Part 7
The cock koel is a jet black bird with a red eye and a green bill. When flying he looks like a slenderly built, long-tailed crow. The hen is speckled black and white. This cuckoo cuckolds crows.
The cock draws off the owners of the nest by placing himself near them and screaming. The crows, being short-tempered birds, rise to the bait and give chase. While they are absent the hen slips into the nest and lays her egg. If sufficient time be allowed she destroys one or more of the eggs already in the nest. She works hurriedly, for the operation is a dangerous one. If she be caught on the nest the crows will try to kill her and will, as likely as not, succeed. The life of the koel is by no means all beer and skittles. If the hen koel gets away before the crows return they fail to notice the strange egg, although it differs markedly from their blue and yellow ones, being smaller and olive green blotched with yellow. Nor do they seem to miss their own eggs which are lying broken on the ground beneath the nest. Sometimes the koel returns and lays a second egg in the same nest, and destroys all the legitimate eggs, for she can tell the difference between her eggs and those of the crow. Thus it sometimes happens that the deluded crows rear up only two koels. They never seem to notice the trick that has been played upon them. Even when the black-skinned young koels hatch out, the crows are apparently unable to distinguish them from their own pink-coloured young.
The young koel invariably emerges from the egg before his foster-brothers and thus begins life with a start. He develops much more quickly than they do, but, unlike the common cuckoo, ejects neither the other eggs in the nest, nor the young birds as they hatch out. He lives on good terms with the other occupants of the nest, and when fledged, makes laudable if ludicrous attempts to caw.
The natives assert that the hen koel keeps an eye on her offspring all the while they are in the crow’s nest and takes charge of them after they leave it. I am almost certain that this is not so.
Early in April the paradise flycatchers (_Terpsiphone paradisi_) arrive. The hen is a chestnut bird with a black head and crest and a white breast; she looks something like a bulbul. The cock when quite young is similarly attired. At his first autumnal moult, that is to say when he is about fifteen months old, his two middle tail feathers outgrow the rest by twelve or thirteen inches. In his third year white feathers begin to appear among the chestnut ones, and after his third autumnal moult he emerges as a magnificent white bird with a metallic black head and crest. His elongated tail feathers now look like white satin streamers. He retains this livery for the remainder of his life, and looks so magnificent in it as to merit well his name. It is impossible to mistake the paradise flycatcher. There is no other bird like it. It is a denizen of orchards and shady groves and may always be seen during the hot weather in the beautiful wood on the bank of the Ravi between the bridge of boats and the railway. A cock paradise flycatcher, in the full glory of his white plumage, as he flits like a sprite through the leafy glade, is a sight never to be forgotten. The movements of his long tail feathers as he pursues his course are as graceful as those of the folds of the gossamer garments of a skilled serpentine dancer.
The nest is a deep cup, in shape like an inverted cone, plastered exteriorly with cobweb and white cocoons. It is almost invariably placed in a fork near the end of one of the lower branches of a tree. Both cock and hen take part in nest building and incubation. As the cock sits his long white tail feathers hang down over the side of the nest and render him very conspicuous. The most expeditious way of finding a paradise flycatcher’s nest is to look out for a sitting cock. The alarm note of this species is a sharp harsh _Tschit_, but the cock is also able to warble a very sweet song.
The Indian oriole (_Oriolus kundoo_) is another gorgeous summer visitor to the Punjab. The cock is arrayed in rich golden yellow. His bill is pink and he has a black patch on each side of his head, there is also some black in his wings and tail. The hen is clad in greenish yellow and is neither so showy nor so handsome. The oriole is commonly called the mango bird by Europeans in India. I have never been able to discover whether the bird is so named because the cock is not unlike a ripe mango in colour, or because orioles are to be found in almost every mango tope. _Oriolus kundoo_ is a bird of many notes. Of these the most pleasing is a mellow _lorio, lorio_. Another note very frequently heard is a loud but not unmusical _tew_. The alarm note of the species is a plaintive cry, not easy to describe. It is uttered whenever a human being approaches the nest. The hen alone incubates, but she is not often seen upon the nest, for she leaves it at the first sound of a human footfall.
The nest of the oriole is a wonderful structure. It is a cradle slung on to a stout forked branch. The bird tears with its beak strips of the soft bark from the mulberry tree. An end of the strip is wound round one limb of the fork, then the other end is passed under the nest and wound round the other limb of the supporting bough. If the strip be long enough it is again passed under the nest. This framework supports the nest proper, which is a hemispherical cup composed of fine roots and dried grass. The minimum of material is used in construction, with the result that the eggs lying in the nest are sometimes visible from below. He who would find orioles’ nests should repair in June to the canal bank or to the above-mentioned wood.
Every oriole’s nest that I have seen in Lahore has been placed near a king-crow’s nest. It is, I think, for the sake of protection that the oriole builds near the king-crow. This latter is so pugnacious that most predaceous birds avoid the tree in which its nest is situated.
Among the summer visitors to the Punjab is a dove known as _Oenopopelia tranquebarica_. Those who find this name rather a mouthful are at liberty to call the bird the red turtle-dove. This species is of interest on account of the large amount of sexual dimorphism which it displays. The head and neck of the cock are ashy grey, his upper back and wings are the peculiar red of a faded port-wine stain, the lower back is grey, the middle tail feathers are brown and the other ones white. There is a black collar round his neck. The hen is a uniform greyish brown, her only adornment being a black collar similar to that of the cock.
As a chapter of this work is devoted exclusively to the red turtle-dove, nothing more need be said of it in this place, save that its note is not the orthodox coo, it is a peculiar low grunt, and gives one the impression that the bird has caught cold.
One summer visitor remains to be described, but he need not detain us long, for, save his respectability, he has nothing in particular to commend him. I allude to the yellow-throated sparrow (_Gymnorhis flavicollis_). This bird probably sometimes passes for a hen house sparrow; close inspection, however, reveals a yellow patch on the throat. According to Jerdon this creature has much the same manners and habits as the common sparrow. This I consider libellous. The yellow-throated sparrow is a bird of retiring disposition and I have never heard of one forcing its way into a _sahib’s_ bungalow. It nestles in a hole in a tree. Having lined the ready-made cavity with dry grass and feathers, it lays four eggs which are thickly blotched all over with sepia, chocolate brown, or purple. A pair of these birds lives in the octagonal aviary at the Lahore Zoo.
XVIII A BIRD OF MANY ALIASES
The paddy bird has as many aliases as a professional criminal of twenty years’ standing. I do not refer to his scientific names. Of course he has a number of these. Every bird has. A person who desires violent exercise for the memory cannot do better than try to keep pace with the kaleidoscopic changes which Indian ornithological terminology undergoes. The paddy bird is now known as _Ardeola grayii_, but I do not guarantee that he will be so called next month. When I assert that the paddy bird is a creature of many aliases, I mean that he has a number of popular names. He is sometimes known as the pond heron, because no piece of water larger than a puddle is too small to serve as a fishing ground for him. His partiality to flooded rice fields has given rise to the name by which he most commonly goes. He is frequently dubbed the blind heron, especially by natives. The Tamils call him the blind idiot. Needless to say the bird is not blind, its confiding disposition is responsible for the adjective. It might be blind for all the notice it takes of surrounding objects as it stands at the water’s edge, huddled up like a decrepit old man.
Before proceeding further, let me, for the benefit of those who are unacquainted with the avifauna of India, describe the bird. It is much smaller than the common heron, being about the size of a curlew. The head, neck, and the whole of the upper plumage are greenish brown, each feather having a darker shaft stripe. The under parts are white, as are the larger wing feathers, but these latter are so arranged as to be altogether invisible when the wings are closed, so that the bird, when it flies, seems suddenly to produce from nowhere a pair of beautiful white pinions and sail away on them. Before it has flown far it usually performs the vanishing trick. This, like most effective conjuring tricks, is very easy to perform when one knows how to do it. The bird merely folds its wings, then the dark coverts alone are visible. These are of the same hue as the damp sand or mud on which the paddy bird spends a considerable portion of the day. The dingy hues of the paddy bird are the outcome of its habits; it is a _shikari_ that stalks its prey or lies in wait for it. If it were as showy as the cattle egret its intended victims would “see it coming” and mock at it. Hence the necessity for its workaday garb.
The paddy bird is a very sluggish creature; it comes of a lazy family. There is not a single member of the heron tribe that does sufficient work to disqualify it for membership of the most particular trade union.
Most herons, however, do stalk their prey, which is more than the paddy bird usually does. One may sometimes see him progressing through shallow water at the rate of six inches a minute; but more commonly he stands in shallow water as motionless as a stuffed bird, with his head almost buried in his shoulders, looking as though he were highly disgusted with things in general. As a matter of fact he is thoroughly enjoying himself. His ugly eye is fixed upon some luckless frog in the water. The moment this comes within striking distance the pond heron will shoot out his long neck, seize the frog and swallow it whole. One cannot but feel sorry for the frog as it finds itself being hustled down the heron’s throat. It probably mistook the motionless creature for a rock and, even had it not made this mistake, it could not be expected to know that the bird had buried in its shoulders a patent telescopic neck. After the amphibian is safely lodged _in ventro_, the paddy bird resumes his strategic position at the water’s edge and maintains it for hours.
One day when I have nothing else to do I mean to mark down a paddy bird in its roosting tree, follow it to its fishing ground and picnic there all day and watch its behaviour. I shall then write an essay entitled _A Leaf from the Diary of a Lazy Bird_.
I imagine that the daily entry will read somewhat as follows:—
8 a.m.—(One hour after sunrise) woke up. 8—8.30—Pruned my feathers. 8.30—Flew to my fishing ground. 8.32—Settled there for the day. 8.40—9—Caught a few water insects for breakfast. 9—10—Had a nap. 10.30—Caught a frog. 10.32—12—Had a nap. 12.15—Caught another frog. 12.17—2—Had a nap. 2.20—Caught a third frog. 2.22—Walked three yards. 2.24—4—Had a nap. 4.40—Caught a fourth frog. 5—6—Had a nap. 6.15—6.30—Caught and ate my supper. 6.30—Flew to roost. 6.35—40—Had a row with a neighbour who had taken my private roosting site. 7 p.m. onwards—Slept the sleep of the just.
The above is not a statement of actual fact. Like many scientific productions it is based on imagination and not observation. I have not yet devoted a whole day to the paddy bird. I have, however, spent an hour at a pond heron’s dormitory and record in the next chapter what I saw there.
At the nesting season the paddy birds awake from their habitual lethargy. Towards the end of June they begin to make a collection of sticks and pile these together on a forked branch high up in some tree. When the pile has reached a magnitude sufficient to support four or five eggs the paddy bird flatters itself that it has built a fine nest and forthwith proceeds to stock it with eggs. This species usually nests in colonies, sometimes in company with night herons (_Nycticorax griseus_), and occasionally with crows. Seen from below the nursery looks rather like an old crow’s nest. The eggs are a beautiful pale green. They are most jealously watched by the parents; one or other always remaining on guard, and, every now and then, gurgling with delight.
The youngsters hatch out in a comparatively advanced condition. A baby pond heron about a week old is a most amusing object. It has a long, narrow, pinkish beak, quite unlike the broad triangle that does duty for a mouth in passerine birds. Its neck is disproportionately long, while its green legs are many sizes too big for it. Downy feathers are scattered irregularly over the body, and add to the absurdity of its appearance. The eye is bright yellow and gives its possessor a very knowing look.
Most birds when they have young work like slaves to procure sufficient food for them. Not so the paddy bird. He knows a trick worth two of that. He is a past master in the art of loafing. He does not feed his offspring on tiny insects, dozens of which are required to make a decent meal; he forces whole frogs down the elastic gullet of the nestling. Now the most ravenous and greedy young bird cannot negotiate very many frogs per diem; hence the feeding of their young is not a great tax upon paddy birds.
XIX PADDY BIRDS AT BEDTIME
The paddy bird (_Ardeola grayii_) is at all times and all seasons as solemn as the proverbial judge; hence at bedtime, when all other birds are hilarious and excited, he is comparatively sedate.
Paddy birds, in common with the great majority of the feathered kind, roost in company. At sunrise, the company separates. Each goes his own way to his favourite river, paddy-field, tank, pond or puddle, as the case may be, and spends the day in morose solitude. At sunset he rejoins his fellow pond herons.
Growing out of the water in a small tank near the railway station at Fyzabad are three trees, one of which is quite small, while the other two are about the size of well-grown apple trees. This description is perhaps as vague as saying of an object that it is as big as a piece of chalk. I am sorry. I cannot help it. I know of no accurate method of judging the size of a tree that is surrounded by dirty, slimy water. On one of these trees, like unto an apple tree, over fifty paddy birds spend the night.
One might have thought that this was a very fair load for an average tree. This, however, is not the opinion of the feathered folk. Some 300 or 400 mynas also utilise this tree as a dormitory. The mynas occupy the higher branches, and the paddy birds the lower ones.
As every one knows, the roosting place of a company of mynas is a perfect pandemonium. For thirty or forty minutes before going to sleep each individual bird shouts at every other individual with truly splendid energy. If man could but devise some means of harnessing this energy, every station in India might be lighted with electric light at a very small cost. As things are, all this energy is dissipated in the form of sound, with the result that the noise made by 300 starlings can be heard at a distance of half a mile.
One might reasonably suppose that a quiet, sedate bird like _Ardeola grayii_ would be greatly disgusted at the din that emanates from the throats of mynas at bedtime, and would refrain from selecting as his dormitory a tree that literally quivers with the shoutings of mynas. It is, however, not so. Birds rarely do what one would expect. I know hundreds of ideal sites for birds’ nests that are never utilised. _Per contra_, I have met with numbers of nests situated in the most uncomfortable and evil-smelling places. Paddy birds obviously do not suffer from nerves.
For about fifteen minutes before and fifteen minutes after sunset the tree in which all these birds roost presents an animated appearance. One or two paddy birds are the first to arrive, and they settle on one or other of the lower branches which almost touch the water. Nearly all birds, on approaching the tree in which they roost, literally throw themselves into the foliage, they plunge into it at headlong speed. Needless to say, the paddy bird does nothing so reckless as this; nevertheless, when approaching the tree in which he intends to spend the night he travels faster than at any other time, except, of course, when he is being chased by a falcon. The advance-guard of the mynas arrives very shortly after the first _bagla_. The mynas belong to two species—the common and the bank mynas (_Acridotheres tristis_ and _A. ginginianus_). They come in squads of twenty or thirty. The various squads arrive in rapid succession. Then the uproar begins and continues to swell in volume as the numbers in the tree increase.
The paddy birds come in ones and twos, and, as stated, invariably alight on one of the lower branches. They usually select a branch so thin that it would be impossible for so large a bird to obtain a foothold on it did not the claws of that bird grip like a vice; and even so it is not without much flapping of their white wings that the pond herons manage to reach a state of equilibrium.
If, when a paddy bird has succeeded in steadying itself on a slender branch two feet or so above the level of the water, another feckless fellow elects to alight on the selfsame branch, there follows trouble compared to which the Turco-Italian War is, as the babu says, a mere storm in a teapot; both birds seem in danger of taking a bath. On such occasions, the bird first on the tree greets the new-comer with gurgles of protest, there is much flapping of white wings, and eventually one or both the birds have to leave the branch.
But it is not until the tree is filled with birds that the real fun begins. When about forty paddy birds are squatting on the lower branches and over 300 mynas on the upper ones, it will be well understood that there is not much accommodation available for new arrivals. When a belated myna appears on the scene and plunges into the midst of his brother starlings, he is greeted with such a torrent of abuse that, although, in the gathering gloom, one cannot see what is going on amid the foliage, one feels convinced that the abuse is backed up by assault and battery. If, on the other hand, the luckless myna pitches into the tree at a lower elevation, he is liable to find himself transfixed by the stiletto-like beak of the nearest paddy bird, the savage thrust being accompanied by a lugubrious croak which seems to be the only note of the paddy bird. Nine out of ten mynas prefer incurring the wrath of their own kind to bringing down upon themselves the less noisy but more formidable anger of the pond heron.
If the mynas are packed like sardines in a box, the paddy birds lower down are not much more comfortable. It is true that the paddy birds are not squeezed together after the manner of the mynas, for the simple reason that if more than two of them attempted to squat on any but the stoutest of the branches they would all find themselves immersed in the slimy, unsavoury water beneath. The discomfort of the paddy birds is of another kind. Each one is balancing himself on an insecure perch and lives in momentary terror of being displaced by the advent of some other _bagla_. Hence, when the tree contains about forty herons, every fresh arrival is greeted with croaks the most sepulchral, and there is much shaking of branches and flapping of wings before he can find a spot on which he is able to maintain himself in a state of unstable equilibrium.
I watched the tree in question one evening in order to ascertain how many paddy birds roosted in it. I was able to count fifty-four by enumerating the birds as they arrived. I may have missed a few. But this is a mere detail. The lower branches carried all the paddy birds they were capable of bearing with safety. A few of the paddy birds had to be content with berths in a neighbouring tree, which grew out of the water at a distance of a few feet.
Some time after the sun had set one of the overflow party decided to try his luck in the main tree, and this resulted in such croaking and fluttering of wings on the part of his fellow paddy birds that for a few seconds the din of the mynas was drowned.
By the time it is really dark every bird, be he myna or pond heron, is sufficiently satisfied to hold his tongue. From then until an hour before sunrise not a sound emanates from the sleeping population of some 400 mynas and 50 paddy birds, who have elected to spend the night amid the unwholesome vapours that emanate from the water below. Birds are evidently mosquito proof.
XX MERLINS
Merlins are pigmy falcons. Like falcons, they are reclaimed for hawking purposes, but are regarded as mere toys by those who indulge in “the sport of kings.”
In the days when falconry was a fashionable pastime in England nearly every lady of quality possessed a merlin, which was often as much of a companion as a dog is nowadays. The exquisite little bird of prey would accompany its mistress on her rides or her walks, flying overhead and coming to the glove when called. This species, being the only kind of merlin found in England, is popularly called the merlin (_Æsalon regulus_), even as _Cuculus canorus_ is always known as the cuckoo, as though it were the only cuckoo in the world.
The merlin when trained for falconry is usually flown at the skylark. There are few prettier sights than that presented by a contest between a merlin and a skylark. Both know that the merlin can do nothing until it gets above its quarry; hence the contest at first resolves itself into one for supremacy of position. The adversaries often fly upwards in spirals until they almost disappear from view. When once the merlin does succeed in getting above the lark it makes swoop after swoop until it strikes its quarry.
In India the merlin is often trained to fly at the hoopoe. This contest is of a nature very different from that just described. The hoopoe does not rely on speed. It trusts to its truly marvellous power of timing the onslaught of the merlin and swerving at the critical moment, so that the merlin misses it by a hair’s breadth. So great a master of aerial manœuvre is the hoopoe that two merlins working together are required to accomplish its downfall.
As the plumage of _Æsalon regulus_ has the nondescript colouring that characterises most birds of prey, no useful purpose will be served by an attempt to describe it. The merlin is a winter visitor to India, and visits only the Punjab and Sind.