Having spent most of the winter watching humans, I took a meeting in Kolkata as an opportunity to go watch birds. This is not easy in the crowded city with its degraded land. This year a local birder friend suggested an early morning trip to one of the marshes surrounding the city: Baruipur. There’s open water as well as reeds and grasses: a typical ecology of this part of the country. It’s become quite a hot spot, and on a Sunday in late January it was going to get crowded with birders by mid-morning. My friend picked me up well before sunrise, so I was treated to a view of the sun rising over the foggy marshland. In fifteen minutes or so, the sun had begun to burn away the fog and visibility became good enough for spotting.
Left to myself I would have gravitated to the open waters to watch the ducks and waders. But in my group there was a very opinionated Bengali who wanted to look at the reed beds and grasses. He was a very good spotter, so I didn’t mind going along with his suggestions. Moreover, I’m not good with identifying warblers and other reed and grass dwellers, so I tend to avoid them when I’m by myself. Birding with other who have different strengths and tastes is therefore something I find useful in building up my birding “muscles”.
For the first couple of hours we had the place to ourselves. We managed to spot about fifty species of birds. They were mostly species I’ve seen before, but there were a couple of lifers. Even among the ones I’ve seen often, there are slight differences in appearance between the individuals in the extreme east and west of the country. A little after eight others began to arrive in dribs and drabs and by nine the place was full of people with more equipment than experience. It was time to drive to a nearby dhaba and have a breakfast of omelettes and bread. Whenever we look at a menu in a restaurant we wonder about what is a better transliteration of the word for peas in various north Indian languages. Should one write matar or mutter? This was the first time I came across motor. But then when you travel a couple of thousand kilometers across the country some things are bound to be different.
This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.
The rain stopped at night, and our morning in Khimseeka dawned bright and cold. We were prepared for the cold. So the lovely day was a wonderful gift after two continuous days of rain. Even before the sun had cleared the ridge behind us, we were out with cameras and binoculars watching the many birds which were out to make the best of the light. The early birder catches the bird, of course.
This was our first time in this region, so many of the birds I saw were lifers. (If you are wondering, a lifer is your first sighting of a new species.) There were people in our group who had come to these parts of the hills before. For all of us though, there was a special target that day: a hide at the edge of the forest a short walk away. We took the single road down.
The above photo shows the landscape around the hide. A thick undergrowth comes close to where we sat. There is about five meters of clearance in front to give us a view of the birds which come out. This rainforest and its undergrowth is full of cryptic birds which are rarely seen. We saw a couple of them in the hour and a half that we spent here. I have separate posts about them in the BoW series.
The morning well spent, we walked back uphill for the short stretch, with an eye out for the little warblers, tits, nuthatches, tree creepers, sunbirds, flycatchers and spiderhunters that this forest abounds in. But there was more, we saw a piculet as well. It was no surprise. When I see a tree like the one in this photo, I have no doubt at all that it is full of insects. In fact, it must be so full of insects that it can sustain several bird waves a day.
Our walk ended at the door of our home for the night: this charming house in the forest. You can see the concrete ground floor, and the wattle and daub structure above it. There can be a lot of rain here, so the roof is pitched high. Unfortunately there are sometimes little gaps between the walls and the frames of doors and windows, so the nights are cold. Still, it was charming enough that we didn’t mind one night in the place. Between the lovely forest and the wonderful food which our hosts made for every meal, I wouldn’t mind spending a couple of nights here some time again. When I said this The Family agreed.
Black-winged stilts (Himantopus himantopus) stalked about the shallows on their long red legs. In good light they are wonderful subjects for photos, because of their reflections in the surface of water. The shallows of Mangalajodi were full of them, and they loomed over the sandpipers and godwits which foraged with them. While trying to take photos of the sunset, I noticed a stilt deliberate roil the water to disturb hidden prey. I turned my camera quickly on it and was lucky enough to get the movement. That’s what you see in the featured photo.
The nice thing about photographing birds in such habitats is that when you can’t do that any more you can turn your camera on other subjects. In the evening, as the light failed birds were not still enough to be photographed, so I went back to taking snapshots of the sunset. Shallows, reeds, grass, they are nice subjects when the light is appropriate.
A pheasant-tailed Jacana (Hydrophasianus chirurgus) without its long pheasant-like tail? Could it be an immature bird? The prominent stripe on the sides of its neck told me that it was indeed a juvenile. It is an unusual species, with the female leaving the care of eggs and hatchlings to the male, while she goes off to find her next mate. I hope to see the female’s elaborate courting behaviour next monsoon.
I was happy to be able to take off from work on a Sunday afternoon in order to drive to Mangalajodi, a village on the banks of the Chilika lake in Odisha. The normal is back with a vengeance. I’m back home for long enough to bung my clothes into washing, fill my case with a clean set of clothes, and go off again. The afternoon on a boat, watching birds at close range was a welcome change of pace.
The most relaxed part of bird watching comes when you are not really looking for a particular bird. You just stand in the open, soaking in the atmosphere of the shoreline, or the forest, or the open scrubland, while birds go past you, or go about their lives as you watch. Some of this happened to us every day during our trip to the Rann of Kutch.
White-breasted Kingfisher (Halcyon smyrnensis)
Pied Crested Cuckoo (Clamator jacobinus)
Indian robin male (Copsychus fulicatus)
Indian robin female (Copsychus fulicatus)
Barred Buttonquail (Turnix suscitator)
Red-naped Ibis (Pseudibis papillosa)
The first day, on the drive from Bhuj to Nakhatrana, we spotted many birds on the road. You can see some of them in the slideshow above. On this morning’s drive we also managed to sight three of the passage migrants that we had gone to see. We spent a long time trying to look for the European nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus). This is another of the passage migrants. We never spotted it, neither that day, nor the next. This was our big miss.
Green bee eaters (Merops orientalis)
Little egret (Egretta garzetta), glossy Ibis (Plegadis falcinellus) and Indian cormorant (Phalacrocorus fuscicollis)
That afternoon, our first in the Rann of Kutch, we managed to spot two more of the passage migrants. After that we spent an hour walking about spotting birds, some which I knew well, others which I’d seen less often. At times like this you can concentrate on photography, especially interesting configurations. In spite of the heat, I felt very relaxed.
Eurasian marsh Harrier (Circus aeruginosus)
Common Redshank (Tringa totanus)
Indian spot-billed duck (Anas poecilorhyncha)
Temminck’s Stint (Calidris temminckii)
Black-winged Stilt (Himantopus himantopus)
The next afternoon yielded the final passage migrant and the rare marbled duck. But apart from that we had a wonderful time watching waders and ducks. These are birds which one sees very commonly in Mumbai, but I’ve missed them in the lockdowns of the last years. It was nice to stand there and watch them foraging.
Painted Sandgrouse (Pterocles indicus)
Red-wattled lapwing (Vanellus indicus)
Ashy-crowned sparrow lark (Eremopterix griseus)
Grey-necked Bunting (Emberiza buchanani)
The morning of our second full day in the Rann of Kutch was spent in another fruitless hunt of the European nightjar. The saving grace of the morning was a sighting of a Painted Sandgrouse (Pterocles indicus). We had a really lovely time in the afternoon. The featured photo is one of the last I took on the trip. It shows a White-tailed Iora (Aegithina nigrolutea, also Marshall’s Iora). Everything we had gone to see was done, and it was time to enjoy the beauty of the landscape and its bird life.
On a very hot day we drove to the Banni grasslands. Parts were under water at this time. But the shimmer on the roads was mirage. This isn’t an unusual sight in India, but this was my first view of this common mirage after almost two years. As you can see from the featured photo, the hot air blurs every photo a bit. It felt like resuming an old and forgotten life. There had been reports of sightings of marbled ducks (Marmaronetta angustirostris, also called marbled teals). They’ve become rare and threatened in recent times, but even so, for us this was very rare. India is far to the east of its normal range. Sightings are few and scattered, so it is always worth making the effort of going to look for them.
October had tracked them over the last weeks, spotting more every day, and was convinced that we could see a group of them. Their normal range straddled the Mediterranean until recent years, when falling numbers restricted them to two populations: the Maghrib and the Asian. The Maghrib population breeds in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Spain, and Portugal, with some having been spotted as far north as the UK. The Asian population breeds mainly in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran. There is some evidence of movement in the population, with scattered sightings from India, northwards as far away as Kazakhstan, and south to Egypt. A study in the Maghrib found that they could be attracted to wetlands near coasts which have diverse vegetation. That could be the reason why it has occasionally been sighted in India as far south as Goa. The attraction to vegetation is possibly due to its stronger dependance on seeds than other dabbling ducks.
We had a bit of misfortune. After much scanning we could see only one duck, and the sound of our cars on the shore sent it swimming away (my photos are all at extreme range; fortunately the air over the water was not as warm as that over the road). I saw it upending once, and dabbling often as it swam. The bird is sensitive to disturbance, which could be a survival tactic learnt in recent years. I had my lifer, possibly my only sighting, unless I go birding in Shadegan or Alicante. Even our attempts at keeping a distance, taking photos with a 6000 mm equivalent lens, was enough to disturb this individual. Later we heard reports of another group of birders who had entered the waters here to get “good photos”. Perhaps it was this encounter which had driven the birds away. October tells us that have not come back to this site till now. Man-animal conflict extends to “bird lovers” who are more in love with counts and photos than with birds.
Masks and foreheads. Nape and wings. Over a couple of days I learnt to tell shrikes by these characteristics, instead of going by the tails and backs by which they are named. Darwin taught us that the gradations of Galapagos finches are evidence of evolution. I realized the central Asian shrikes are no less. The fine gradations between their plumage, and the minor differences in the feeding and nesting habits, are all evidence of evolution in the same way. The four species that I learnt to distinguish are the bay backed shrike (Lanius vittatus, an endemic native of India), the Isabelline shrike (Lanius isabellinus, whose range extends well beyond India, as I now learnt), the red backed shrike (Lanius collurio), and the red tailed shrike (Lanius phoenicurides). The last three share part of their ranges, and are called sympatric species because of that.
We’d arrived in Kutch to watch the migrations of the red backed and red tailed shrikes, little knowing that backs and tails do not really distinguish them. Out first lesson: the males of the red backed shrike (L. collurio) is very similar to the native bay backed shrike (L. vittatus). There are two things you have to look out for. The first is that L. collurio‘s eye mask narrows over the forehead but that of L. vittatus does not. The second is even more subtle: a white patch on the wings tells you that you are looking at L. vittatus. Look at the first two photos in the gallery above to see the differences (as always, clicking on a panel will take you to a full sized photo).
The featured photo shows a red tailed shrike (L. phoenicurides), but it took me some time to recognize it for what it is. Individuals can differ in the amount of red in the back and tail, and when you see lots of them together, it may get hard to tell them apart. I learnt to look at the head and nape. These are completely blue-gray in L. collurio, but have more of a red tinge in L. phoenicurides. In other words, to tell the red tailed shrike, look for a red head!
Isabelline shrike, Lanius isabellinus
The red tailed shrike (L. phoenicurides) breeds in central Asia, through an arc from Afghanistan to Mongolia. The Isabelline shrike (L. isabellinus) has a wider range, breeding as far west as Ireland, and southwards in Asia into India. Russian ornithologists apparently distinguished between the two for quite a while, but it was only about a decade ago that West European scientists agreed to split the species. The crucial observations were the rarity of cross breeds, or, in the language of modern biology, the absence of gene flow between the two populations (note however, that there are photos of courtship between the two species). Although the two have very similar colours, the mask over the eyes of the male L. phoenicurides is definitely more pronounced. The females of both species lack the distinct mask. But both sexes have a red head in L. phoenicurides. Again, click the photos in the gallery to see the differences.
Red tailed shrike, Lanius phoenicuroides
What about their behaviour? Shrikes are called butcher birds for a reason, and I saw that behaviour clearly in my first sighting of the red tailed shrike. It had just caught an insect, and was busy impaling it on a thorn. Like a butcher, it keeps a stock of carcasses. All sought out higher perches, their favourite being two to three meters off the ground. This was perfect for photography. You can see them either sitting on wires, or on thorny bushes. The latter are perfectly suited for their lifestyle. A study made almost exactly two years ago in Oman on migrating individuals of L. collurio and L. phoenicuroides could not find any differences in their foraging habits. I guess one would need a longer and wider survey to find any differences, since they are so subtle.
The immature birds present an equal challenge in identification. I eventually managed to figure out the differences between juvelines the red backed (extreme left) and the red tailed (middle) shrikes. The old rule again: look for a red head to tell the red tailed. But surprisingly we also spotted a long tailed shrike (Lanius schach). This one breeds in India and to the east, and we saw only this one specimen. So the Rann of Kutch may be on the western border of its range. Thinking of immature birds and breeding, also brings to mind the ability of shrikes to distinguish between their eggs and those of others. A recent attempt at constructing the evolutionary tree of the shrikes mentions that this may point to past brood parasitism. Cuckoos have created similar cognitive abilities in some other birds as well.
Red tailed shrike, Lanius phoenicuroides
Kutch was a major learning experience for me. I’d only seen the Isabelline and bay backed shrikes earlier. They are easy to distinguish. Seeing the two passage migrants, the red backed and red tailed shrikes brought home to me how recent the evolution of the shrikes must have been. Of course, all birds that we see today evolved fairly recently. They are the remnants of the dinosaurs after all. But the evolution of some shrikes could be even more recent than of humans. That surprised me no end.
A small, nondescript bird. Easily spotted sitting on exposed high ground. Unremarkable call. What’s the fuss about spotted flycatchers (Musciapa striata), you may ask. I didn’t see it in the field either, when I took several photos of this bird. But consider this. The bird is less than 20 grams in weight, smaller than 15 cms in length. Despite that, the individuals that I saw were on an annual journey from Mongolia to Tanzania. I couldn’t think of walking that distance! It isn’t an easy life, not many birds live longer than a couple of years, although they are known to be able to live as long as eight years. And if that wasn’t enough, they raise two broods a year, all within the space of three months.
M. striata breed in Europe as far north as Sweden and Finland, and even across Gibraltar in Morocco and Tunisia, and in an arc north of the Caspian, eastward into Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia. The western population spends most of the year in sub-Saharan west Africa; the eastern population in east and south Africa. In September you can see it pass over a swathe of land that includes Turkey, Georgia, and western India. This little bird had drawn us for a couple of days to the Rann of Kutch.
I was very happy to be able to photograph it when some of the other birds gave me a hard time. Once you found its perch, you could be sure that it would return there after a sally. I didn’t get to see its prey. The air was full of large dragonflies. They couldn’t possibly be swallowing them on the fly. So maybe they were picking out something smaller, or maybe I just happened to miss them feeding. If the latter, then they seem to miss an insect on most of their hunting sallies.
A study showed that they are able to tell the difference between their own eggs and eggs of other species introduced into their nests. This marks it out as fairly special, since most birds are unable to do this. This ability has been interpreted as the result of a past evolutionary arms race where the ability to distinguish eggs evolved in response to nest parasitism by cuckoos. Support to this idea is given by the fact that currently parasitized species are able to distinguish eggs with some, but lesser success. The group also tested whether such an ability to distinguish eggs is related to special discernible patterns on the eggs. The lack of visual patterns shows that it is cognitive abilities which have evolved, and not egg shape, size, or colour. It is interesting, though, that the birds are not able to distinguish between their own chicks and chicks of other species placed in their nests. As Mullah Nasruddin pointed out, it doesn’t do to judge a person by their coat.
Tolstoy may have forgotten to write “Bee eaters are all alike.” But that’s why it was not hard to tell that the birds playing possum in sand banks were bee eaters. Finally, after two days of search we saw the blue-cheeked bee eaters (Merops persicus). On the basis of genetics, it seems that bee eaters can be divided into two main clades. One consists mainly of species which nest in Africa, and the other of species that nest in Europe and Asia. The latter are mostly migratory. Climate change may be affecting these patterns (some European bee eaters, M. apiasternow breed in South Africa), but the patterns hold for most species. M. persicus is a borderline case, what Tolstoy may have called an unhappy bee eater. One subspecies breeds in north Africa (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) but migrates to west Africa (Mauritania, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone etc) in winter. Another may be called Central Asian (since it breeds in an arc from Kyrgyztan in the north to Turkey, Greece, and Egypt in the south) and winters in east and south Africa. This was the subspecies that we had gone to Kutch to see.
There is an increasing appreciation of the European bee eater as an ecosystem engineer, since it nests in deep burrows. These serve to change the characteristics of the soil, and provides space for nesting to secondary species. In addition, their foraging provides controls insect population and provides food to other species. But these characteristics are all true of both the blue cheeked bee eater (M. persicus) and the little green bee eater (M. orientalis). A little reading convinces me that there is a case to be made for this whole genus to have similar nesting and feeding habits. So it is possible that all bee eaters could be ecosystem engineers. Certainly, studies should give interesting results. Due to their conflicts with humans in areas where bees are cultivated, this might be quite an important topic.
Having seen migrants arriving and leaving together, often flying in formation, I’d begun to think that migration must involve gregarious birds. But just the day before I’d come across a long-distance migratory bird, the rufous-tailed scrub robin, which was territorial, even for rest breaks during its migration. The bee eaters, however, are communal. A large flock was sitting on electrical wires, acacia trees, and flying down to a nearby sand bank for a sand bath. Do they fly together? I don’t know. Although seeing them taking sand baths cheek by jowl, I would think they might. They are such unlikely travellers. When you see them flying, they are on short flights, usually to catch food before returning to their perch. Here they seemed to be having fun hopping down for a communal sand bath, behaving a bit like a group of children at a swimming pool.
The whole bunch of birds had their beaks open, tongues out. Seeing one such bird supine on the ground, The Family had come to the conclusion that it was dead, and was very surprised when it flew up to a nearby tree. I didn’t notice much sound from the group, so the open mouths and wagging tongues were not producing calls. I suspect that this was their way of cooling off, much as a dog will pant to cool down. I initially thought that the dust bath was also part of their attempt to cool down. It may have been partly that, but it is more likely that this for the usual reasons: getting rid of parasites and cleaning the feathers. I haven’t noticed this behaviour amongst our resident M. orientalis, but I must look more carefully at them. Thinking of all the bee eaters I’ve seen, I think Tolstoy missed a great opportunity by not writing a sentence about the genus Merops to rival the opening of Anna Karenina.
You can tell that I’m not a natural born ornithologist by the fact that my first question after taking the featured photo was “What’s that bush with the white flowers?” Everyone else in the jeep was babbling about greater, lesser, and common whitethroats. The Family gave me a look which would have melted the lens in her binoculars if she’d not had to take it off her eyes in order to look at me. As a peace offering I said “Definitely a common whitethroat. See.” She looked at the photo I’d taken and said “Okay. At least you go it.” It was at extreme range, and any attempt to zoom made it a little fuzzy. October took a look and said excitedly “Clear eye ring. Obviously Curruca communis.” Wisdom looked, but reserved her judgement. I waited until I could search for a good explanation of the difference between the common whitethroat (Curruca communis, also greater whitethroat) and the lesser whitethroat (Curruca curruca). There is one, and it is worth reading.
Why the excitement? Because this is another bird of passage in India. It spends its summers breeding in Europe (every single country, including Iceland), south across Gibralatar to Morocco, and eastward in an arc over central Asia right up to Mongolia. In winter it migrated to Africa. The western population crosses the Mediterranean and the Sahara to winter in a narrow band across sub-Saharan Africa. The eastern population crosses either the Mediterranean or the central desert land (the complex of the Gobi, Thar and Arab deserts) to winter in the great rift valley and the surrounding parts of eastern Africa. For a short while the greatest density of these birds in the east is in the Rann of Kutch. We had timed our trip to catch this unique sight.
A new longevity record has been registered for the Common Whitethroat Curruca communis, with a bird recaptured in Italy 18 years and 11 months from the date of ringing. This exceeds the previous longevity record by almost 10 years.
C. communis is very well-studied bird. Its population crashed during the great Sahel drought of the 1970s and 80s (those with long memories may remember the Live Aid concerts of 1985 in response). But the species is said to be well on the way to recovery now. I always wonder though what this means. The genetic diversity in the current population must be much reduced compared to what it was before. Would this have consequences in the coming years of a warm earth? There is evidence that the evolution and speciation of warblers was strongly influenced by climatic changes. Perhaps we are at the beginning of a burst of such speciation.
Unfortunately I got sidetracked by the interests of people around me and never got back to the question that interested me in the first place.
Don't hold your breath 