“Have you ever seen a green pigeon, sir? ” my guide asked me. It was the month of February and I was on a bird watching trip to the Keoladeo Ghana national park in Bharatpur. I have seen blue stone pigeons, the white ones, the brown ones, the spotted ones, the ones with spread out tails but I have not even heard of green pigeon what to talk of seeing one. He said he heard the call from the nearby tree but he could not spot it despite lot of efforts. We saw more than sixty species of birds that day but no green pigeon.
My guide was an old hat. He had done his bird recognition course from Bombay Natural History Society. And his name; Kaptaan Singh. He had impressed one of his foreign clients so much that he had gifted him an impressive Karl Zeiss binocular, which increased the pleasure of bird watching manifolds.
I was mighty impressed by his knowledge too. So I asked him how did he get into bird watching. “ I must have been 10 years old that time. We lived just beside the park. We used to keep a watch on the fields to shoo the birds away. One day a foreigner came asking about some python. I didn’t know what a python meant that time but I could make out he was enquiring about a big snake which I knew. I took him to the pythons nest. The foreigner was so happy to see the python that he gave me ten rupees. I thought if just showing a python can fetch me 10 bucks, this must be good business. I had seen most of the birds but hardly anything about them. So I started coming to the park along with the old guides and then I never looked back.”
I saw lots of birds in the two days that I stayed in Bharatpur. I could recognize a spotbill and spoonbill, learned the difference between a kite and a honey buzzard, I saw two varieties of king fishers and mynahs. Both these birds have a pied variety, which unfortunately we could not spot. The trip motivated me so much that I even bought a copy of Harper book of Indian birds. The joy of spotting a new species and recognizing it with the help of a field guide can just not be described in words. Its like hitting a pot of gold. For me it was the scavenger vulture, a white bird with yellow beak. But the missed opportunity of watching a green pigeon kept troubling my mind.
The spirit of a birdwatcher remained with me when I joined back office. I was viewing the world with new found eyes. The president estate is a small heaven for bird watchers.
I discovered a darker variety of mynah. They looked dirty and were always found around garbage. Unfortunately harper could not give me it’s name. After a couple of weeks I chanced upyon a book of Indian birds by an Indian author. He had mentioned about Bank Mynahs with photograph. So another querry was answered. I also learned that the pied varieties of any bird is called so because they are black and white in colour.
One day while coming to the office I noticed a bird was making a nest in a tree in front of my office. It was quite low so I went to take a closer look. It was a pigeon. It was a green pigeon. My spirit was content at last. I posted a sentry near the tree to stop all movements around it. A week later it laid eggs. But the luck of the pigeon was not as good as mine. Within a few days a crow attacked the nest and broke the eggs. The pigeons flew away. I was a sad moment for me.
I spotted the pied kingfisher during my Sundarban trip. It was sitting on a lonely tree branch jutting out of water. The bird looked beautiful against the backdrop of golden sunlight.
I am sitting at a beautiful coffee shop right now, which has a glass wall all around. Its located on the Delhi Dehradun highway. There is a park all around with lush green grass even in this peak of summer. As I write this a grin appears on my face. I see two pied mynahs just outside the glass wall. I stroke the glass with my pen. They look at me with caution and then walk away to a safe distance and continue playing.
