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Tracking a flight
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Its heart beat over a thousand times and the bird looked as though it would come apart if you breathed on it too hard. All it took was a swallow to surprise RANJIT LAL at a bird ringing camp.
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RANJIT LAL
It's the turn of this blackwinged stilt.
BIRD ringing or banding has been a long established way of trying to figure out the routes taken by migratory birds on their momentous journeys. At suitable sites, mist nets are strung up, and traps laid that harmlessly snare the birds as they come down to roost or rest. They are quickly retrieved and then identified, measured and weighed. Most importantly, a light, numbered aluminium band is slipped around their legs, with a "return to" or "please inform" request from the organisation doing the ringing. Then, they are freed. If the bird is subsequently caught elsewhere, or more likely killed or found dead, we know at once of the journeys it has made. Though the rate of recovery is only around one per cent we have learnt a lot about the remarkable journeys that some birds make every year, through these recoveries. We know that ducks and geese fly down all the way from Central Asia and Siberia, a feat no doubt, but one that is eclipsed by that of thousands of tiny-tot warblers (smaller than sparrows) that do similar distances and that too, by night!
It seems like a clinical, scientific exercise, which of course it is, but there is much more to it. There is much more to be learnt than just the bird's name, rank and serial number as it were — and of course the cherishing of the optimistic hope, that some day, in some other (or maybe the same) place, the bird will be recovered. Normally, there is always a healthy distance maintained between an observer and a bird. Seen with the naked eye, birds are usually tiny dark fluttering things, or even if large, too far away to really appreciate. This distance is dramatically closed up when you look at birds through binoculars; now those same fluttering specks leap larger than life and twice as natural. With good binoculars you can admire the fine detailing of their plumage and catch the glitter in their eyes. But the exaggeration of the bird's size and the concentration of focus, as happens when it is seen through binoculars, take a lot of magic with it. And that magic only reveals itself when you hold the bird in your hands, or look at it close up, in perfect proportion and context to the world around it. No matter how many times you do so, your astonishment and delight will be fresh as a brand new day.
RANJIT LAL
And the star of the show... the streak-throated swallow.
This year, the "Delhibird", group and the Bombay Natural History Society organised a three-day bird ringing camp at Basai, a swampy bird-rich habitat just outside Gurgaon (Haryana). The camp was sponsored by Indian Oil and the Wildlife Trust of India. Having been to a similar camp last year, I thought there would be no real surprises in store: one had seen it all before. Perhaps. But the little streak-throated swallow that was brought out for darshan from its cloth bag changed all that in a trice. How did this tiny (its head was the size of a marble) delicate, extremely breakable looking thing, hold its own in the face of thunderstorms and howling gales? It looked as though it would come apart in a puff of feathers if you breathed on it too hard. Its bones were surely made of brittle glass, they seemed so fragile, and its heart thrummed like a miniature electric motor as it beat over a thousand times a minute. Really, like all others of its kind (and especially those that flew thousands of kilometres on their migrations) it needed to be saluted!
Even the larger birds, when looked at close up, appeared extraordinarily fragile. Blackwinged stilts are tough no nonsense black and white waders that are found in the murkiest of water bodies, wading about manfully on long knitting-needle legs. Seen close up they took on all the fragility of a porcelain figurine. Of course, you can appreciate the finer points of birds too. We saw and admired the fine, comb-like plates on either side of the shoveller's bill, through which it filter feeds, something which is almost impossible to see even through binoculars. You can admire the fine pencilling of plumage, the perfection of colour, design and finish: the plumage of the painted snipe, for example was like finely worked bronze. And of course, you get to know a bit about the birds' characters too. The smaller birds were by and large calm, and accepted their captivity quietly, especially if their surroundings were dark. But birds like the lovely yellow bittern and night heron were fighters all the way — they stabbed and jabbed their scalpel-like bills left, right and centre, pincer-gripping fingers with bulldog tenacity and drawing blood. You had to be careful while handling these lovelies, because they could easily put an eye out! The expression in their eye said it all: there would be no mercy here. But easily the best moment during the whole ringing procedure is the last: when you hold a bird in your cupped hands and open up your palms to let it fly free. And every time, a small part of you wings off with it, low and swift and happy over the marshes, jinking and swerving before vanishing forever.
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