Serin is the quintessential passerine… restive and recursive… an existence characterized by a perennial urgency, not much different from the travails of a modern-day human… deeming idleness as wasteful and celebrating entanglement in a web of frantic activity… it might be just another human folly though, juxtaposing one’s own conundrums on what might be a mature, measured naivete, preferring to meander along the slow, steady contours of evolution rather than trying to define it… the avifaunal consciousness has been an intriguing subject for long, and continues to be… for unlike many other fauna, their abilities tend to defy their size in so many myriad ways that one often reaches a point of hapless befuddlement… from nonchalant transcontinental sojourns of migrators to the speed and precision of raptors… in a sense, birds lilt, be it their flight, their song or their esse…

The fire-fronted or red-fronted serin adorns the usual grumpy expression of finches, the male embellishing it with bright orange or red patch on the forehead… ranging from the Caucasus to Central Asia and the Himalaya, it is one of those unfortunate birds whose bright plumage has made them a subject of human captivity, yet enough populations exist for those who prefer to eke them out in the wild… this particular male made me sweat for almost an hour on a hot, dusty afternoon in Markha village, calling out unceasingly from a clump of thick, impenetrable bushes by the riverside but never once revealing itself… all I could do was stand still for a while, then get impatient and move back and forth around the shrubbery before the three o’ clock sun and the altitude forced into the shade, and then go through the motions again… all I got for the effort was a thirty second sighting, the bird on a mission to stuff itself with herbals it seemed… one of those days where one takes what one gets, I surmised, and headed back to the camp for a well-deserved lie down…

Musing on a fire-fronted serin, Markha village, Ladakh