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I have been working mainly from home for the past two weeks. Every night, around 6 p.m., I head to the terrace, where I spend 15 minutes looking at the Rosy Starlings who are performing in Delhi before their journey from the Northwest to Europe and Central Asia. I haven’t seen any gossip, but some of the flocks are big. On Friday night, I saw one with a few hundred birds. And then I went back to work.
Bird watching is one of the few outdoor things you can still do during shutdown, even in a Mumbai apartment with no balconies (one of my colleagues in Mumbai wrote a fascinating article on how people now feel pinched; in The last two decades, developers in the city decided that balconies were a luxury and decided that people would happily abandon them for a little extra room.)
Since the closing began, and people began spending all their time at home, there has been a huge increase in interest in birdwatching. And people are realizing that there are many birds around. One of my friends, a recent convert, sends me photographs taken in his garden, asking for bird identifications. They are common birds, but you are probably seeing them for the first time. Just like I did about 14 years ago.
I started birdwatching in 2006 when my son (then four years old) became interested in birdwatching. And suddenly I started to see birds: they had always been there; I hadn’t noticed them before. I still don’t see them all. On Sunday morning, for example, I was helping my son with a concept of differentiation when he pointed to a Blyth’s Reed Warbler on the moringa tree outside his window: He was returning to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The math session did not go very well.
Delhi is an especially good place for bird watching, although the best image of the blockade is from Mumbai (and was taken by HT’s own photographer, Pratik Chorge, at Navi Mumbai).
Delhi has the second largest number of bird species in a city after Nairobi, Kenya, where Marabou storks can sometimes be seen nesting on top of street lights. The closest relative of the marabou in India, the Greater Helper Stork, is a common sight in the Guwahati cityscape (especially where there is litter). Even in the heart of Delhi, near HT’s office, I have seen Indian gray hornbills and, when my office was a corner room on the 16th floor, a pair of Egyptian vultures nesting on the terrace of an adjoining building. . From that office, on clear winter days, I have also seen the population of great white pelicans residing in the Delhi Zoo: they live in an open aviary and do not leave because they are well fed, soaring in the hot springs. Now, I’m grounded in a first-floor office in the same building, and the only birds I see (and hear, more often than I see) are the pink parakeets on the lonely tree outside the window.
Delhi is also a good place for birding because Gurugram and parts of Haryana and Rajasthan lie along the Central Asian Indian Flight Route which is a major migration route, largely for waterfowl. .
So what birds can you expect to see at home?
If you have a garden, you can see most of the birds in the garden: barbets of two kinds, pigeons of two kinds, pigeons of two kinds too, the rufous tree cake, the Indian silver bill, two species of bulbs, the tailor Common Bird, House Sparrow, three types of starlings, Common Raven, Indian Gray Hornbill, Purple Sunbird, Eastern Magpie Robin, Shikra, two-type quacks (maybe three), the Black Kite and some others.
Even some plants on a balcony will surely attract some of these birds. If you’re lucky and have an old tree in or near your house, you might even see owlets, a barn owl, maybe even a Golden Oriole.
And then of course you can look up at the sky. I have seen two types of ibis and an oriental honey vulture flying over the house; the son has seen a booted eagle, an egyptian vulture, and a flock of common cranes. In the winter months, we see ducks, sometimes geese.
We are locked up The birds are still free.
