When it comes to babblers, it helps to have two facts wedged into one’s mind. They like the sound of their own calls — which explains their name. At the same time, they do not mind their calls being drowned by their species-mates’ — in plain terms, they enjoy company.
In Chennai, from the ubiquitous yellow-billed babblers to the uncommon yellow-eyed babblers, these basic facts about babblers are immutable.
Chennai and surrounding areas fall within the Yellow-eyed Babbler’s range, but these resident birds do not show up on the radar often.
“They are a bird of the scrub environment,” points out eBird reviewer Vikas Madhav Nagarajan, who had sightings of these birds at Guindy National Park in 2016. Though not so common in Chennai, certain patches in and around the metro may always offer the promise of a sighting. That includes Vandalur Repeater Road.
eBird has two photographic records of Yellow-eyed Babbler sightings from this section — one by Karthikeyan GB (10 December, 2016) and the other by Karthikeyan Ponnambalamoorthy (7 January 2017).
“The Yellow-eyed Babbler is a social bird, but how gregarious it appears depends on where you see it,” says Vikas. “You do not get to see it in large numbers in and around Chennai, but in Karnataka, I have seen it in flocks of 10 to 15. In Tamil Nadu, I have not come across Yellow-eyed Babbler flocks bigger than 4 to 5 birds.”
Across Tamil Nadu, slight variations in Yellow-eyed Babbler occurrence can be observed. Recently, Rama Neelamegan was treated to a sight of gregarious and noisy Yellow-eyed Babblers at a patch that is part of the Eastern Ghats in Vellore. Rama explains that with a scrub environment, this patch is just what the doctored ordered for the Yellow-eyed Babbler.
Yellow-eyed Babblers allopreen each other, just like their more common cousin: the Yellow-billed Babblers. These two also diverge on many points, two of them being that the Yellow-eyed Babbler is more bush-centred, and is given to higher levels of acrobatics.
(Uncommon Residents, as the title suggests, is about birds that are resident in Chennai but not commonly seen)
