Our winged friends
By: K S S Pillai
We often see prominent people releasing doves into the sky as symbols of peace. Birds represent strength, purity, and the presence of God, while some, like eagles and peacocks, are used as vehicles of gods in some religions.
The crowing of roosters wakes us up before sunrise. When asked why they were killed in large numbers, the reply, in a light vein, was, “That is the fate of all who try to awaken the sleepy”.
Living outside a city, surrounded by trees, I frequently hear different types of birds. Since I spend much time on the balcony near my first-floor room, I often look at the sky where clouds of varying colours and shapes move.
The large house opposite, facing the road, has a terrace, surrounded by parapets. The owners are settled in another country and visit the house once in a while. In their absence, different types of birds use the terrace.
A pair of doves usually sit on the parapet for some time, speaking to each other in their language before flying away. Their place is then occupied by other birds, sitting lazily, observing all that is happening around them. A peahen sits there often, before flying clumsily above the houses in the society to the sprawling trees in the agriculture college compound behind.
Kingfishers are known to live near water bodies as their main food is fish. One is often seen sitting on the same parapet, though there are no fish-bearing ponds or rivers nearby. Birds also sit on the electric lines that pass above the road in front, without getting electrocuted.
A golden shower tree stands outside my bedroom, which sheds all its leaves and bears bunches of yellow flowers once a year. Those flowers are placed on a large plate with several other things for the first sight of members of the family on the morning of the Vishu festival.
The tree is used as the daytime home of different types of birds throughout the year. Many types of insects also inhabit it. The birds jump from branch to branch and eat those insects. All birds and small animals leave the ants on the tree alone, perhaps because they sting when disturbed.
I see flocks of birds flying to some distant destination early in the morning. They fly back in military formation to their faraway nests in the evening, making raucous sounds now and then.
When the sun is about to go down, bats fly to the agriculture college farm with many fruit trees. I have never seen them return to their nests, as they might be doing so before sunrise.
The paddy field in front of my village home was ploughed with a pair of bullocks. I have seen groups of storks trailing the plough to devour worms exposed in the upturned soil.
When I was a boy, I had seen several birds competing with us when the cashew tree in the compound started bearing fruit. The children were prohibited from climbing the tree as it was infested with violent red ants. Some local heroes would volunteer to climb the tree and harvest ripe fruits, after smearing their bodies with ashes.
We used to bring down the cashew apples with nuts at the end by accurately hitting them with stones and heavy wooden sticks. The ripe fruits hanging from remote branches fell when we hit them with our missiles. We drank the sweet juice of the apples and sold the nuts to vendors who came every day.
Crows also came to the tree to peck at the ripe apples. Sometimes they would fly to the nearby coconut trees, carrying fruits in their beaks, to eat them leisurely. We would take a round of these trees several times and pick the nuts with partly eaten apples. That was also the case when the mangos ripened on the trees.
Sometimes there would be high-pitched cries of birds flying above some place. They have seen a snake, the elders would say. The sound would stop after a minute or so, and the birds would fly away to some distant place.
Birds have become such a part of my life that I cannot imagine one without them.
(The author is a retired professor of English. A regular contributor to ‘The Kashmir Vision’, his articles and short stories have appeared in several national and international publications)
