial, and our artists have taken their models from these birds on ledges.

  Lastly, co-tenants. One of these, the domestic sparrow, can be ignored—for some reason that is beyond me, it has always been a rara avis here. The others are very much with us, both the grey-necked house-crow and the all-black jungle-crow. Crows are such sapient birds, their ways are so curiously dark and daring, that one could write pages about them—Dewar has, in fact, devoted a whole book to the grey-neck—and I dare not add another paragraph! But I will say this. I have watched civilization overtake the jungle-crow, in my own backyard.

  It was a rude, uncouth, apprehensive bird in my boyhood, lacking poise, shy and sidling in its approach to the tap for a drink, clumsy and precipitate in its getaway. Today it sits on top of the bucket with easy self-assurance, and wears a sophisticated look. The amused, tolerant glint in its eye suggests that it is reflecting impersonally over something ludicrous.

  It is possible that it is thinking, in its black mind, that in the past thirty years it has witnessed the gradual taming and civilization of one who was a robust young barbarian?

  1953

  16

  Rescuing a Fledgling

  After a solid breakfast I smoked my favourite pipe and, while my table was being cleared and dusted, had a nice, cold wash. Then I had a cup of strong, hot coffee. I was preparing to work. By 2 o’clock I had decided on the plan of work—before tackling hard jobs it is wise to spend a moment in planning the attack. And as I sat down at last to the hateful, necessary thing, a commotion broke out in my backyard, a series of high, thin squeaks and quivers, like the ‘ghosts that did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets’. White-headed Babblers are excitable creatures, and there is a clan of them living in and around my compound, sounding the alarm at each passing cat and human. However, there was a sustained hysteria in their alarm now, something in the way their chee-chee-chees and tremulous chrrrrrrs rose in outraged pitch till they were choked altogether, that called for immediate investigation, and I stepped out to the corner of my backyard.

  On the clean-swept ground beneath the mango tree was a fledgling babbler, just out of the nest, fluttering weakly against the corner of the compound wall and the bathroom, falling to the ground after each futile attempt to gain the top of the wall. Two adult babblers were on the ground beside it and three more in the boughs above, all encouraging the premature adventurer with frantic voices and quick flirts of their round, half-spread wings and loose-feathered tails. And strolling along the top of the wall towards this domestic group was a small, grey cat.

  The cat was the first to see me. It froze in its tracks, gave me one intense, green-eyed look, and disappeared down the other side of the wall into my neighbour’s territory. The birds flew into the tree at my approach, but when I was right under the tree and just a step from the fledgeling, they flew away in a loud body to a drumstick tree some twenty yards away, and there continued their alarm even more agitatedly than before—I noticed that not one of them was facing me and that some hopped down to the grass beneath the drumstick tree, as if what excited them lay there.

  The moment its elders left, the infant babbler crouched low and was instantly turned into a small, grey, shapeless, immobile lump; it did not move or bat an eyelid even when I touched it. Here was an intriguing situation! The fledgling on the bare ground was exposed to every passing enemy, and the older birds would not come to its rescue so long as I was near; they would persist with their instinctive demonstration at the grass beneath the drumstick tree. Should I move the youngster beyond the drumstick tree, where it would be safe in the innumerable boltholes offered by a pile of broken brick and scrap, or should I leave it where it was, keeping an eye on it from a distance and watching further proceedings? Finally I retreated to a point equidistant from both tr
ees, after taking a photograph of the fledgeling, and sat down to watch.

  Till 5 o’clock I sat stolidly on, observing happenings. First all except two of the babblers (the parents of the grounded youngster?) left ostentatiously, whirring and skimming on weak, blunt wings over and beyond my roof. The birds that stayed behind stuck to the drumstick tree, twittering feebly from time to time. Next, a pair of ill-assorted baby-snatchers arrived on the scene, a jungle-crow and a house-crow; they perched on the compound wall and cocked their heads from side to side, looking at me and at the ground beneath them with sly, sidelong glances. After a while they hopped towards the mango tree.

  This was the signal for the waiting pair of babblers to fly headlong into the mango tree, yelling blue murder and the rest of the clan was there at once, as if by magic. Routed by the pack of yelling, gibbering babblers, the crows fled to a coconut top some distance away. This performance was repeated several times, the babblers leaving the mango tree and even my compound, the crows approaching furtively, the babblers returning in screaming force at once to mob and drive away the enemy. The grey cat, which appeared on the wall again, was also mobbed and chased away, but the passage of a shikra low overhead was marked by silence.

  All the time the little one stayed put. I doubt if it as much as lowered its bill by a fraction of an inch in all those three hours. But it closed its eyes and did not open them except when the crows, whose proximity was proclaimed by the furious babblers, were near. It was evident that no attempt to induce the youngster to move to safer quarters would be made so long as I was there. The sky was darkening, and rain imminent. I decided I had watched long enough, and taking the fledgling gently in my hand, deposited it on the scrap heap, and it promptly disappeared into a crevice.

  In a moment the adult babblers had joined it and, the new ground being sufficiently far from me, vociferously encouraged the fledgling to essay flight. However, in the further fifteen minutes that I watched, it did not succeed in getting out of my compound—the babblers have no nest here, but probably have one in my neighbour’s compound. Next morning they were more successful, and the youngster cleared the wall after a few tries. Apparently, a day and a night make all the difference in development to a fledgling learning to fly.

  1956

  17

  The Anril

  Two years ago, there was a protracted controversy in the ‘Letters’ column of a newspaper on the identity of the bird known in classical Tamil as the ‘anril’. According to early Tamil poetry and to subsequent literary traditions these are the characteristics of the bird: it is specially noted for the constancy of its attachment to its mate, and is the embodiment of marital affection and fidelity; the top of its head is red; one reference speaks of its curved beak and its assembly in a palmyra top in the evening with loud calls.

  According to one school of letter-writers the ‘anril’ is the Sarus, no less, celebrated for its constancy to its mate, and definitely with a red, papillose patch of skin on the head. I quote from Hume with regard to its attachment to its mate; writing of the Sarus, our only indigenous crane, he says: ‘Whether in large or small numbers, they are always in pairs, each pair acting independently of the other pairs … they certainly pair for life, and palpably exhibit great grief for the loss of their mate … on two occasions I have actually known the widowed bird to pine away and die.’

  That seems fairly close to the classical Tamil account, but the Sarus was never known in the Tamil country. The protagonists of its identity with the ‘anril’, however, argue that the literary account is in the nature of a transferred epithet, and that, therefore, the non-existence of the Sarus in the Tamil country means nothing. The lion, for instance, was also never there in the Tamil country, but there are certainly many references to it in classical Tamil. But whoever heard of a Sarus atop a palmyra.

  The other school favours the black ibis. Unlike the Sarus (whose neck, on top, also shows a patch of red skin) only its crown is covered with red, papillose skin, and its beak is definitely curved like a sabre, whereas the Sarus is straight-beaked. Moreover, it certainly does resort to palmyra tops in the coastal inland plains of Tamil Nadu, in the evenings, and it does come out with a strident, long-drawn call then. I can never forget my first evening in the Kanha National Park. The wildlife warden of MP was with me, and some half a dozen black ibises came in at evening to roost in a tree close to the lodges, and came out with their grating, carrying calls. ‘Say, what is that dreadful sound?’ the wildlife warden asked me: ‘Is it not a barasingha being killed by a tiger?’

  Oddly enough, those who deny the black ibis the distinction of being the ‘anril’, rely on its being not a Tamil country bird exclusively but one with a practically all-India range—the closest look I have had at these birds, actually, was in the Thar Desert, where five of them flew up to perch in a stunted tree very near me. One of the Sarus-fanciers wrote to me (not that I ever entered this controversy) pointing out that a distribution south of Madras was not mentioned in Dillon Ripley’s Synopsis, and that the black ibis did not occur in Sri Lanka—so how could it be called any more a bird of the Tamil country than the Sarus? He must have looked into the first (1961) edition of the book when ‘Madras’ meant a wider area than Tamil Nadu today. Anyway, the black ibis is quite a common bird in the dry flat country of the south—I have seen it dozens of times in the southern reaches of Tamil Nadu (where it is much commoner, actually, than in the northern parts of the state) and scrutinized it through binoculars to make quite sure it was not the glossy ibis.

  At this juncture, a literal translation of line 219 of one of the oldest extant classics of Tamil, Kurinji-p-pattu (some eighteen centuries old), may be provided. Writing of the approach of evening the poet specified, among other things typical of the day’s end, that ‘curve-beaked anril arrive at the broad-leaved tops of tall palmyras, and sound their calls’. My picture* taken quite recently in the scrub around Tirunelveli, shows the black ibis atop a palmyra, to which the birds do resort at sunset in these parts, there being few other suitable roosting trees in it. I may add that the light shade of the neck in the picture is due to the slanting evening light, and that the neck was dark all right, and the scarlet patch of pimpled skin on the crown is clear in the live bird.

  Last year, during a long motor drive along country roads from Ramanathapuram to Kanyakumari, I saw many black ibises, and took pains to point them out to seven chance-met rustics and ask them the name of the bird. Four said they did not know its name specifically, it was just another wasteland bird, but described its habits accurately: the other three called it ‘anril’!

  That is pretty clinching. However, the problem of the anril’s identity still remains, in spite of all this evidence, for I am unable to find any mention in ornithological literature of the black ibis mating for life, or always going about in a pair. I have seen it singly, and in small parties of three to nine, most often in odd numbers which do not suggest pairs, and watching them, have never seen them moving in unison in pairs, only very much by each bird, individually. Perhaps some specialist on this bird can tell whether or not it pairs for life.

  1986

  * * *

  * Not reproduced here.

  18

  A Flight of Danaids

  Late in the afternoon of 27 June I was watching wading egrets from the bank of an estuary, and thinking pensively of tea. A wind sprang up across the water and blew gustily towards me, dispelling the muggy stillness around, bringing the smell of rain with it. I looked up at the sky—black, billowing clouds had already obscured the horizon and were rapidly mounting the sky. Then they were over the water and I could see that they were no rain clouds, but a great swarm of butterflies, thousands upon thousands of them, floating down on the breeze.

  They went past overhead on a loose pile, perhaps a hundred feet in depth. In the lower layers they were using their wings to flutter, but higher up they just rode along on outspread wings, like dry leaves caught up in an air current: only they did not
flurry and twirl about like dry leaves, but sailed smoothly past on taut wings, steering their airborne course. Most of them sailed on out of sight, and the next day they were to be seen in every garden within a ten-mile radius, but a few thousands from the lower layers circled my bank and settled on trees.

  There were two kinds of them more or less in equal numbers and mixed: one with brownish-black wings laced along their edges with white dots and the other marked with an elongated network of black on a pale cerulean ground that blanched to white dots at the edges of the wings. I had seen numbers of these same butterflies the previous day (26 June) in small flights, but that was a casual incursion, a few hundreds, nothing at all like this. By 5.45 p.m. the swarm had passed, and those that had settled on my bank were clustered thickly on twig and leaf, most of them on a jamoon tree in full flower.

  What amazed me even more than the sight of these countless beautiful wings, was the indifference of the birds around. There were four spotted owlets sitting in lumpy pairs on a tree, three or four crows, half a dozen kites in the air, a pair of king-crows perched on electric-supply wires, a pair of common mynahs and a party of white-headed babblers, all birds that would normally gorge themselves when such a swarm of insects came their way.

  But none of them took the least interest in the swarm, except that the kites circled higher to avoid it. I noticed that two of the owlets were just out of their babyhood and still very juvenile—they were as indifferent to the butterflies as the older, more experienced pair.

  Obviously these lovely insects were highly disagreeable as prey, and advertised this quality unmistakably. Both kinds seemed familiar to me but being innocent of butterfly lore I could not place them. However, having collected butterflies occasionally for an enthusiast, I knew how to kill them when one had no cyanide bottle—one holds them by the thorax between thumb and forefinger and a firm, quick pinch kills them instantly. I collected two specimens of each kind by this method, but had to pinch hard to still them. I put them into an old envelope and turned home.