Waters of Life (Part 1) - Shrinking Habitats

 From information sourced on the ENVIS Hub: Kerala there are more than 18000 public ponds in Kerala, of which some 5400 are in Palakkad district. That accounts for nearly 35% of the total and the rest being distributed in the other 13 districts. Perhaps the major geographical feature, the Palghat Gap, explains this unique richness in small broken waterbodies throughout the district. Many of them are on private land and in the middle of farmed areas or in small wooded grooves. 

Most ponds are now being taken over by the local panchayats and 'renovated' for use by public. These ponds were traditionally used for bathing, washing clothes, bathing cattle, limited irrigation and various other localized uses. Of late the trend is more towards clearing all vegetation in and around the ponds, desilting and deepening them and putting it to use for drinking water storage, wider irrigation purposes or fish farming. The renovated ponds are now restricted zones and protected with fencing along the edges and nets over the water to prevent birds from picking off fish. 

Mercifully there are still a few privately held waterbodies that are a haven for birds and other creatures. One of them, near Polpully, happened to draw my attention as it was on a road I used to take to visit my mother's ancestral 'tharavad'. Why it attracted my attention, I cannot say, but it did. Perhaps the wild and unkempt nature of its edges or the greenish scum floating on the water proved to be the magnet. Anyway, when ever I used to pass by, my head would turn and in a fleeting moment I would see the usual birds that normally haunted such ponds. It never occurred to me that I should stop long enough and scour the area. 

In 2020, as the Covid lockdown progressed and the prolonged confinement was getting on my nerves, I decided to extend my drives to the hospital by taking slightly 'longer' routes! On one such drive, when I happened to be on this particular road, it struck me that a few minutes at the edge of this pond would be worthwhile. What a difference it made to my lockdown! Despite the garbage in the pond including an old disused mattress. 

 

Over the next few months and also during the 2021 lockdown, my friends and I spent many fascinating hours on the edge of this pond observing how life goes on in a place when there is minimal human interference. By comparison the cleaned up ponds were 'sterile' and totally uninteresting. I hope this pond is allowed to remain this way forever and I have reason to think it will, as many local folk, attracted by our presence on its edge regularly, started to take notice of the Life in the Pond!

Eurasian Moorhen

Little grebe

Purple heron

Little grebe

Black-crowned night heron (immature)

Lesser whistling duck

The posts that will follow after this are stories of a few fellow creatures that survive in many such small habitats. Let us hope  a peep into their fascinating lives will encourage protection of at least a few such waterbodies for their survival. Otherwise we humans are the ones that stand to lose from their absence. 

Birders, eBirders and Num-birders - A Lament

It's been a while since I sat down to type a few words on Blogger. In a world full of vloggers, I wonder if bloggers will attract attention any more. 

The whole of the last (2021) Covid lockdown was spent transitioning into a videographer from a photographer. I confess, it needs  a lot of fine tuning and I had to partially abandon the projects as my current hardware wasn't quite capable of keeping up with the needs of Da Vinci Resolve and handling video editing very smoothly.

Therefore, till such time my hardware gets upgraded, I will crib about something that makes me increasingly disheartened about birding.

I have, as I have mentioned time and again, transitioned from 'tigertracking' to 'woodcrawling' over the last few years. Increasing expenses, a growing son and the Covid pandemic in the last two years have ensured that my woodcrawling has been mostly confined to my backyard! 

During the years I spent 'tigertracking', it didn't take very long to realize the pursuit of a tiger or for that matter, any carnivore, was a like searching for the elusive Scarlet Pimpernal. It was, therefore, not very difficult to shift attention to something that didn't need much searching, birds!

Birds are just about anywhere. Open your ears and eyes; they are all around us. The best part is that you don't have to go searching for them, they'll come to you. Of course, some of them, like the elusive tigers, won't come to you but they'll make you go searching for them. For these rare birds, it requires a lot of planning and company of like minded friends. Please don't get the impression that we are a bunch of 'twitchers' and in case you don't know what that word means, take the help of Bing, Google or a more birdy DuckDuckGo search engine! After all, what really matters is the journey and not the destination or target species when you are with the right people. 

Becoming a Birder

So, from randomly shooting birds on my jungle trips more than 20 years ago, I graduated to picking up the field guide to try to identifying them myself.  From a combination of a Bikram Grewal pocket guide and Salim Ali's field guide, I have graduated to half a dozen different guides. I still possess both these books. The pocket guide, in tatters, went with me into the field and Salim Ali remained in my room for reference. Unfortunately, both of them listed details of only under 300 birds combined and quickly became inadequate for a serious birder. 

My collection of field guides now include Grimmett & Inskipps, Krys Kazmierczak, a bigger Bikram Grewal and Rasmussen & Anderton. They cover all possible birds, numbering around a 1300 or more species found on the Indian subcontinent. Not only that, I found my interest in nightjars, owls, raptors and warblers so I have another half a dozen and more books on specific birds. I had become a dedicated birder! 

For a little more than twenty years, I've been honing my skills and have now become quite adept at identifying birds both by sight and sound, thanks to the company of accomplished birders I call friends. We birded the old fashioned way, with a pair of binoculars, handheld GPS, a notebook and pencil. Not all of us carried cameras and if we did, it was a tool for birding. While I don't claim to be an expert or professional, I am now able to identify most of the endemic birds seen in peninsular India and western ghats.

In 2014, I was introduced to the eBird portal and  my randomly scribbled bird lists suddenly became very orderly checklists!  Not only that, my photographs that used to be uploaded unsorted to photo upload social media sites like Picasa, Flickr and Facebook or the old Yahoo Groups, could now be uploaded to a dedicated site for birds. Now, with a click of a mouse, I could get the list of birds I had seen photographed and recorded sounds of. 

In the initial eBird years I carried my field guides with me till I eventually downloaded the eBook version of Grimm-Skipp. Identification of a bird was based on points noted in the field. Photography itself was for recording what we saw. The, so called, eBird checklists were completed after reaching home from memory and notes made in the field. 

From Birder to eBirder

Somewhere around 2015, the eBird mobile app was launched and what it did was cleverly combine checklist for a specific location with GPS coordinates and a live mapping of the tracks we walked during the session. The notebook and pencil, though still an essential part of the birding kit, became redundant. The consequence of this change was that the fun went out of birding.

Earlier, we did make observations in the field but most of the listing was done at the end of a session, with each of us shuffling our memories to remember what we had heard or seen. Usually over a rather sumptuous breakfast for which, planning was done days in advance! Numbers were at best for academic interest and not for competition. 

As time passed most of us realized in the guise of citizen science we were becoming statisticians. The app was like a modern version of the abacus. We were all busy adding to the numbers in the field almost instantaneously, as we were seeing the birds, (I decline to use the term 'observing' here!). All of a sudden the camera's importance grew as media uploads were adding colour and sound to the checklists. Beside photographs, some of us were now recording bird calls as well as shooting videos. 

It became a period where the purpose of each trip seemed to be for adding to the collection of photographs and call recordings. A simple pass time for which the most expensive tool was the binoculars suddenly became quite an expensive hobby. High end cameras and lenses, sophisticated microphones and field audio recorders became a part of our birding armamentarium. 

Gone were the days where we could go into the field with a simple backpack and water bottle. Now we had heavy camera bags, audio recorders and shotgun mics with cables draped around our anatomy. Birding had suddenly lost its simple charm. 

We had become data collection agents but were euphemistically called 'citizen scientists'! Along the way our Birding with Breakfast also took a hit especially after Covid lockdown came into our lives. Not only that, after we returned from a birding trip, substantial amount of time was spent editing and uploading the media files to our eBird checklists.

From eBirder to Num-birders

Of late, the new habits seem to have become completely alienated from traditional birding. The eBird website lines up challenges for each month and some lasting all year. Essentially, it is making birding a competition and one that is becoming very unhealthy. eBirders seem to be more keen to get numbers under their belt than enjoying birding for birding's sake. Not for them are the field guides and binoculars. Most of them are armed with the latest cameras and far reaching lenses. At the sight of a bird they fire away a few hundred shots. Then, the photograph is posted in some birding group with the query, "ID please"! 

As a matter of fact, I have now confirmed my worst fears. Many so called eBirders are on the platform only to get access to information regarding interesting sightings and their locations! I maybe wrong but that is what my gut tells me.

It seems that these bird photographers aren't interested in identifying a bird in the field. The Merlin app is used to identify and sometimes misidentify a bird. Their sole aim seems to be to photograph the maximum number of species in the minimum time. From time to time we see a comment on an eBird checklist, "The first photographic record of ABC species in XYZ location"! Seriously! Who cares?

I am afraid, traditional birding has become a dying art. It is eBirding or Num-birding now and I don't enjoy being a part of this new trend.  Most of the new and young individuals with an eye for birds are following this route now. I don't deny there are a few who still follow the traditional birding habits but most are 'collectors'. They are more interested in acquiring the latest photography gear first, rather than a simple pair of binoculars, and notch up the numbers in double quick time! 

I will continue my contribution to eBird because it aids science and also helps me catalogue my birding experiences more systematically. However, I refuse to be drawn into Num-birding. I have made sufficient contribution in terms of media uploads, both photographs and audio recordings. Despite my reduced activity, I'm surprised that my name is included in the list of prolific birders contributing to eBird! However, unless I go out and explore newer territories for my future birding adventures, I'm afraid I'll not be making much contributions in the foreseeable future. 

For that, Covid has to decide that it has punished humans enough. However, it seems we still haven't learnt our lessons, two years into the pandemic. As for me, I'm not leaving my comfort zone in a hurry and no numbers can tempt me to embark on a birding trip to locations where I can add to my species list substantially. 

At this point of time in life, perhaps the twilight zone for me, I prefer to be with Funny Friends, Feathered Fiends and Food, in no particular order or location!

After all, I'm a Woodcrawler first and everything else afterwards!

Avian Orchestrations - Part 2: Calls, Songs & Mimicry artistes

Judging by the popularity of the previous post (← link here), I will safely assume that at least some of you have started sharpening your ears and listening to the feathered friends around you. As you pay more attention, your ability to connect a call to a species will improve and you will soon enjoy birding with your eyes closed! To 'see' a bird it has to be in your line of sight but to 'hear' one it can be just about anywhere. That is the advantage of birding by your ears. You might have also noticed, if you listened carefully, that each bird is capable of making different sounds. The objective of this post is to introduce you to the different types of bird sounds that they are capable of. 

Birds are vociferous creatures, especially in certain seasons and situations. In the south of India as summer sets in, the days break early and from the middle of March to the middle of July the average length of daylight will exceed 12 hours; even stretching to 14 hours between May and July. The early part of summer is also the time the migrant birds would have left or will be preparing to leave for their breeding grounds. In our part of the world too, as summer heralds the arrival bright and warm and days, the endemic birds will also prepare to get into their romantic best! Yes, it is the breeding season and love is in the air.

If you've taken to the habit of listening to the birds, you would have, by now, realized that they sing more at particular times of the day. They are most active at dawn and therefore most noisy around sunrise. Not that they fall silent the rest of the day but they are at their loudest best, early in the morning. This is the Dawn Chorus.

DAWN CHORUS

It is usually in the early summer or spring, in most parts of the world, that birds get into their singing moods. As the beginning of the breeding season starts, the birds, especially the males, looking like they stepped out of  Savile row in their resplendent new plumage, test their musical skills to attract the suitable ladies of the species .They can be heard anytime but the best time is about an hour before sunrise and for another two hours after. There is plenty of daytime, as I mentioned earlier and potential suitors find the highest perches and belt out song after song till they catch the attention of a mate. While most singers are male some females too join the fun.

(PLEASE CLICK ON THE CAPTION UNDER THE PHOTOGRAPHS TO HEAR THE SOUNDS. IT WILL TAKE YOU TO THE MACAULAY LIBRARY PAGE WHERE THE SOUND IS UPLOADED. YOU WILL HAVE TO CLICK TO PLAY)

Oriental Magpie Robin

Common Tailorbird

Asian Koel

If you listen carefully everyday, you'll find some species start earlier than others. In my place it is the Asian koels, oriental magpie robins and white-throated kingfishers start their singing before sunrise. (Click this LINK to listen to the birds that join in the Avian Orchestra at my house) As the east lights up the red whiskered bulbuls, tailor birds and others join the chorus. Everyone is in trying to outdo each other because there is nothing better to do at that hour. The light is low, there fore predators won't see you easily. Potential food like the insects and flying termites will get active only after the sun warms the air and the earth. Besides the light may not be enough to detect them. In urban environments the sound carries further as traffic and the cacophony of a city won't drown out the songs!

If you are an early riser and carry your newspaper to the bathroom for a leisurely read while sitting on the best seat in the world, the potty seat, you can keep an ear out for this dawn chorus. Birds wake up before sunrise and warm up while you are trying to read that newspaper and complete the most important  activity of the day!

BIRD SONGS & CALLS

Birds vocalize differently depending on the situation, season and location. Their voices can be broadly divided into two, the songs and the calls. Please note, I used the word 'voices' in the previous sentence because there is also another type of sound, the non-vocal sounds, which we will see later.

Birds sing, mostly the males of the species, during the breeding season. The males, especially, use their talent to advertise their availability to the females. Not only is it a trick to attract mates but also to ward of threats in the form of other birds competing for the same mate or territory. It is also used as a tool for bonding with the mate and their young. Songs are more complex acoustically, have a definite rhythm, are longer and get repeated over and over again. Some birds have more than one type of song and they can go through the entire repertoire in one go. 

 

(The LINK to the song of the Oriental Magpie Robin)

Most song birds are usually those that breed where visibility is low, meaning, in habitats where visual connection is difficult, like in thick forests, dense shrubs or even open areas where grass and bushes grow tall. In such situation a call is used to attract the attention of a potential mate or warn other birds intending to enter the territory of the singer. If you have observed, birds that forage or breed in open places like cormorants, darters, ducks, egrets, heron and storks rarely sing. They usually make a sound only when alarmed or when fighting off competition.

Calls are vocalizations that are made at other times of the year after the breeding season is over. They are short, not very musical and acoustically simple. They are used to communicate within a flock, to keep  tabs on location of individuals or as an alarm to warn about an imminent danger.

(The LINK to the call of the Oriental Magpie Robin)

NON-VOCAL SOUNDS

There is one other aspect of bird sound, the non-vocal sound. Bird songs and calls are produced in the bird's voice box called the syrinx but there are birds that have poor vocal ability despite the presence of the syrinx. Such birds use other parts of their anatomy to produce sounds. They use bills, feet, tail or wings to produce sound. Albatrosses, some herons and storks, clatter or tap their bills to communicate. Snipes and swifts can vibrate their tail feathers to produce a rattling or whistling sound. All woodpeckers have a very specific rhythm to their tapping and the species can be identified by just listening to it.

Black-rumped flameback (Non-vocal call)

MIMICRY ARTISTES

Many a time, I've heard a shikra call around my house and rushed out with a camera or microphone only to see a racket-tailed drongo shaking in laughter as it succeeded in fooling me again! Most of us would have heard a parrot or myna imitate sounds and even 'speak' human languages. However, in nature, there are a large number of birds that can imitate both animate and inanimate sounds. Some jays, starlings, mockingbirds, magpies and the lyre bird are all great imitators. They imitate, among other things, predators, other birds, insects, squirrels,vehicular horns or alarms, door chimes, chain saw, phone ringtones and much more.

Racket-tailed drongo

In our part of the world the commonest mimicry artiste is the racket-tailed drongo. It can imitate many birds, animals and inanimate sounds. The ones around my house imitates shikras, babblers, bulbuls, kites, squirrels, whistle of a bus conductor and more! Other birds found on the Indian sub-continent that imitate well are larks, leafbirds and shamas.

The mimicry serves two purposes. One is for establishing territory and attracting a mate and the second is to scare away foraging birds to steal their food!

Next time you hear a bird outside your window, try to identify the call. You can record it on to your mobile phone and compare it with bird sounds on websites like Xeno-Canto or eBird. Once you get the hang of it, identifying the birds around you will be a breeze. Not only that, it will amaze you what birds are capable of, when they put their minds and syrinx into it!

Avian Orchestrations - Part 1: Birding by the Ears

A little over four months ago, the first Covid-19 case was reported in Kerala, on 30th January. Subsequently, as the number of cases started shooting up, Kerala went for a lock down from the 23rd March 2020 and the nation followed suit the next day. We are now into the third month and still don't know how long it will continue.

Indian Peafowl (Male)

As usual, Pinks are Links. Click on the caption of each photograph to listen to the bird!

In the initial phase of the lock down, when movement of people were strictly monitored, all of us were confined to our houses, a self-imprisonment induced by an invisible Corona. Suddenly, our eyes and ears became sharper and we started seeing and hearing things we never noticed before, in our monotonous lives! Social media was flooded with messages of animals, birds, fish and all assorted creatures moving around places deserted by homo sapiens. Whether they were moving around with greater freedom now or it was only that we never had time to notice their presence among us, only time will tell. In any case, suddenly, everyone became nature enthusiasts overnight!

Asian Koel (male)

Greater coucal

It is debatable whether nature took over when we temporarily abandoned spaces. Yes, there are definite indications that mammals, large and small, have started re-entering spaces that was rightfully theirs but birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians were probably around all the time but we were too busy to notice. Of these, I can vouch for the birds. I have been pursuing them obsessively for a few years now and I know they have been around us all the time. The people who were used to leaving home early to beat the traffic and and returning late evening would have missed the show. Obviously, if you stop commuting during the critical hours of dawn and dusk, the eyes and ears start noticing thing they didn't see or hear earlier. No surprise there!

Red whiskered bulbul

Red vented bulbul

To most of us, it is the visual identification which is mandatory for anything to imprint in our brain. It is rarely that a call from the dense canopy 40 or 50  feet above us or from among the reeds in a pond, registers as a bird call or song. Without a mental image, the majority of us, cannot link a sound with anything animate or inanimate. Most of us have to 'see' the source of the sound to connect it to a sound, not the other way around.

Brahminy kite

Shikra

When I started paying attention to birds, it was because my interest was to photograph them. It was, therefore, of paramount importance that I not only saw the bird but also found it on an ideal perch. That was what a 'good photograph' demanded. Slowly, as I turned from being just another 'bird watcher' and photographer to a listener, I had transformed into a birder. In exalted company of a few like minded friends, my auditory apparatus perked up and eventually overtook my visual apparatus! My photography gear ceased to be as exciting as before, since my ears were now getting more adept at identifying birds.

Barn owl

Indian grey hornbill

Over a period of time, I realized that I was listing birds based on auditory clues than visual ones. It was a completely new experience and the 'photographic eye' didn't matter any more. It used to be disappointing, earlier, if I couldn't sight a bird and get a photograph. Now, I didn't have to see one to know who was hiding from me. My ears had evolved!

House crow

Large billed crow

For, those who had started enjoying the beauty of birds during your self-imposed confinement over the last few weeks, I'm sure having to go back to work again will be depriving you of the simple pleasures of watching that bundle of feather go about its daily routine. Something you had grown used too, that helped soothe your frayed nerves and kept you busy during an otherwise frustrating lock down.

Common myna

Rufous treepie

Rose-ringed parakeet

Fear not, you can still enjoy the company of your feathered friends even if you are in your office. If you have an office with a garden, all the more better. There is no place with human presence, that birds haven't adapted to. All you have to do is perk up your ears and listen to the world outside, especially if your boss is screaming at you for nothing! It will definitely help you keep your cool.

White cheeked barbet

Racket tailed drongo

Considering that the Corona issue continues to smoulder, flare up and smoulder again with no end in sight in the foreseeable future, birdsong will help you tide over this crisis in more ways than one. You can keep your boss out of your ear, your children entertained and  your spouse happy because you are overflowing with the milk of human kindness. All thanks to the mellifluous tones the birds pour out around you.

White throated kingfisher

Stork billed kingfisher

Paradise flycatcher (white morph male)

This post is peppered with photos of various commonly seen birds around our homes and office (in South India mainly). You may have either seen them or heard them but rarely connected the visual and auditory components to one bird. Unfortunately Blogger doesn't allow direct audio file uploads so I've put the link to the audio file in the caption of the photos.

Black-rumped flameback woodpecker

Yellow billed babbler

Oriental magpie robin

Each caption is link, which, when clicked, will take you to the Macaulay Library Archives (← click here for link) of bird songs. That is where I have uploaded many of the bird calls (and photographs) that I have recorded. Once you are familiar with the song, you can identify the bird even if it is singing from somewhere far away and out of sight.

Common tailorbird

Pale-billed flowerpecker

Purple-rumped sunbird

Loten's (large billed) sunbird

House sparrow

This is, by no means, a complete list of birds seen or heard around us. Common birds differ according to location, altitude and habitat, so for a given location the list of birds in that area will be slightly different. I may have omitted many species, either because it is not seen commonly in the place I live in or because I don't have audio records of my own for them. You can check Macaulay Library (← click here for link) or Xeno-Canto (← click here for link) for more audio records.

If you want to know more about any species that you run across, I'd suggest you look at some of the dedicated birding sites. One of the most comprehensive sites is the eBird website (← click here for link) where you can explore more details of the bird you have seen or heard.

Finally, no bird calls or sings in a monotonous fashion. Every bird has a large repertoire of songs that is usually reserved for different seasons and situations. Bird song is more elaborate and usually heard during mating season while bird calls are short and used to warn the flock or keep in contact. Some birds imitate very well and the racket tailed drongo is an expert mimic, able to imitate other birds, animals or even inanimate things.  So if you listen only to one track, you might be missing some serious talent. Select a species on one of the above mentioned websites and listen to all the various calls and songs a bird is capable of.

I hope this post gives you a stimulus to 'look' at bird with your ears. Even during your busy day, tune your ears to pick up the bird outside your window. It will be a lifetime of free music!