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.
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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.
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