A surprise visitor of the avian kind wandered into the home of Ajikumar V in Bharathannur, on the outskirts of the city, a couple of days ago. Although not a birder himself, Ajikumar, a cooperative inspector in the Nedumangad, was curious enough about the tiny bird, to call in a few local birding enthusiasts to help take care of it.
Bird aboard
“Much to our delight, it turned out to be the rarely-seen Yellow-legged buttonquail!” says birder Biju P B, who along with fellow enthusiasts, Anoop Palod and Reji Chandran, identified the buttonquail. “We are especially excited because there have only been a handful of sightings of the bird from Thiruvananthapuram district and this is, perhaps, one of the first sightings caught on camera. Even ebird.org , a free database of bird observations from all over the world, managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University in the United States, does not report any listing pertaining to this particular bird from the district,” explains Biju, assistant director, ESI Hospital, Ezhukone, over the phone.
Yellow-legged buttonquails (T. tanki ), which resemble quails but are unrelated to them, are endemic to the Indian subcontinent, East Asia and South East Asia. They are categorised among the least threatened species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That said the birds are masters of hiding in plain sight.
“Buttonquails are only the size of newborn chicks and they live in the undergrowth in sparsely populated areas. Their reddish-brown colour with muted orange highlights gives them the perfect camouflage for the undergrowth and therefore it’s almost always impossible to spot them,” says the birder.
“I have actually gone on a few expeditions to spot the buttonquails to no avail and lo! This one just turns up just like that. Our lucky day!” he adds.
The birders believe that the buttonquail in question was flushed out of the undergrowth into the house by some predator, maybe a cat or an owl. “They are ground-dwelling and usually run in times of trouble rather than flying,” says Biju.
The trio inspected the bird for injuries and when it was found not to have any, they released it back into the wooded area from whence it came.
