Courting days

Extracts from a Birdwatcher’s note book:

by K. G. H. Munidasa

The annual nesting season for most resident birds having begun, there is much courtship going on. I noticed a Ceylon Black Robin engrossed in his. Ordinarily, black robin is not a bird that one would turn round to look at a second time.

But this particular fellow looked positively handsome while he courted his Lady Love. He puffed himself out and strutted around with the poise of a Turkey cock.

When the hen flew off the cock followed, sat on the branch beside her and repeated his advances. I suppose he eventually succeeded in winning her over; because she is already carrying nesting material to a cavity between two rocks deep inside the scrub.

I came across the entrance hole of a Loten’s Sunbird’s next bound round with nylon threads - about ten inches of it, carefully interwoven with the natural fibres that had been used to built it. The inside was lined exclusively with soft feathers that could have been definitely collected from a fowlrun.

In a colony of the Striated Weavers in a reed bed beside the road, I found three nests in which fresh cow-dung had been used in place of the usual moistened mud. I placed a bit of it in my palm and smelled to make sure it was cow-dung.

In a House Crows’ nest an acquaintance once climbed up to look for koels’ eggs, he found several rusty pieces of barbed-wire and a portion from a Lady’s wig.

The birds in this neighbourhood appear to have lost their natural fear of humans and are no longer wary in their presence. Red-vented Bulbuls, Purple-rumped Sunbirds, Black Robins, Tailor Birds and the Munias visit houses for various purposes, unmindful of the treatments they would receive at the hands of small children.

In the past couple of weeks, I have found two nests of the Red-vented Bulbul placed in precarious positions in tiled roofs, among the rafters. In a store building nearby a pair of Spotted Doves had placed their crude nest on top of a wall, less than ten feet above the floor and very conspicuous at that. A previous week a hen Tailor Bird visited the hostel twice to collect cobwebs for her nest being built in the scrub across the road.

In March two pairs of Spotted Munias built nests in the roof just above my bedroom window, only to be pulled down by someone in my absence.

Unlike the other Munias, the White-backed Munia used mainly flower stalks of grass in nest-building. In one such nest, I found altogether 31 leaves of different sizes having been fixed to the wall, on the outside.

The Jerdon’s Chloropsis is apparently a good mimic of the other birds. At least the pair which regularly visits my garden to drink and bathe at the bird bath is so. I have noticed that they imitated to perfection practically every common bird around the place, and a number of others which do not visit the garden at all.

The other day I was watching with great interest a Mason Wasp hard at work in his mud nest in the window sill when I heard the cheery-wee note of a Black Robin, in the Margosa branch immediately above me.

I looked up and failed to find any bird there. Just then a Shikra called, immediately followed by the scald-note of a Common Drongo and at once I knew who the actor was.

It was the male Chloropsis, who sat preening on a topmost twig of the Margosa tree at the edge of the garden.

In an earlier occasion, he imitated the Blyth’s Reed Warbler a long time before that migrant bird had arrived in our shores, and brought me rushing outdoors to investigate.

The pair of Red-vented Bulbuls, which I had found building a nest in a hedge-row a fortnight ago had consequently laid three eggs. I daily visited the nest to make sure how long would it take the first egg to hatch.

But some animal or human pulled the branch where the nest was, spilling the clutch of eggs to the ground.

It was very pathetical to see three little embryos, fast growing to be three little chicks, being devoured by vicious red ants.

A similar fate befell two chubby nestlings of the Purple-rumped Sunbirds. One day they were there safe and sound inside there cosy nest and on the next it was only a battered mass of fibre, cotton and cobwebs I found there. This time I was certain the culprit was the Common Coucal or Crow-Pheasant.