The monogamous life of the Hornbill
If I could write this story with a feather……
I have written before about my strange liking for train journeys. You can read it here >Look out for a GPTT.
A train bogie for me is not just a throne to forget my past or beget my future but it also happens to be my collegiate. Many a minds have I heard and many a brains have I torn out during these journeys. Here is an anecdote from one such travel.
It was to be a journey of three hours by train, from Changanacherry to Trichur, two different cities that belong to my home state Kerala in India. Just across my seat harbored an octogenarian couple. We exchanged offbeat smiles for the first 30 mins. They spoke less with each other. Despite their silence there was lot of love and care that seemed to cradle them without making it socially evident. A graceful angelic lady and a grand old man who gave me grandpa vibes. The lady’s earrings served the reason for the icebreaker.
“Ma’am, your earrings are so pretty. That’s a cute duck in gold. Love it”, I started.
The lady broke an innocent smile and said a coy “Thank you”.
“Ah. Oh .. No No” interrupted the gentleman and in English he said, “I will never gift my sweetheart a duck shaped earring. It’s a SWAN.”
Through the later discussions, I learnt that the old man, Mr.Nair, had been an officer in the Indian Railways. And a very high-ranking officer. During his tenure, he had also escorted the ex-Chief minister of Kerala in the early 1970s.
Curiosity always paves way to streams of opportunities and knowledge. I am a perennial explorer and however hard I try to resist myself from the urge to ask questions, I still do. For me, between swan and duck, there was darkness. With the grace of a saint, the man held me captive to his learnings and experiences. He had rich knowledge and passion about the subject of birds, and he did agree with me that he was an unacclaimed ornithologist. His choice of gift to his sweetheart spoke in thousand words about the depth of his love and the worth she meant to him.
Mr.Nair told me this classic story of the monogamous life of the hornbills and the mynahs and few more unheard stories about various birds.
Let me stick to the specifics of the hornbill and their curious yours-till-my-end commitment.
Hornbill with its peculiar figurine of its beak is easy to spot — it has a jersey of black and white and an yellow large beak with a horn. Until then, I had no knowledge that Hornbill was the state bird of Kerala, the state from where I belong. It was rather an ugly state of my knowledge. So What do I then know .. I complained to myself :)
Family life of the hornbill pair
Hornbill’s life ways flow with nature’s laws and they have seasons for breeding. Just as the eligibility to procreate sets in, also marked by the prominence of something called a casque just above their beaks, there are loud calls and songs in the air, a set frequency for the male and the female. If a female responds to the male’s call, and the match is made, it is a registered pair forever. Studies say that the pair forms a thick bond for life. Jealously love until death. A complicated morality that they have not learned from books.
Hornbill’s nest and the peep hole
Hornbills looks for high altitudes to raise their family. The process is nothing short of a covert operation. Very high treetops or the highest tree on a higher terrain. They fiercely protect their families. The mates look for a seeming hollow where it begins to build a nest with plant pieces, mud, and their saliva. The saliva helps plastering the nest to create fortified walls. The female gets inside this nest before it is completely sealed. The mates are now separated except by a small aperture on one wall of the nest. .
The male hornbill brings food for the female and feeds her through this small aperture. This lasts for close to four months, during which the female would have laid eggs, incubated them, and raised chicks. This is also the time when the mother sheds her old feathers, called the moulting process. She enjoys the pampering by her mate until the home is too small for her grown up chicks. The mother bird breaks open the nest at this stage and steps out into the world again. The parent pair continues to feed the chicks together until the young ones can find their own food.
I told you the perfect love story but there are disorders just like in all other affairs of the world.
If by any chance, the male is hunted or dies, the story ends in tragedy. The Juliet, she sees no future without her Romeo. The lovelorn female hornbill knows no life if her mate has not returned. The world is dead, and she breathes her last inside the same cage which they had jointly built — technically due to starvation fueled by the agony of lost love. Need I say about the chicks, they would die too.
Two hours of my journey swept past like few minutes.As I alighted from the train and waved my hand to bid bye to the couple, I felt a pang of physical pain inside me. Some people are just so difficult to part and for unexplainable reasons. I miss that gracious man to this day and my ears ache to hear those soft words measured gently out of a treasure of love, care and wisdom.
