Missing the Trees for the Forest
Can’t believe its been three long months since I wrote Seeing the Unforeseen, my last story that, thanks to all the love and appreciation showered by you was featured in Medium’s The Environment publication.
Since I last wrote, the monsoon season has literally and figuratively imposed itself across the Indian subcontinent, oscillating from sporadic showers to near catastrophic downpours. The constant feeling of gloom that usually persists during these days thanks to the gray skies was further accentuated by the lack of any birding “action”
Or so I thought.
The Polychromatic Pilgrimage
As with most things that tend to have an lasting impact on our lives, this also began as a blip from the normal. For someone who doesn’t quiet relate with the experience of sitting for hours at a birding hide, the blip happened when I first agreed to do so for sighting the Oriental Dwarf Kingfisher aka the ODKF. Darting across like a tracer bullet in the thick foliage of the Western ghats, the ODKF comes across as a rainbow on steroids. Its breeding season in the monsoons, when it commences its seemingly unending sorties each with an assorted catch for its hungry fledglings is the best time to document it.
So off we went, braving torrential rains and waterlogged highways to reach Shirvali, a quaint village on in the Chiplun region of the Western ghats. Exploring a new location of sighting the ODKF every monsoon has helped me convince myself to commit time to sit still in an enclosed hide as we wait for it to make it’s signature call before appearing out of the blue on a perch in front of us. Once we had our first sighting, our host for this trip — Nishikant Tambe, more fondly known as Nandu, noticed my restlessness in that closed space and offered to take me out for walk. The ensuing couple of hours — bare feet in the rain soaked jungle that Nandu has created from scratch was nothing short of an epiphany. The idea of pilgrimage is often associated with an journey undertaken to show one’s devotion. I’m now convinced that pilgrimages are in fact journeys of self discovery — more so if they involve the polychromatic ODKF 🌈
Farewell Trail
One of the constants in my birding journey thus far has been my birding buddy — Ashwin. When he broke the news that work commitments would now be requiring him to move to a different city, a plan to make the most of our time together hatched instantly. And what better a place for that than the vast expanse of grasslands near our home town of Pune. From the rain drenched mountains to the rain parched grasslands we went. A few weeks before our trip, the place had been abuzz with sightings of rare quails and crakes. By the time we were finally able to make it there, waters from dams filled by heavy rains upstream had all but covered the areas and driven those birds away to higher grounds. Unperturbed by the unrelenting rains we managed to carve out a couple of trails that gave us sightings of the quintessential rain bird — The Rain Quail. Cryptic colored and ever so shy of stepping out in the open, the rains act as an aphrodisiac of sorts making the males come out in the open. The Painted Francolin is another one of the lot that makes it a point to be heard by calling itself hoarse from a open perch. Nothing beats the Common Hawk Cuckoo at calling though, aptly named the Brain Fever Bird, it probably stops only because it needs to breathe!
Couple of months into this farewell trail, the pang of missing the rare quails pales in front of the realization that it is indeed the company in which one has those sightings happen that is missed more than anything.
An untimely miss
The rare quails we’ll catch up with later — hopefully.
What I’m not sure of catching up with at all is the sighting of pelagic birds — seabirds that spend most of their lives on the open ocean and are only found near land during the breeding season. Unlike the national capital region of Delhi, the city of Mumbai is not exactly known as for its “birding buzz”, so when the first news of rarest of rare sightings happening at the most nonchalant of locations in the city came in, many didn’t pay attention. It was only when photographs of these rarities started making their way on social media platforms that the birding community across the country woke up to the near miracle unfolding in Mumbai.
Work travel and then some more work travel kept me away from Mumbai the entire time that the pelagic folks came closer and closer to the shore. Ayyappan Hariharan (Instagram and X), an avid birder and photographer par excellence documented most of these sightings and furthermore, agreed to share his photos for the readers of this blog.
The image with the Gateway of India in the backdrop in particular deserves a special mention for there was an attempt to generate a similar one using AI tools. Ayyappan — bossman that he is, could capture this “arrival” in a way that will be treasured forever is surreal to say the least.
As the storm that brought these birds to the Mumbai shores began to clear up, those of us who missed these sightings hoped that the best was behind us. But it was not. A week later, the Arctic Tern, a bird so rare to our shores that the Halley’s comet (that visits us once in 72 years) has been seen more than it was sighted drifting away to glory. What made these long distance migrants divert from their well set routes is a matter of speculation. Climate change induced wind patterns is coming up as one of the top reasons and if that is indeed the case, their sightings are as much a sign of concern as of celebration.
You missed seeing all this? What in the world were you doing?
Yup. Have got that a lot in the past few months.
My kinda Monsoon Mania
While everyone who identifies as a birder made a beeline to the shores of Mumbai, I went towards the forests again. There is something about rains and the jungles that keep drawing me towards them. While this year the herp trails like the ones we did for Life at Night >> Nightlife and The Curious Case of Contentment did not shape up, what I did get was a chance to introduce more folks to the joy that is birding. First in the forests of Dandeli and later in the estuaries of Goa.
On one of these trips we had the august company of another wild life documenter par excellence — Rakesh Dhareshwar (Instagram and X) who took it upon himself to make us feel at home in Goa. Rakesh brought to the proverbial table, his two passions — wildlife photography and food! And left us with hearts full of awe and tummies full of goan delicacies.
The Forest or the Trees?
All work and no play may make Jack that bit dull but all travel and no rest can make your back hurt like hell. With travel off the table, most of September saw me spending time at my happy place — Vetal Tekdi in my hometown. There is no better place to let the body heal, than the one where the mind is at peace. The good lot of rain received this year in the city may have crippled our traffic infrastructure and left us asking questions for the future, it clearly had a rejuvenating effect on the urban forest amidst the city.
Birding trails to the Vetal Tekdi never cease to surprise. It is a place where the less you “target” for a sighting, the more you will get to see.
The less you chase the more you can seek.
Alongside birds, the Vetal Tekdi is also home to some of the most beautiful butterflies this side of the Western ghats. On a day when the sun is out after a morning shower watching them sift from one nectar laden flower to the other is nothing short of hypnotic💗
The unending tussle between whether to zoom in on the detail or to zoom out for the larger picture was how these past few months could be summed up. And while I may have missed contributing to the larger birding events such as the Passage Migrant Count and the ongoing Annual Vulture Count, focusing on birding that bit closer to what I call home has been a refreshing change this year.
As the calendar flips to October can’t help but recall the amazing Raptober Fest we had a couple of years back and the kick off to what would hopefully be an action packed birding season where we will Eat. Sleep. Bird. Repeat.
Thanks for staying with me till here. Tell me in the comments what works best for you — zooming in or looking at the larger picture?
Stay Kind. Always.❤️
