All the trees have been marked to be cut. Every single one.
Not just the gangly teak (
Tectonia grandis), but even the ones that have no 'value' - the red-leaved Indian almond (
Terminalia catappa), the green-barked, symmetrical silk cottons (
Bombax), the fallow but foliaceous mango (
Mangifera indica) and the stout jackfruit (
Artocarpus heterophyllus). Maybe even the cashew trees will go.
And with them, some others that had turned the backyard of that not-so-old grandparental home into my childhood birding paradise. From the bamboo thicket on the verge of the dry deciduous forest patch to the edge of the paddy fields, I spent my boyhood here watching so many birds I now know so intimately that just their calls, trickling through to my ears from afar in any wooded patch, can assure me of their presence.
Golden and black-hooded orioles, white-browed and red-vented bulbuls, Indian pitta, orange-headed ground thrush, racquet-tailed drongos, white-cheeked barbets, coppersmiths. Up in the canopy were Indian scops owls, jungle owlets, crested serpent eagles, shikras, leafbirds, ioras.
I watched the gaudy Indian pitta rummage about among the dry leaf litter by day, and listened for its
wheet-ew call at dusk. Red spurfowl came into the cowshed to pick at maggots in the dung. Jungle bush quail whirred into the air even as my heart pounded at the sudden announcement of their presence. Grey francolins called from the gateposts. Peafowl courted in the yard. For three days, I watched a black-naped monarch fly sorties almost at eye-level. In those camera-less times, I have seen black, bronzed and racquet-tailed drongos share perch on a tree branch. And, as if to compete with that, a tree full of vernal hanging parrots, rose-ringed and plum-headed parakeets.
And then, there were other magic moments: when a 16-foot king cobra was found spitting and hissing in a pit meant to catch wild pig. And in the pit next to it, two jackal cubs (one blind) and two terrapins. One night, a small Indian civet slunk out of the forest to clean up the banana leaves from a feast.
I chased skinks without luck. I collected glow-worms and trapped their pale light in bottles. Under stones, I looked for scorpions. And scanned treetops for green agamid lizards. Once, in a dry field, I saved a lapwing's egg from two circling pallid harriers, innocently unconscious of the fact that even harriers needed to eat.
I go there less frequently now. The people who once lived there - my grandparents - live with my parents in Bangalore. At night, the only sounds in the house are of rats racing on its rafters, bats squabbling on its beams and the crunch of termites eating away its innards.
Half of the birds I saw in my youth don't visit any more. The jackals have stopped calling. The wild pigs still come sometimes. I have seen neither the pitta nor the monarch on recent visits.
That house was a place I had saved in my heart for my daughter's growing up years. But now, with the trees numbered for the axe, I have nothing to go there for.
If I want to remember that house and its patch of forest, I must plant the seeds of memory before I forget.
The fog clung to the ground in great murky blankets when I arrived at Sultanpur Bird Sanctuary on this Friday morning. At 6 AM, traffic on NH 8 via Mehrauli and Gurgaon had been thin, but my gruff but kindly Sikh cab driver held my gaze for an astonished moment in the rear-view mirror when I said I was going looking for birds. After driving more than 50 km from Delhi in bone-numbing cold and dangerous visibility levels to do this, he must have wondered. But he only said I could have gone to Bharatpur instead. But Sultanpur, so close to Delhi (in Haryana), is a celebrated avian paradise. And winter made it especially so.
A Bluethroat, displaying its gaily banded chest, welcomed me. As the fog lifted, peafowl scuttled, but a covey of Grey Francolins grazed unperturbed on the path ahead of me. A thudding of hooves announced Nilgai. A female followed by three young calves crossed barely a hundred metres in front of me. Sarus cranes were calling, and somewhere among the reeds a Black-necked Stork was planning breakfast. The soft quackering of several migratory ducks, the trilling of Tailorbirds and at least three species of Prinia - Ashy, Plain and Graceful - provided the background music for my morning walk.
The mist lifted gently, and the view became less ghostly. Painted storks and cormorants flew overhead. In a copse to my right, two male Black Redstarts had a mild face-off. A Rufous-tailed Shrike picked a dragonfly out of mid-air and dismembered it slowly on a thorn thicket. Red-throated Flycatchers were everywhere, some males showing off their bright throats.
The water was alive with ducks. Though I was staring right into the sun, I could tell the silhouettes of Northern Shovellers and Spotbills. There were Common Teals, Lesser Whistling Ducks, Common and Crested Pochards, Tufted Ducks, Gadwall and Garganey. But among them all, sailing like frigates in a flotilla of dhows, were the Greylag Geese. Large, beautiful birds with bills of pink, they lorded over the water. Until a Eurasian Marsh Harrier scattered the ducks and extracted a shudder out of the Greylag flock. There were other raptors too - Spotted Eagles, Oriental Honey Buzzards, Black-shouldered Kites, Kestrels...
As winter wears on, these waters will attract more migrants, among them Common Cranes, Bar-headed Geese and a host of warblers and waders. And then, by March, most of them would have returned, but for the Shovellers, who are usually the last to go.
