Grey-headed Canary Flycatcher: An Afternoon Haiku

What could be common to a tiny forest bird and a temple statuette that embodies grace, beauty and wild power? 

Having looked at a small group of 4-5 highly energetic and extremely acrobatic birds with small grey heads, small straight sharp beaks, large black eyes and yellow bodies, I looked expectantly at Sunita. Beguiled by the beauty and thrilled at finding a new bird, I wanted a name – to end the delightful morning walk on a satiated note.

“OK, so this bird that you see is ... take a good look. Notice the greenish-yellow upper body, the whitish-grey throat. The yellow on the belly all the way to the vent – it glows in the light.”

A shaft of white light penetrated the top-canopy and lit up a space surrounded by a cluster of branches in the mid-canopy of a copse of tropical deciduous trees. Drawn to the light a buzz of winged insects circled in random flight paths and were being hawked by the birds in our viewfinder.

All of this was fine but I wanted a name.

I looked again. The birds seemed to set their sights on a winged insect and with remarkable dexterity follow its flight path, and change direction quickly to snap up the prey. Flying trapeze artists on steroids. The change of direction was random; the birds picked up their targets in mid-air and within the blink of an eye perches were exchanged. 

“Notice the typical flycatcher behavior – exposed mid-canopy perch, the swift and short targeted sortie. And the large eyes.”

Still no name.

It was a satisfying end to a nice morning walk that had yielded Chestnut-bellied Nuthatches, Black-hooded Orioles, Hoopoes of the European race, Asian Barred Owlets, Black Redstarts, Grey Hornbills, and White-bellied Drongos among others. The small grey-yellow birds were right in the garden attached to our home and, like a true landowner, I felt a flush of pride at this newly discovered treasure. But for it to be truly mine, in my village, my garden and my backyard, I needed to know what it was called.

“OK... so this is a -- Sahastra, have you had a good look?”

Absolutely. I had, down to the soft tit-tit that emerged from the trees in a low-frequency murmur of avian satisfaction. My neck hurt, my eyes were blinded and the suspense was unbearable. All of this had just one cure – a name.

“The grey-headed Canary flycatcher. I did not know it was found here."

I didn’t care. The bird was mine for all time to come.

November noon

                             ticks vanish

                                                           canary flycatchers

In subsequent Novembers investigations established that the Grey-headed Canary Flycatcher (Culicicapa ceylonensis) had made the small patch adjacent to my home a regular haunt.

The next meeting with the bird was in the Himalayas, in May, as we descended the Loharjung-Wan road towards Didana. We heard the chee-weeeee-wee call with a soft whistle before the long weeeee and they were almost always in mixed hunting flocks. Jennifer informed us that they often make up the extremities of these flocks, a bit like the advance guard.

My first encounter with the birds in southern India was at Muthodi and again they were quite vocal. The habitat was different here -- not the montane oak forests of the Himalaya, or the dry-deciduous groves of Rae Bareli in the Gangetic flood-plains -- but the birds behaved just the same. The call, the perch, dexterity and the delight.

The next day while driving back to Bangalore, we stopped at the Belur temple. Its scale is not what one expects – small and star-shaped as opposed to the huge imposing masses that a lot of temples are. In his book “Diving the Deccan”, Bill Aitken found it an uninspiring anti-climax. On our way back, birding talk was interspersed with notes of the archaeological, and I managed a summary: 

“The Belur Temple is like a (canary) flycatcher, small but exquisitely crafted.”

Beej remarked, “You must be the only birder ever to imagine such an example. Or for that matter, any archaeologist.”

The Huntress at Belur, lit by a shaft of evening light

Bill Aitken can try some birding, I guess, and start with the flycatchers. It will ensure that he is better appointed when he is in the presence of the Belur Huntress the next time round.

Text and photo of the Belur Huntress by Sahastrarashmi

Photographs by Sandeep Somasekharan

Odyssey to Bedni Bugyal – Didana to Ali Bugyal

Pressed to ascend an indefinite distance to the alpine meadow of Ali Bugyal, Jennifer Nandi's mind fastens to thoughts of self-preservation and meditations on the Zen of climbing

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, we set off from Didana the next day on what we’ve been told is roughly an “eight-kilometre easy trek” to Bedni Bugyal. We should be there for a late afternoon lunch. We couldn’t have been further from the truth! 

We walk the flanks of the mountain and descend quickly to a trickling brook. Scrubby bushes and a higher-altitude variety of stinging nettle encroach upon our path, breaking their needles of poison on the edges of our trousers. Stinging nettle thrives in the phosphate-rich soil around human habitation. In most soils and waters, phosphorus is in short supply. Decomposers return phosphorus to the soil as the phosphate ion. A phosphorus atom, unless lodged deep in the earth, is therefore likely to spend much of its time in organisms. 

A shepherd sits under the shade of an old tree, guarding his precious herd of sheep and goats. The shepherds’ goats roam the hillsides devouring their favourite food of slow-growing oak saplings. 

We ascend swiftly through straggly oak and rhododendron. It is difficult to imagine that this was once part of a rich forest that clothed the hillsides from the Indus to Bhutan at an altitude from about 1500 m to 3000 m. Today, scant patches of that ancient green belt are the only reminders of its past glory. The large evergreen “Ban” Oak had once been the best known of the Himalayan oaks. 

There should be many Black-throated and Eurasian Jays wedging acorns into crevices to split the shell with their ice-pick beaks to get at the seeds. But birds are indicative creatures. They know this forest offers little nourishment. Lopping interferes with the regenerative ability of a tree. 

Acorns from adult oaks carry very large stores of food to sustain oak seedlings through their difficult first months. A mature tree may carry as many as 90,000 acorns. Oaks are slow growing. Eventually, they may stand four storeys high to provide boarding and lodging for birds and animals. 

Within the roots live beetle larvae. Concealed in crevices of the bark are tiny moths. They lie dormant during the day and fly around the branches at night. And just beneath the bark, beetles burrow radiating galleries in the wood. Hunting for the beetles are Himalayan Woodpeckers. The birds favour a mixed coniferous and temperate forest and, as we leave Didana far behind, these handsome pile-drivers are everywhere. 

Epiphytes cloak the bare branches of the oak thickly enough to provide a safe haven for nesting Asian Brown Flycatchers, which are just all over the place. So are Green-backed Tits. One tit, with its mouth crammed with food for its young, takes such a detour to approach its nest hole that we had to pause our predestined aptitude for peering, to allow it some privacy. 

Oaks once grew abundantly in association with Rhododendron arboreum and occasionally the Deodar, forming the chief tree of a well-known class of forest. How resplendent the rhododendron must have been with their large compact clusters of red flowers which contrast so strongly with the glossy green leaves. The Rhododendron is either lopped for firewood or its flowers picked to be processed into a kind of sweet drink that is sold by every ‘juice’ shop along Himalayan hill-station roads. 

Plantations of Chir Pine, Pinus roxburghi, were planted in place of the primary forest of mixed conifers. This species of tree does not support undergrowth. In the dry season, the tinder-dry pine needles quickly catch fire and, in the monsoon, with little top soil to protect the earth, the rain washes swathes of mountainside down in ubiquitous landslides. 

The gradient is now steeper than before and we pause every now and then for breath and for an awareness of where we are. A male Kaleej pheasant sporting a long white crest with white barring on its rump, contrasting nicely with the blue-black of its body, gives us a glimpse of its bright red facial skin before scooting off into a deep gully. 

The forest opens. Grey-headed Canary Flycatchers signal their presence with their short interrogative whistles. Tits and tree-creepers are everywhere. But their whistled introductory notes followed by a rapid penetrating accelerating trill, is quite distinct from the high-pitched chi-chi-chi-chi-chiu-chiu-chu trill of what we are more accustomed to. 

This bird is a tree-creeper with a straighter bill and with so much more patterning – dark ear-coverts with a nice creamy breast and belly and it is ever so rufous on its flanks. These Rusty-flanked Tree-creepers chase each other and settle frequently on the barks of trees, creeping up the vertical trunks and along the underside of branches, spiralling upwards in a series of jerks, probing the cracks and crevices in search of insects and spiders. Such lively behaviour – is it indicative of nest-building? 

Why do we climb? We pit our strength against difficulty; we endure hardship, discomfort and danger. It is almost as if we negate outward agencies of any kind – we put aside competition, we deny our otherwise prevalent sense of separateness, we reject the fake. We see the mountain’s magnitude, its immensity, and in doing so we drive out our pettiness. On occasion, we are so fully absorbed that we escape not just from the ugliness of greed, of noise, of noxious fumes, but from our very selves! 

Odyssey to Bedni Bugyal - A Day at Didana

To derive joy from the simple act of birdwatching, all you need to do is wait, watch and listen. Jennifer Nandi reveals the Birding 101 in the third episode of her travelogue on Bedni Bugyal

A Blue Whistling Thrush, ever the skulker, trails us as we walk its wooded paths

Lots of little surprises greet us the next morning. The Pied Thrush and his companion are in full view; so are the rock thrushes, the blackbirds and the Mistle Thrushes. A new visitor to the campsite is the Variegated Laughing Thrush. A very secretive bird; keeping close to the shrubbery, it hops in and out of sight to forage on the ground. We pursue it and it flies off with a rapid squeaking ‘qweek-qweek-qweek’ -- out of sight and reach of the binoculars. 

The ubiquitous Red-vented Bulbul against a Himalayan valley

Sahastra, our group leader, has scheduled an ‘all-day birding day’ today. We walk towards the village and select a little plateau of grass overlooking fallow fields and shrubbery. It is a simple morning; but we concoct magic from it by waiting, watching and listening. There are a whole kaleidoscope of reasons to invest in an activity as simple and as magical as birdwatching. Tiny details vie for attention – is the hind-collar of the Whiskered Yuhina pale yellow or a more buttery yellow? Is the bright orange-yellow on the forehead of the warbler a field characteristic or a matter of circumstance – it could’ve stuck its head into a pollen-bearing Rhododendron blossom! On the warbler, over there - one and a half wing bars or two? Any coronal stripes? Is that harsh ‘churr’ an alarm call? It’s a warning -- a bird of prey perhaps? Or unmindful birders? In John Hay’s words, “A bird is not valued because it is ‘beautiful’. It delights by the way it exemplifies the universe working so well, so coherently, and with such endless individuality.” 

I looked at our group of men with an IT background, from Bangalore and Chennai with an urge to watch birds. I imagine that the atmosphere in their workplaces can be highly manipulative, perversely efficient. It was laudable that their concerns about wilderness were not just about making personal risk and physical exertion the hallmarks of a wilderness experience, but about falling into resonance with a system of unmanaged, non-anthropocentric relationships that can be as fulfilling as rappelling down a steep face of rock.

Didana, less than a one-mule town, was deserted as everyone was attending a wedding in the valley 

There is no denying that wilderness travel can be extremely taxing and dangerous. You can fall into a crevasse, lose your way, become hypothermic, de-hydrate, run out of food, or walk in a delirium as Bijoy will shortly so eminently demonstrate! However, the common experience of those who travel in the wild are far less violent events. They encounter the most essential attribute of wilderness – that wild lands preserve complex biological relationships that represent a gene pool vital for the resiliency of plants and animals. Surely we have an ethical obligation to provide animals with a place where they are free from being impinged upon by civilization. Moreover, we have a historical responsibility to preserve these kind of landscapes from which modern man emerged. 

Odyssey to Bedni Bugyal - Loharjung to Didana

Walking in the Himalaya offers the pleasure of a constant flirtation with epiphany, learns Jennifer Nandi

A stream en route to Didana from Loharjung

A morning of magic greets us. Arrogant blue skies goad us onwards. The rugged hill road from the village leads us past an anarchy of rampant secondary growth that stretches into the valley below. This riot of plant and animal life owes its fecundity to hillsides that once supported lush forests of oak and rhododendron. Sandstone country with its covering of alluvium and glacial clays evidently suited oaks and rhododendron allowing them to grow to glorious maturity. But the oak trees were much harvested to supply the British Naval construction of the 18th century. 

Sporadic secondary growth of oak and rhododendron dot the higher hills and if you closed your eyes you could hear a Blue-capped Rock Thrush pouring out its rather monotonous undulating and fluty song. It is easily identifiable being the only rock thrush with a white patch on the wing. And if you look closely enough you can see the contrasting cobalt-blue throat. The largest of the rock thrushes, the Chestnut-bellied, is common enough, perched high up on tall trees, sometimes slowly jerking its tail up and down and on occasion uttering its softer and more subdued song.

A Blue-capped Rock Thrush showing off the 'mirrors' on its wings