When I first moved into my new house in Secunderabad, I was delighted by the profusion of nature all around: tall thickets of bulrush growing in the scattered swampy lots, slender green tree frogs crouched in the crevices of the compound wall, dragonflies with gauzy gossamer wings, the occasional snake lazily crossing the road, and chameleons resplendent with ruffs around their necks.
The housing estate where I lived, like many of the new estates in Secunderabad, had been developed on land that had earlier been a vineyard, and much of the wildness and green fecundity of its earlier persona persisted. For someone like me, who had until then lived only in a metropolis, living this close to nature was wonderful. But the greatest pleasure by far was observing the birds in the area: hopping on the ground, perched on the bushes, or sailing gracefully on currents of wind. As an amateur bird-watcher, I was struck, time and again, by the number and variety of birds that I could observe, even on a casual stroll through the estate.
Dazzled by this plenitude, I spent the first few months trying to list out the different species of birds that I could spot — from the white-breasted kingfisher flashing its blue, to the golden oriole winging past in a flurry of yellow and black; from the blue cheeked bee-eaters, their pin-tails sticking out like broomsticks, to the large grey hornbills flapping their wings in ungainly flight. Over a period of time I was able to list more than 40 different species — to me a huge number.
It helped that our colony abutted a small lake, so water birds — cormorants and egrets, sometimes a grey heron, sometimes a painted stork — added to the growing list; as did the unforgettable sight of a white-breasted water hen with its brood of chicks nonchalantly crossing the road to disappear into the undergrowth on the other side. Over a period of time I realised that I could mark the seasons, sometimes even the months, by the species of birds that appeared.
While the black drongo with its forked tail and the rust and black coucal could be seen all around the year, the parakeets (both the ordinary green Alexandrine as well as the rarer plum-headed variety) appeared in July, raucous and chattering, feeding on the ripening grain in the adjacent fields. The golden oriole (glorious sight!) — made an appearance not long after this, and the almost-as-golden weaver birds fluttered around busily in September, attaching their curious, gourd-shaped woven nests to the branches of the thorn bushes. The swallows lined up on the overhead wires in February, wings neatly crossed behind, and pairs of sunbirds, (he, glossy purple, she, a drabber grey), hovered around in March and April, their curved beaks dipping into flowers, drinking nectar on the fly.
The colours of the birds span all the shades of the rainbow: the Indian roller, an iridescent turquoise like the kingfisher, the parakeets and bee-eaters in shades of green and blue, the yellow-gold weaver birds and orioles, the purple sunbird, the white egrets, the black cormorants, the red splashes on the bulbuls and the Indian robin, and the drabber earth coloured birds — the mynah, the brown dove and the prinia.
Not content with merely flaunting their colours, the birds register their presence through insistent calls, blotting out other sounds, as noise-cancelling as modern headphones! Trills and tremolos fill the air around me, occasionally interrupted by harsher calls — the noisy squabbling of the babblers, the repetitive koo-ooh of the koel or the plaintive ‘did-you-do-it’ call of the lapwing. Listening to them I marvel at how such miniscule throats can produce so plangent a sound!
But on the horizon of this colourful and harmonious world, I spot a distant cloud. Crows and rock pigeons, earlier hardly seen, have started making forays into the area. As the numbers of these ‘urban’ birds grow, the amazing variety of other birds will, I fear, dwindle and decline. I hope, though, that that will not be for a long time yet.
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