A tree is perhaps the most befitting exemplar of containing multitudes… slow yet fast in its growth… sombre yet vivacious in its palette of colours… wizened in some places, rotund in some… stock-still at trunk and swaying to the branch… as above, so below… a tree simply doesn’t inhabit a space, it instils life far beyond itself, in the garb of its supposed lifelessness…
So I tried to correlate, while in the process contending with that dreary period of forced dormancy before heading out for a big run… and this was my first foray into a serious trail ultra, so precautions were in order… settled tranquilly in a homestay amidst the lush coffee plantations of Chikkamagaluru – the bona fide birthplace of the venerated beverage in India – with greenery all around and hardly any wi-fi to boot, this was the ideal place for an idyll…
‘Twas also the perfect place for birding… albeit with the caveat that I couldn’t expend myself stalking fauna up and down the hill, with one eye upon the next day where that’d have to be done anyway for seeming eternity… one guffawed, remembering Coleridge’s famous lines… water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink… I was amidst some of the country’s best coffee plantations, but ironically there were no coffee beans one could buy… apparently, they just wash and sell raw beans here, no roasteries around to buy the end product from… two, the air was brimming with chirps and cackles, yet one had to resist the temptation to go chasing after them…
Such were the circumstances that led me to pin all my hopes on an Indian coral tree adjacent to the room, its bright red flowers starting to bloom… a short stroll in the morning brought little rewards, the treetop trapeze artists weren’t too concerned with getting the worm it seemed, so after chasing a few bush birds around in futility, we drove to Mullyanagiri and Baba Budangiri peaks, the highest in the region… but both were choc-a-bloc with tourists, and the religious paraphernalia that so often ends up defacing a perfectly scenic hill, so I just took a few photos for the sake of it and we wound our way back to the homestay…
Which was when my luck finally turned… as I settled in the veranda after lunch, the avifaunal procession finally began… started by Chestnut-tailed starlings, grumpy as is expected of most passerines, too consumed by the vicissitudes of subsistence maybe, as migrants even more so, a feeling common across species…
It went silent over the tree for a while after that, so I took my attention to the wide open fields on the other side, and with fortune wafting in with the clouds overhead, appeared another passerine, a Blyth’s reed warbler… unlike the starlings, this one had given me a lot of grief since the morning, an exasperating cocktail of restiveness and reclusiveness… for a brief ten seconds though, it stopped to ponder, time enough for a few quick shots before it disappeared into the thicket again…
As I moved the head to ease the stiffness in the neck, a flash of colour moved in the distance, the bins revealed a Black-rumped flameback in no particular hurry, once in a while letting some wood chips fly, but it seemed more out of habit than hunger… I was in no mood to creep diligently for a couple of hundred metres for a close up, so a habitat shot would have to suffice…
Back on to our coral tree then, to the highlight of the day… and I firmly believe that I manifested the Vernal hanging parrot that came to perch, for the past hour or so I’d been wondering what luck it would be if I could see one… the only hanging parrot species found in the country, sleeping upside down like bats… the rest being parakeets, which are far more ubiquitous… this male stuck around for a while… flitting from one flower to the next for about five odd minutes before the parakeets arrived and chased it away… but I had my wish granted by the genies of the coffee estates (I came up with the genies the next day, spooked a bit while running through jungles all alone in the dark when all of a sudden the headlamp shone upon wooden masks of deities hung atop trees)…
‘Twas all parakeets from thereon, a pandemonium of Plum-headed parakeets followed by one of Malabar parakeets, the latter endemic to the Western Ghats… that was more or less it as the light started fading away, one Greater racket tailed drongo perched right up on the top of the tree but it was obstructed by the branches for a clear shot…
By now my arms and neck were feeling a bit sore as well, and with lots of pain in store for the next day, I would up shop… all in all, ‘twas a random harvest of delight… a quote I’ve picked up from the annals of Himalayan exploration, and that often comes to mind as one stumbles serendipitously upon the joys of the outdoors…
Birdwatching in the Western Ghats, Mallandur, Karnataka
