A s the rainy season comes to a close, and the rain that was supposed to stop starts up as fierce as ever, the brain fever bird gets frantic. It seems to echo the rising panic in a householder’s heart as guests are expected in just a few days and every room is festooned with wet laundry that simply won’t dry. Many of us have heard this bird, which bird nerds know as the hawk-cuckoo. After warming up its voice with a few trills, it calls out a three-note tune that gets louder and higher-pitched with each repetition: “brain fever, brain fever, brain fever”.
The name “cuckoo” or the Tamil name “kuyil” is already onomatopoetic, but the word suggests only the coo-oo, coo-oo of one kind of cuckoo. There’s another that sings a four-note tune (“Where’s my tiffin? Where’s my tiffin?”) all day and all night, sometimes, till you can’t get vadai and kesari off your mind.
In our old house there was a creature on the telephone line out front that a little niece claimed was saying “peekaboo”. For ages we called it the peekaboo bird, till we identified it as a bulbul. Recently a golden-backed woodpecker that always used to hammer (“tok, tok, tok”) surprised us by drilling for a change (“drrrr”). If birds can change their calls with the season, I’m sure they change their calls with their geography. It’s quite possible that in England those familiar black devils of town and country say “crrrrrow”, and in Chennai they say “kaa-kaa”, and in Delhi they say “kou-waa”.
In our heavily wooded garden the birds have many things to say.
The devious tree-pies and drongos come up with new and puzzling calls that fool us every time. We drop everything to run out to see what is making some entirely different sound, only to discover our same old friends. Our latest puzzle was a cry that sounded like a bus conductor in Tamil Nadu calling out the next stop. This morning we found out what was making the sound: a racquet-tailed drongo missing one of his racquets, perhaps lost on his long flight from the east. He sat at the window, looked to see who was in, and sang out, “Gobichetty, Gobichetty, Gobichetty, Gobichetty!” He seems to be a long way from home, but we hope he’ll like it here.
