Encounter: God, Darwin, Ali and the Blue-capped Rock Thrush

In the foggy ruins of time, most memories can get blurred, or muddied entirely. But not a birder's remembrance of a cherished bird. The story of me and the Blue-capped Rock Thrush involves God, Darwin and Salim Ali -- playing significant bit-parts.

Back in the day when I believed that God had created the world, I honoured periodically a votive my mother had made to send me with my father to Sabarimala, a hill shrine in the southern Western Ghats reached after a half-day pilgrimage on foot from a check-dammed river that curls sluggishly at its feet. I loved the vagabonding, and the uncustomary walk in the forest. It’s been two decades since I last went. That temple – now among this land’s richest, and visited by 300,000 pilgrims daily in the season – occupies more acreage than it did then, what with the permanent habitation enveloping it. That sorrowing forest river, Pamba, swirls now with plastic, detritus and the excrement of pilgrims too blinded by devotion to consider what their ecological footprint has stamped out. It’s another matter altogether that somewhere between then and now Messrs Darwin, Sagan and Dawkins interrupted my religiosity with questions of pressing urgency, eroding it first with guilty discomfort but eventually washing it away albeit without disrespect to the forces worshipped by those who had brought me up. 


That said, some nights when I attempt to command my mind to sleep as effortlessly as I did as a child, the temple and the forest surrounding it surface from my subconscious, embellished with shards of innocuous untruth, deliberate fictions that soothe and console the pangs of losses irreparable in this lifetime.


When that comforting reverie takes hold, I feel the moist trampled earth comfort my aching bare feet, the damp of the forest condense on my shirtless back, the overwhelming scent of vegetation. I hear a faraway chuckle, then see the bough of a forest tree bend and swing as it receives the crashing burden of a leaping Malabar Giant Squirrel. I always hear birdsong – the jubilant squeals of Hill Mynas, the sweeching of Scarlet Minivets, the percussion of White-bellied Woodpeckers, the squabbling of Rufous Babblers, the trilling of Chestnut-headed Bee-eaters...


Sans field guide or binoculars, my birding was incidental and a touch surreal. Sometimes the shadowy shape of a bird would announce its presence urgently, fleet past and melt into the jungle. Malkoha? Drongo-Cuckoo? I’d peer, I’d dither, but I could not afford to linger: A pilgrim must stick with his flock. Thus, many sightings were approximated, assumed and, not unwittingly, concocted.


Yet, one encounter I remember clearly. It was December, a few weeks before Makara Jyoti, and our pilgrim party was camped in the muggy shade of a tin-roofed shelter, open on three sides, with the bare ground for a floor. Gruel was cooking on an open fire. Robber-flies were hunting winged things infatuated with my fragrant preteen sweat. Bitten by both, scratching, and tolerating the misery of that tropical afternoon (and dreading the imminent night that would tempt airborne roaches out of uncharted crevices), I gazed longingly towards the tops of trees in the forest verge that began about twenty metres from the shack.


Jungle Crows, sparrows and mynas abounded. Red-whiskered bulbuls overreached to filch morsels. As I watched lethargically, an unfamiliar bird flew into view. It was smaller than a myna, dull, slaty-blue with a rusty brown breast. It lingered, unafraid, doing nothing. It just perched there on the steel beam and looked idly about.


My birder’s eyes, schooled on Collins and field guides of suchlike Imperialistic abstraction, tagged the bird as a thrush. I noticed the aspect, the overall blue appearance, large black eyes, rich rufous chest and belly, white patches on the wings, and the bluish grey head. I watched the bird for a good five minutes before it flew away into the forest. I didn’t see it again until I embarked on informed birding a few years later. I made a mental note then and later an entry in my diary: “Blue-headed Thrush”.


In 1989, when I got my first legitimate field guide – Salim Ali’s 'The Book of Indian Birds' – this was the first bird I looked up. Turning the page feverishly, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I was almost correct. This was Monticola cinclorhynchus, the Blue-capped Rock Thrush.


Every time I see the Blue-capped Rock Thrush – and I have seen it frequently in southern India in winters and in the Himalaya in late spring and early autumn – I am reminded of myself at twelve, a scruffy, itchy pilgrim gazing in rapture at a sprite, a vision, a gift of the forest.


Thank God, or whoever is in charge, for that epiphany.


Text: Beej
Photo: Sandeep Somasekharan


Read all Encounter posts

Encounter: Rufous Tailed Shrike

Often, the stupidest questions elicit the most enlightening answers. Such was my initiation to the little featherball known as the Rufous-tailed Shrike. I'm glad I asked, though...

I am responsible for one of the dumbest questions in Birdingdom. This is a belated confession.

One fine February evening we were happily maneuvering a pot-holed road in Rae Bareli as GS scanned the acacia bushes beside the road for birds. Suddenly he exclaimed, “Rufous-tailed Shrike!" (Beams with excitement, asks driver to stop.)

I saw the bird and inquired, “Why is this Rufous-tailed Shrike?” It was actually three questions:

Why is this bird a shrike?

Why is it a Rufous-tailed Shrike?

What are you so excited about?

You must have realized that I had figured it was a bird. I also had a passing familiarity with the color rufous.

Prickled by the question but managing to keep his composure (the sighting helped), GS snapped, “Observe.”

This I did.

Lanius isabellinus is a small shrike with a hooked bill adapted for tearing flesh. It has a grey or sandy-brown mantle, a prominent rufous tail and grey-brown ear coverts. The male has a white patch at the base of the primaries (this is absent in the female) and the female has faint dark scaling on the breast and flanks. The bird in the last picture seems to be a first winter specimen since it has the overall coloration of the female (including the faint dark scaling on the breast), lacks the white patch at the primaries, but has the dark black lore of the male. The bird in Sandeep's photo (the lead pic) is an adult female (lacks the white patch on the primaries).

In winters the bird frequents wooded country along canals, riparian tracts and acacia vegetation along small roads. It breeds in the highlands of Baluchistan, southern Siberia and the Daurian steppes of central Asia.

The Rufous-tailed Shrike eats smaller birds, lizards and rodents and has the gruesome habit of impaling its prey on thorns and barbed wires. It is usually found atop bushes and small trees – a prominent perch for hunting. The bird we saw flew down and picked up a large ant (see pic below).

Going by the field guide that we were using, the shrike had no business to be there. However, one cannot really fault the birding guides for this as the basic information regarding winter and summer ranges of migrants is quite archaic – some of it survives from the days of Salim Ali and the British ornithologists. Bird checklists for some districts in UP are last updated by the district collectors and amateur British naturalists (A O Hume was the Collector of Etawah and the district is an exception, thanks to Gopi’s fieldwork. The checklist is quite current with 400+ birds). Most siting data continues to be reported from IBAs and established sanctuaries but very few birders visit the offbeat places, which are not well-known or are simply off-track. This leads to over-reporting from certain parts while creating birding blind-spots at the same time.

The grand old man of Indian ornithology was wise enough to avoid bias and made sure that he birded in places like Bastar, Bahawalpur, Districts of United Provinces, Afghanistan, etc. where few people venture today. He had birded in Rae Bareli and has reported the Siberian Crane from there. In my multiple visits to Samaspur, a bird sanctuary in the district, I have never encountered birders. The sanctuary staff tells me that such visits are fewer than a dozen in a year.

Moreover, the migrants can shift the wintering range based on factors like temperature, cropping pattern and rainfall. This is both seasonal as well as gradual shifts over time. This makes it all the more necessary for the data gathering to be extensive and well-planned.

The shrike sighting turned out to be good birding education. The presence of this elegant little predator indicated that the migratory season was well underway. Moreover, migrants can often be found in areas in which they have not been recorded earlier either due to a shift in range or gaps in information. So it's good birding practice to keep looking for them. This is where initiatives like MigrantWatch are both welcome and necessary since they enrich our knowledge about these lovely avian tourists as well as track shifts in arrival times and geographical spread.

Incidentally (now that I am on serial confession mode), I am also responsible for one of the most stupid answers in all Birdingdom. More on that later. Patience, dear reader. Or patientez s’il vous plait, in case you are Francophone.

Text and photographs by Sahastrarashmi (taken in Rae Bareli, Uttar Pradesh)

Lead photo by Sandeep Somasekharan (taken in Kutch)