Barn Swallows
pepper the skies. The mind flutters to think that their fluid flight has power
enough to propel these feather-light globetrotters across the crumpled and
ruptured geography of continents, over the endlessly curving horizons of
oceans, keeping faith to a genetic clock whose earth-girdling pendulum swings
them between the high points of procreation and perpetuity. And here they stretch
a horizontal seine, an animated mobile net over marsh, open water, open crops,
snaring the massed arthropods in their flying gapes!
* * * * *
In black
cotton soil stood three Indian Coursers. The field had been prepared in neat
rows, as most fields seemed to have been, and their accordion canvas revealed these
smooth humped creatures on their bleached bone skeletal legs. The symmetry of
their beings is such a powerful magnet. We glass them, twisting uncomfortably
in the car, whispering our awe to each other, scared our movements might scare
them into flight. They too seem frozen in fear, or that supreme confidence
cryptic creatures have in their invisibility. The tension is palpable. Their
tricoloured heads, black, white, and shades of sand, remain fixed at one angle
for endless minutes. When they relax, it’s the head they move first, easing the
crick in their larynxes; one cocks a black iris skyward, another looks away and
I glimpse the tricoloured ‘V’ at its nape. Gradually they begin their comical
dart-stoop-straighten-dart form of foraging, moving away from us imperceptibly.
* * * * *
Opposite the
Red Tank, separated by the raised earthen road, and at a much lower level than
either, lie inundated paddies. They’ve been freshly planted, at least two
fields, and the sprouting crop of rice is still thin; much soggy ground clearly
visible.
Three Common Snipe stand in
ankle-deep water like earthworks. When one tilts and inserts its straw length
bill into the squelch, does it sip up the earth and become dun-coloured? When
still, they coalesce in their surroundings, gathering the mantling sky and the
cradling earth into their protruding nocturnal eyes. In flight, are these bedazzled
in the shining light of day, zigzagging the rocketing snipes as they skim
towards escape?
Their hungry companions in the field
are a few jittery and cautious Spotted Sandpipers. Both birds more seasoned
than the swallows as world tourists, returning to India once the monsoon has
quenched her bone-dry pelage and the depressions in her contoured landscape
softened with reflections from the liquid succor they hold. They form the
vanguard of the teeming flocks that will arrive as the cooler months progress.
* * * * *
Treading a
trembling floating world of plant and water, Purple Swamphens utter shrill
creaks, as though freaked out by the sudden sensation of sinking unbidden. They
mime a scuba diver crossing overland, as they exaggeratedly lift their reed-stalk
toes high over recumbent soggy water plants, pantomiming stealth, and place
them cautiously upon floating fronds.
Several were on firm ground,
twitching their stubby white tails up over their backs as they strolled in the
thin shadows cast by reeds on the margins of banks. I saw one reach up to a
seeding grass head, with its beak, and bend it to be clasped in the folded
skeletal umbrella of its grotesquely long toes, then clean the seeds into its
mouth with a sideways swipe of its partially open crimson beak. Their feathers
are a frenzied palette of the azure and verdure world, now dominated by dark
hues of shadows, now bouncing the light of the sky through emeralds. Yet my
eyes miss their robust rotundity in their marginal world of land and water.
