Excursions of an amateur birder

An academic experiences first hand the joys and agonies of birdwatching with a group

A group stood by the Lalbagh West Gate fountain. They were all in dark clothes (so as to not startle the birds), necks angled upwards. I was seeing them for the first time, but held no doubt that this was BngBirds — the first hit on Google when you look for ‘Bengaluru’ and ‘birdwatching’. They meet in Lalbagh Botanical Garden in Bengaluru every second Sunday of the month, and on some other occasions.

I stood with the group and followed their lead. They were all looking at a Brahminy kite in flight, just above us. It was soaring from one end of the sky to the other, its path being tracked by at least three pairs of binoculars.

“Look at its colour!” someone said, so I squinted. I could see the outline of a bird moving in the sky. 

“The shape of its tail!” I squinted more; it looked bird-like, I agreed. 

“Its wings are completely still! What a beautiful sight.” I squinted till my eyes shut on their own.

I felt blind. The only thought in my head was: “Oh, a silhouette!” But in that moment of deep confusion, I learnt this: birds can be identified by the colour — of their heads, wings, bodies. They have behaviour and habits unique to each species. In the same vein, I learned that not all birds soar. S-o-a-r is not just an adjective to be thrown in a sentence, but to describe the movement of this creature. Smaller birds flap their wings because their bodies don’t have the structure to support gliding in the sky. Larger birds — birds of prey — are images of glamour. They move hundreds of metres with a single flap of their wings, the wind literally holding them up.

Then I wondered: how do you separate a Brahminy kite from a black kite or an eagle? A bit of research tells me that there are more birds of prey and all of them look similar if you don’t know what you are looking for. Especially at this distance, when each colour blends into the other and becomes black (google the European honey buzzard, which has a delicious name but can be mistaken for your neighbourhood kite).

Look at the shape of the tail, I was told. If it is forked, it is the black kite, and if it is fanned, it is the Brahminy kite. You must look closely and carefully, watch the bird and pay attention. The details reveal themselves only with patience.

Identifying trees 

Within a minute, the group was off again, only to pause as one of the older birders spotted the silk cotton tree. “How many of you know this tree?” He was describing a tree that I have seen all over Bengaluru, especially along the Cubbon Road boulevard, painting the horizon red with its bright flowers. It is native to the city, unlike the more popular jacarandas and the tabebuias.

The veteran was only one of the many who are a part of BngBirds, perhaps the most active and popular birding group in the city. Like most community spaces, even this one uses WhatsApp communities and Telegram smartly, and is now 881 members strong. BngBirds is an off-shoot of Birdwatchers’ Field Club of Bangalore (BFCB), the city’s first birding group. BFCB was started in 1972 by Joseph George who is widely credited for pioneering group birdwatching efforts in the country. George put together lists of birds he saw, which also became the first annotated checklist of birds in Bengaluru. He would communicate with birders using postcards, inviting them for walks whenever he was able to schedule them. 

The founder of BngBirds is Ulhas Anand, who unfailingly leads the Lalbagh group every month. On other Sundays of the month, there are walks in different sections of the city: in Saul kere, Kaikondrahalli; Jakkur lake, and even one in Valley School, Kanakapura Road.

You can tell these men apart from the others by the clothes they wear. Most wear collared white shirts, formal pants, and strap-on sandals. I wondered, for a moment, whether they were following a dress code that I had missed in the email. The rest of the group wore clothes like mine: track pants and t-shirts, in varying degrees of fancy. All of us had the good sense to wear shoes. We were in for a bird walk, after all.

As it turns out, there’s not much walking involved. Thirty minutes in, we had walked only so far that the Lalbagh gate was still visible. Every five steps, someone in the large group would either ask a question or stop and point. A child would spot a bee, or a fallen palm fruit. Another birder would hear the very sharp call of a bulbul.

If a question was asked, it would be patiently answered, and sometimes, it would develop into a tangential conversation. But this low pace meant that we were a group of 30 blocking the pathway perpetually. The rest of Lalbagh — populated with older men and women power walking in their kurtas and saris — was deeply inconvenienced. The passing eye roll was capable of cutting across the walking-talking crowd of people and hitting you directly. “How dare you interrupt my walk,” it seemed to say.

The couple of times I went birdwatching before, I was with a friend who had been birding for about two years. I went along only so that I could wake up early, and spend time with said friend. We went to Cubbon Park early Saturday morning and felt the city’s cool very intensely. There were very few people so birds were in abundance. She would pick up her binocs and watch through them closely before making notes and looking at her copy of ‘Birds of India’.

Value of silence

Being loud is frowned upon in birding. You must not scare away the birds or yell in excitement (there, there!) when you see one. The more crowded the place, the fewer the birds you see. So most birders venture into pockets of nature early in the morning. That is when anticipation is high and birdsong is loud. You listen carefully and venture in the direction of the bird. If you ever hang out with a long-time birder, they will tell you the difference between a white-cheeked barbet and a coppersmith barbet.  

This silence is punctured so heavily in Lalbagh that there is no trace of it. The birds, somewhere high up in the trees, are in some state of coexistence with us noisy beings. Whether it is the violent hand of a child or a sharp yell, there is barely any response from these creatures. Lalbagh is full of other creatures — dogs, cats, monkeys, and insects.

So if you are in the business of serious birding and want to complete goals and make checklists, Lalbagh is perhaps not the place to be. But that is also the point.

Growing community 

Bengaluru’s birding community is growing. Every day, new people join these groups and ask each other questions about a chirp heard in passing, or a bird spotted in flight. I am a part of two other groups — an all-women’s birdwatching group, and another more informal group run by veteran birder Deepa Mohan. 

The first time I came across Deepa was in a broadcast email she sent to the BngBirds community. She had written a long email about a recent birding experience, and I was hooked. 

When I finally got the chance to meet her a few months later, she turned out to be a small woman with the voice of a megaphone. She led a closed walk in Kalkere biodiversity park, and took us around for three hours. From our cosy corner of forest, we could see an expanse of the city that stretched far beyond our line of vision. “There used to be nothing here,” she said, “but now the city has expanded in the form of buildings and more buildings. Birding is not so easy anymore.”

Finding rare birds in the city was not difficult, but now, “one has to travel 25 km to 30 km outside the city to spot diverse bird species”. Setting up these walks takes work and coordination. It is a question of coordinating with officials, making sure there are restrooms, and foreseeing any problems that might arise. Most
birders also begin planning their commute days before the walk, and carpool to the location.

The large community and Bengaluru’s quick growth go hand in hand. The more the IT crowd in the city swells, the more need there is to return to nature. This bizarre catch-22 makes every birding experience more unpredictable. I end up people-watching and birdwatching in equal parts. In one session, I met a woman fed up with wrestling Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, and wanted simpler books to read. She then held on to our Punjabi identities and began listing people’s names to check if I also knew them. 

In another session, I ran into a boy from my college who had just begun teaching biology to kids and was attempting to bring nature into the conversation. In a third, I came across a man in his 50s, an IT executive, much fitter than I have ever been.

This turn to nature is telling. Birding is not simply an activity done in isolation, but a community activity that allows one to meet more people. Looking at birds is simply the very beginning of this activity — we spend an equal amount of time looking at trees, insects, and flowers. In discovering the histories of Bengaluru’s nature, so much is revealed about the people.

This information can also be recorded in the form of data that even scientists can use. Once a birder spots a bird, they add the name of the species to eBird, a database of information collected across the world. Developed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird ultimately contributes to data that is used by scientists to collect information of birds and their populations. The activity is completely voluntary, but equally empowering. You can be an amateur birder and document a bird someone else might not have seen before. This kind of data collection becomes very important in the backdrop of climate change. 

One such record of interest is the State of Birds in India, which points out that there are about 178 species of birds in the country that must be conserved on priority. An activity like birdwatching brings the two realities together — one of seeing fewer birds around us, and the other of looking at data collected over the decades.

Learning new things

The crowd in Lalbagh was so thick that I had to quickly memorise the faces of my fellow birders. The group would keep breaking off into smaller offshoots interested in one thing or the other. Palm fruits, a centipede, a dog. You could choose which group to hang on to, or find yourself there by accident. In any case, different parts of nature opened up to me in pockets. I learnt to differentiate a ripe palm fruit from an unripe one. I looked closely at the bees constantly working around these fruits, and could even hear their low hum from where I stood. I found out that trees also have epidemics and can die in large numbers at the same time. I learnt that wasps perish inside ficus fruits.

It was fascinating that this information was coming to us from people clad in formals on a Sunday morning (as if knowledge cannot be obtained from the informals). All the other men I have encountered in similar formals are either boring or talking about politics or both. Or they are my father. 

In the middle of all this conversation, I slowly began to adjust to the sound of bird calls. My ears learnt to separate one sound from the other, and the park revealed itself to me in a way I could not have previously imagined. Is it possible that I have been deaf to these sounds this entire time? I prepared myself for a great epiphany, a change of being.

And then I was stopped short.

Someone in the group identified a chirp that was different from the rest. A short burst of chirps that sounded circular. “What is that sound?” Veteran birder No 2 answered immediately. “That, I think, is a sunbird. Let me see.”

Everybody paused. The rest of Lalbagh suddenly did not matter. He took his lenses, adjusted them a little and zeroed in on the bird. It was hidden somewhere in the arms of a large ficus tree, one of the oldest in Lalbagh. “Right there, by the arm that is pointing straight up. It’s a small, shimmery thing.”

Spotting a sunbird

We followed and began looking at the exact branch he was looking at. I was imagining a bright yellow bird, the colour of the sun. I could see the little flutter of its wings in my mind and felt great excitement. My first bird.

I didn’t have any binocs myself, and waited till someone was done admiring the sunbird. I followed their eyes, and looked at the branch it was rumoured to be in. Third from the left, I told myself. Visible next to the pole behind it. I took a deep breath, finally received a free pair and put them to my eyes.

I could see in front of me the tail of a branch that looked nothing like the real life ficus in front of me. I removed the binocs, located the branch and tried once more. This time, I could see a blurry black-ish leaf. The third time, I could see a sky that was full of clouds but empty of birds. I looked around for help and found another formals-clad birder watching me with a little laugh. He came to me and directed me exactly, till I saw a little flutter by a branch that was much closer than I previously thought. “Ohh, I thought it was far away.” I used the binocs again, took a deeper breath. 

But the binoculars world had changed further this time. Through the lenses, I could see a palm tree, and that was certainly wrong. What upside down world was this? So I looked around some more, found a spot to stare at, and quickly put on a performance, “Oh there it is! How beautiful!” My real reaction would have been no different, surely.

By now, the birdsong had died down in my mind and all birds were invisible. Later, I asked my birder friend, “How the hell do you use binoculars?”

It takes practice, I would later learn.
But that learning curve is full of adventure. Merlin, another app developed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is now my best friend and tells me exactly which bird is chirping around me. Identifying the bird, noticing their habits and spotting their colours will all take time. Until then, I’ve trained my ears to always listen.