soliloquies in the outdoors
Contrasting birds comes rather organically as one scours a landscape for their activity… and so was the case as one mused upon an Imperial eagle and a Grey francolin, diametrically opposite for the most part but then there are some similarities the more one thinks about it… while one bestrides the high skies and canopies, …
The sandpiper, like the rest of its wader brethren, is a busy disposition, tiptoeing pensively along the shore, looking for something beyond food it seems… reading passing scribes on the water or pondering over the lay of the land… there’s a melancholy in its demeanour, maybe those long migrations add up after a few years …
Kingfishers, despite their calculated gaze and stock-still demeanour broken only by flashes of short flights, seem cheerful… maybe ‘tis the kaleidoscopic plumage that bedazzles the eye or the disproportionately large beak, more often than not they tend to enamour the observer… while raptors spend hours riding thermals and weaving circle after circle in the sky …
Woodpeckers underline the echoes of winter… their tap-taps breaking the silence of the otherwise brooding woods… as the chirps of other avifauna punctuate their own little surrounds, woodpeckers fill the whole forest with their drumming… rhythm and bass section, one muses, watching these birds bristling about the oaks and pines in a no-nonsense manner… for …
Eagles, there is such pensiveness in their cold stares… although I find most avifauna steeped in a wistfulness that characterizes the nature of their existence, it seems more accentuated in the raptors, as if exhausted by all that burden of death, stuck in this vocation… their cries are shrill, movements calculated… the hooked beak resembling …
Birds, the fidgety kind, anyone who likes to stalk them in lush, dense forests is well acquainted with the acoustic delights and visual disappointments… the chirps and rustles spark hope… the human crouches and crawls in a misconception of stealth, the avifauna revels in the foliage… both parties trying to avoid a startle, one looking …
Musings on backyard birds in the monsoons…
Housekeepers is what comes to mind when one looks at the smaller birds prancing about the terra firma or waiting pensively at the waterside… while the raptors and mammals go about their mauling, impaling, tearing and digging like teenagers, leaving a seeming mess in their wake, the little ones tend to go about their business …
Musings on Scaly thrush (Zoothera dauma), a secretive ground foraging bird common in the Himalayan region
Musings on an Indian roller (Coracias benghalensis) with a broken beak, Tal Chappar, Rajasthan, India