by Ruskin Bond
Nightjars are not much to look at by day, so this short-sighted birdwatcher isn’t missing much. But their sounds are distinctive. Douglas Dewar described the call of the Indian nightjar memorably as ‘the sound made by a stone skimming over ice’. The nightjar called Horsfield’s, most commonly found in Mussoorie, makes a noise similar to that made by striking a plank with a hammer.
We mustn’t forget the owls, those most celebrated of night birds, much maligned by poets obsessed with death and cemeteries.
Actually the owls have the pleasantest of calls. The little jungle owlet has a note which is both mellow and musical. Then there is the little scops owl, who speaks only in monosyllables, except for an occasional ‘wow’.
Probably the most familiar of Indian owls is the spotted owlet. He is really a noisy bird, who pours forth a volley of chuckles and squeaks and chatters in the early evening and at intervals throughout the night. In the daytime, like other owls, the spotted owlet is silent, and hides away in some dark corner, such as a hole in a tree or a wall, emerging towards sunset to hunt for prey—chiefly insects, but also occasionally mice, shrews and lizards.
Birdsong in the Mountains
Birdwatching is more difficult in the hills than in the plains. It is hard to spot many birds against the dark trees of the varying shades of the hillside.
There are few birds who remain silent for long, however, and one learns of their presence from their calls or songs. Birdsong is with you wherever you go in the Himalayas, from the foothills to the treeline; and it is often easier to recognize a bird from its voice than from its colourful but brief appearance.
The barbet is one of those birds which are heard more often than they are seen. It has a monotonous, far-reaching call, ‘pee-oh, pee-oh’, which carries for about a mile. Like politicians, these birds love listening to their own voices, and often two or three will answer each other from different trees, each trying to outdo the rest in a shrill shouting match. Some people like the barbet’s call and consider it both striking and pleasant. Some just find it striking.
Hodgson’s grey-headed flycatcher-warbler is a long name that ornithologists, in their infinite wisdom, have given to a very small bird. This tiny warbler is heard, if not seen, more often than any other bird throughout the western Himalayas. Its voice is heard in every second tree, and yet there are few who can say what it looks like. Its song (if you can call it that), is not very tuneful and puts me in mind of the notice that sometimes appeared in salons out West: ‘The audience is requested not to throw things at the pianist. He is doing his best.’
Our little warbler does its best, incessantly emitting four or five unmusical, but nevertheless joyful and penetrating notes.
Another tiny bird heard more often than it is seen is the green-backed tit, a smart little fellow about the size of a sparrow. It utters a sharp, rather metallic, but not unpleasant call which sounds like ‘kiss me, kiss me, kiss me’.
A real songster is the grey-winged ouzel, found here in the Garhwal hills. Throughout the early summer it makes the wooded hillsides ring with a melody that Nelson Eddy would have been proud of. Joining in sometimes with a sweet song of its own, is the green pigeon. As though to mock their arias, the laughing-thrushes, who are exponents of heavy rock, give vent to some weird calls of their own.
When I first came to live in the hills, it was the song of the Himalayan whistling-thrush that first caught my attention. I was sitting at my window, gazing out at the new leaves on the walnut tree. All was still; the wind was at peace with itself, the mountains brooded massively under a darkening sky. Then, emerging like a sweet secret from the depths of a deep ravine, came this indescribably beautiful call.
It is a song that never fails to enchant me. The birds starts with a hesitant whistle, as though trying out the tune; then, confident of the melody, it bursts into full song, a crescendo of sweet notes and variations ringing clearly across the hillside. Suddenly the song breaks off, right in the middle of a cadenza, and I am left wondering what happened to make the bird stop. Nothing really, because the song is taken up again a few moments later.
One day I saw the whistling-thrush perched on the broken garden fence. He was a deep, glistening purple, his shoulders flecked with white. He had sturdy black legs and a strong yellow beak; a dapper fellow who would have looked just right in a top hat. As time passed, he ‘grew accustomed to my face’ and became a regular visitor to the garden. On sultry summer afternoons I would find him flapping about in the water tank. Later, refreshed and sunning himself on the roof, he would treat me to a little concert before flying off to his shady ravine.
It was a boy from the next village who acquainted me with the legend of the whistling-thrush. According to the story, the young god, Krishna, fell asleep near a stream, and while he slept a small boy made off with Krishna’s famous flute. Upon waking and finding his flute gone, Krishna was so angry that he changed the culprit into a bird. But having once playing on the flute, the boy had learnt bits and pieces of the god’s enchanting music. And so he continued, in his disrespectful way, to play the music of the gods, only stopping now and then (as the whistling-thrush does), when he couldn’t remember the tune.
It wasn’t long before my whistling-thrush was joined by a female. Sometimes they gave solo performances, sometimes they sang duets; and these latter notes, no doubt, were love calls, because it wasn’t long before the pair were making forays into the rocky ledges of the ravine, looking for a suitable nesting site.
The birds were liveliest in midsummer; but even in the depths of winter, with snow lying on the ground, they would suddenly start singing, as they flitted from pine to oak to naked chestnut.
The wild cherry tree, which grows just outside my bedroom window, attracts a great many small birds, both when it is in flower and when it is in fruit.
When it is covered with small pink blossoms, the most common visitor is a little yellow-backed sunbird, who emits a squeaky little song as she flits from branch to branch. She extracts the nectar from the blossoms with her long tubular tongue.
Amongst other visitors are the flycatchers, gorgeous birds, especially the paradise flycatcher with its long white tail and ghost-like flight. Basically an insect eater, it likes fruits for dessert, and will visit the tree when the cherries are ripening. While moving alone the boughs of the tree, they utter twittering notes, with occasional louder calls, and now and then the male breaks into a sweet little song, thus justifying the name shah bulbul (king of the nightingales), by which he is known in northern India.
At the Bird Bath
A whistling-thrush comes to bathe in the rainwater puddle beneath the window. He loves this spot. So now, when there is no rain, I fill the puddle with water, so that my favourite bird keeps coming.
His bath finished, he perches on a branch of the walnut tree. His glossy blue-black wings glitter in the sunshine. At any moment he will start singing.
Here he goes! He tries out the tune, whistling to himself, and then, confident of the notes, sends his thrilling full-throated voice far over the forest. The song dies down, trembling, lingering in the air; starts again, joyfully, and then suddenly stops, as though the singer had forgotten the words or the tune.
A little distance from my home, a number of small birds bathe and drink in the little pool beneath the cherry tree: hunting parties of tits—grey tits, red-headed tits and green-backed tits, and two delicate little willow-warblers. They take turns in the pool. While the green-backs are taking a plunge, the red-heads wait patiently on the moss-covered rocks, coming down later to sip daintily at the edge of the pool; they don’t like getting their feet wet! Finally, when they have all gone away, the whistling-thrush arrives and indulges in an orgy of bathing, as he now has the entire pool to himself.
The babblers are adept at snapping up the little garden skinks that scuttle about in the leaves and the grass. The skinks are quite brittle and are easily broken to pieces with a few hard raps of the beak. Then down they go! Babblers ar
e also good at sifting through dead leaves and seizing upon various insects.
Our Insect Musicians
When the monsoon with its magic touch brings life and greenness to rock and earth and withered tree, our insect musicians are roused to their greatest activity. The whole air at dusk seems to tinkle and murmur to their music. To the shrilling of the grasshoppers is added the staccato notes of the crickets, while in the grass myriads of lesser artistes provide a medley of sounds.
As musicians the cicadas are in a class of their own. There are many species of the cicada in India, most of them forest dwellers. All through the hot weather their screaming chorus rings through the forest, while a shower of rain, far from damping their ardour, only rouses them to a defeating crescendo of effort.
The ancient Greeks knew the cicada well. They called him tetix, and appreciated his music so much that they kept him captive in a cage to hear him sing. Well, there is no accounting for tastes!
Only the males were chosen—for the females, as with most insect musicians, are completely dumb. This moved one chauvinistic Greek poet to exclaim: ‘Happy the cicadas, for they have voiceless wives!’
The music of the cicadas varies. Each species plays its distinctive tune. Their music-producing instruments are so complex that they must be regarded amongst the most remarkable sound-producing organs in the animal kingdom.
The underside of a cicada’s body carries a pair of flaps, each of which covers an oval membrane which looks like the head of a drum, set in a solid rim of the body wall. The cicada does not beat his drums. They are set into intense vibration by a great pair of muscles attached to them from within the body. The sound is produced by the vibration of the drums, while the whole abdomen, which is practically hollow, helps to increase or diminish the sound, according to the position of the covering flaps. Simple, isn’t it? To be truthful, I find it extremely complicated, and am able to describe the process only by consulting the notes of S.H. Prater, one-time curator of the Bombay Natural History Society.
Let it be added that the female carries these structures in a modified form, but, as she has no muscles to bring them into play, she is unable to use them. This is why she must remain silent while her spouse shrieks away. I would change the line from that Greek poet (Xenarchos, I think) and say instead: ‘Pity the female cicadas, for they have singing husbands!’
Perhaps the most familiar and homely of insect singers are the crickets. I won’t go into detail over how the cricket produces its music, except to say that its louder notes are produced by a rapid vibration of the wings, the right wing usually working over the left, the edge of one acting on the file of the other to produce a shrill, long-sustained note.
One of our best-known crickets is a large black fellow who lives underground and rarely comes out by day, except when the rains flood him out of his burrow. But when night falls, he sits on his doorstep and pours out his soul in a strident song. This cricket’s name is as impressive as his sound—Brachytrypes portentosus.
The mole-cricket is a genius by itself. Mole-crickets are tillers of the soil. They use their powerful forelimbs for shovelling up the earth and their hard heads for butting into it. Notwithstanding its earthy occupations, the mole-cricket is sometimes moved to creating music. But as he repeats his note, a solemn deep-toned chirp, about a hundred times a minute, the performance can be monotonous.
In India, the cone-headed kattydids are probably the most notable performers. Kattydids are trim, slender grasshopper-like insects, much in evidence in the fresh green grass of the monsoon. In the fields the loud shrill notes of the males may be heard both by day and by night. Sometimes one of them comes into the house and treats its occupants to a sudden outburst of high-pitched fiddling. His song rises in pitch as the performer warms to his work. In a room it can be quite deafening; and the sound is always difficult to locate—it seems to come from everywhere.
Finally we come to the tree crickets, a band of willing artistes who commence their performance at dusk. Their sounds are familiar, but it is difficult to see the musicians. Delicate pale green creatures with transparent green wings, they are hard to find among the foliage. And a tap on the bush or leaf on which they sit will put an immediate end to the performance.
Presumably the males sing in order to attract their more silent females. The music advertises the presence of the male, just as in other creatures it is colour or smell that does the job. After a performance, the female can sometimes be seen feeding off a sweet nectar that is contained in a cavity just behind the male’s wings. Well, even the human male seeks to please his sweetheart with the offer of chocolates. And if music be the food of love, play on, cicada!
The Whistling Schoolboy
From the gorge above Gangotri
Down to Kochi by the sea,
The whistling-thrush keeps singing
His constant melody.
He was a whistling schoolboy once,
Who heard Lord Krishna’s flute,
And tried to play the same sweet tune,
But struck a faulty note.
Said Krishna to the erring youth:
A bird you must become,
And you shall whistle all your days
Until your song is done.
IX
Big-Cat Tales
‘Why do you write so many stories about leopards?’ asked a young reader.
‘Because they are such fascinating creatures,’ I said. ‘Lithe, sinewy, powerful—beautiful, in fact.’
And I am glad to say that leopards are on the increase, although they do occasionally attack domestic animals. But the hills and forests are extensive enough for leopards to roam freely; they do their best to keep away from humans.
How can there be an India without leopards and tigers?
A Vision at Midnight
Sal trees near Rajpur. A lovely sight—varying shades of green; new leaf freshened by recent rain. And then, returning to Mussoorie around midnight, saw a leopard leap over the parapet wall, then her three cubs scurrying into the bushes. I thought I’d seen my last leopard some years ago, but in the hills this is obviously an animal that knows how to survive.
Romance Still Rides the Nine-Fifteen
I was at a wayside stop, on a line that went through the Terai forests near the foothills of the Himalayas. At about ten at night, the khilasi, or station watchman, lit his kerosene lamp and started walking up the track into the jungle. He was a Gujjar, and his true vocation was the keeping of buffaloes, but the breaking up of his tribe had led him into this strange new occupation.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘To see if the tunnel is clear,’ he said. ‘The Mail train comes in twenty minutes.’
So I went with him, a furlong or two along the tracks, through a deep cutting which led to the tunnel. Every night, the khilasi walked through the dark tunnel, and then stood outside to wave his lamp to the oncoming train as a signal that the track was clear. If the engine driver did not see the lamp, he stopped the train. It always slowed down near the cutting. Having inspected the tunnel, we stood outside, waiting for the train. It seemed to take a long time in coming. There was no moon, and the dense forest seemed to be trying to crowd us into the narrow cutting. The sounds of the forest came to us on the night wind—the belling of a sambar, the cry of a fox, told us that perhaps a tiger or a leopard was on the prowl. There were strange nocturnal bird and insect sounds, and then silence.
The khilasi stood outside the tunnel, trimming his lamp, listening to the faint sounds of the jungle—sounds which only he, a Gujjar, who had grown up on the fringe of the forest, could identify and understand. Something made him stand very still for a few moments, peering into the darkness, and I could sense that everything was not as it should be.
‘There is something in the tunnel,’ he said.
I could hear nothing at first; but then there came a regular sawing sound, just like the sound of someone sawing through the branch of a tree.
‘Bagh
era!’ whispered the khilasi. He had said enough to enable me to recognize the sound—that of a leopard trying to find its mate.
I thought how fortunate we were that it had not been there when we walked through the tunnel. A leopard is unpredictable. But so is a khilasi.
‘The train will be coming soon,’ he whispered urgently, ‘we must drive the animal out of the tunnel, or it will be killed.’
He must have sensed my astonishment, because he said, ‘Do not worry, sahib. I know this leopard well. We have seen each other many times. He has a weakness for stray dogs and goats, but he will not harm us.’
He gave me his small handaxe to hold, and, raising his lamp high, started walking into the tunnel, shouting at the top of his voice to try and scare away the animal. I followed close behind him.
We had gone about twenty yards into the tunnel when the light from the khilasi’s lamp fell on the leopard, who was crouching between the tracks, only about fifteen feet from us.
He was not a big leopard, but he was lithe and sinewy. Baring his teeth in a snarl, he went down on his belly, tail twitching, and I felt sure he was going to spring.
