soliloquies in the outdoors
Plumbeous redstarts endear one with their restiveness, nudging and ingesting hapless insects trying to fathom fast flowing waters… a songbird punctuating rivers and streams, it darts around from boulder to boulder tracing parabolas in the air, adding to the din of the river with short, shrill calls and animating the surroundings with a flurry of …
The dipper tends to send a few shudders down the onlooker’s well-cloaked disposition before one begins to marvel at its foraging, combing the surface of frigid waters emboldened by gravity before diving into their shallow depths for a morsel… seemingly foolhardy but in reality, one of those evolutionary ingenuities… I knew that the brown dipper …
The treecreeper is a rather comforting bird to look at… ensconced in its arboreal domain, enquiring for food among nooks and crannies, subsisting industriously… twixt humility and hubris, it prefers the former, choosing a benign camouflage over loud contrast… skittering up trees with hastiness akin to a rodent, leading some hapless insects to the end …
Lark – a bit smug, this one, the Ashy-crowned sparrow lark, especially the male, the missus still (relatively) demure and consenting… flitting around open fields looking for grains or reaping the rich entomological harvest of the monsoons… quintessentially restive, forever grouchy… happy as a lark? na… not this one for sure… For Shakespeare and Chaucer, …
Cuckoo, harbinger of rains, keeper of time… some resident, some migrant, all parasite… ‘tis a rather intriguing avian, the cuckoo… biologically, culturally, philosophically, or etymologically… at times endearing, at times appalling… ‘Twas a Jacobin cuckoo that we’d spotted, meandering through a rather sultry afternoon in Orchha looking for birds… as is the norm with this …
Birds … busy bees… forever restive yet surprisingly gallant at times… singing to beckon or wailing out alarms… never a dull moment in the avifaunal kingdom… thus one tries to kill the tediousness of doing lap after lap around this wide-open field lying amidst a slew of real estate projects in various stages of completion… …
Birds, for all their niftiness, can’t find their way around an unrelenting sun at times… ‘tis a leveller of sorts, this heat… you may fly but I can sweat… a feeble attempt at one-upmanship over the avifauna, for when the heat reaches its zenith, every natural adaptation needs a pinch of luck to concoct the …
I’m yet to roam in landscapes with those exotic, exquisite hornbills… until then, grey hornbills are all one gets as their everyday fill of these avians… gazing out of the window on a sultry city afternoons or running through foggy mornings, their laboured flight more often than not catches the eye, making them, even if …
Fathoming the universe, yet still baffled by dreams, such are the vicissitudes of life… the more we know, more the contradictions… sleeping birds being a case in point… for a species used to crumbling into that suspended space of consciousness for hours, there a tinge of envy as one sees the avifauna managing with just …
Prinia, prancing… that’s my mumble on spotting this busy bee of a bird, flitting impatiently across bushes with the tail moving in a rather autonomous manner, like a music conductor’s baton waving furiously to navigate a busy section of the symphony… well adapted to the chaos that is urbanity, its dismissiveness to the idea of …