When we constructed our
own home adjacent to the temple pond, my wife and I took special care to have
a spacious verandah to make the house as open as we can and
for our two daughters to play. We took extra care not to fell the trees in the compound and to compensate the felling of a few, we
planted many saplings of different trees (mango, jack-fruit, tamarind) even on the courtyard in front of the house, and we
planted many flower plants too. The result is that we are always having plenty
of butterflies and different kinds of birds and their music in and around our
home. (The jungle babblers sometimes even come into our drawing room.)
As both my wife and I
are government employees, we have a division of labour in the household chores.
Sweeping and cleaning the home is my duty apart from cutting the vegetables and
scraping the coconut in the kitchen. (However hard I try to learn cooking,
I can only be an auxiliary in the kitchen chores.)
On the last Sunday of
July 2012, when I was sweeping, I noticed some coarse materials on the floor of
the verandah. My daughters, especially the little one, generously contribute to
litter the floor with different materials. But if it were they, the materials
would only be leaves of grass and tulsi and the petals of
hibiscus and thechi and of other flowers. While I was
pondering over the source of the scattered dry fibers of plantain trunks and other
objects, my elder daughter informed me that she had seen a sunbird trying to
construct its nest in the ceiling of the verandah. I looked up and saw the
weaving work on one of the hooks in the ceiling. The initial stage of the
construction was already over.
The fibres were strongly
draped on the hook and a bare structure of the nest was dangling. Some
materials fell down only at the initial stage of the construction. I started
observing the work closely. The bird took exactly 9 days to complete
the work. How patiently and how diligently it worked from dawn to dusk! There
were two birds, of course the male and the female. I thought that the nest was
being built by both the birds. But, no. The female bird is the architect, the
worker and the material collector too. The male always accompanies her,
but there is no interference, no violence, no attempt to dominate.
The outer layer of the
nest is constructed with coarser materials. The dry thin barks of some woods
are used. (The bird has used even the worn-out pieces of plastic bags). Inside
that layer, rough fibers are sewn or woven together. Then soft materials are brought
and put inside. The intervals between bringing the materials range from two to
twenty minutes. It depends on the availability of the materials. Sometimes she
took hours to collect.
Even if I have said that
the bird works on the nest from dawn to dusk, in the morning it starts work
only after 9 o'clock. Till then it hunts spiders and drinks nectar from the
fresh flowers. (As there are many plants and trees in our compound, these
birds can have enough spiders to hunt and many flowers to drink nectar.)
Of course the male is also with her. You can differentiate the male by
its iridescent colour. (Wikipedia says that these little birds called sunbirds or sugarbirds or
spider-hunters belong to the family of the tiny passerine birds—Nectariniidae and there are 132 species in 15
genera and most sunbirds feed
largely on nectar, but also take insects and spiders, especially when feeding
the young.)
At the final stage of
the construction, each time after putting the collected materials to make the
nest cosier, the bird would go inside and only its thin and long beak could be
seen projected through the entrance hole. And the entire little nest could be
seen vibrating. The bird was making the nest wide enough by spreading the soft
material with its legs. Whenever she was inside the nest, the male bird came
flying and hovered over the entrance as if to make sure if his wife was safe
and secure in the new abode. Then he will perch on the hibiscus plant adjacent
to the verandah waiting for his beloved, chirping intermittently.
Even when the nest was
quite ready to be lived in, the bird was not seen lodging in it at night. On
the eighth day, at night, putting a ladder on the wall, I climbed
close to the nest and was wonder-struck
at the craftsmanship of the bird. The little bird had made the inner bottom of
the nest incredibly feathery as velvet! It means that the bird knows that when her eggs hatch, the
chicks will be featherless and their delicate bodies need the softest place to
lie on. I looked closely to know how the bird dexterously suspended the nest
from the hook and was awestruck at the intelligence of the bird. It has
collected and used spider-web extensively to drape the nest on
to the hook and put together the coarser outer layer intact!
Making the nest as feathery as velvet
On the ninth night (August 7, 2012) the bird
slept in the nest. The next day morning I waited to see when
it leaves the nest. It flew out at 6.15 a.m. (It seems that the sunbirds are
not early risers as the other birds are.) Immediately after it went out,
I put the ladder and checked whether there was any egg. No. In the evening, after reaching home
from office, I checked the nest again and still there was no egg. The bird came
‘home’ at 6 p.m. In the morning of August 9, there was an egg in the nest. It
was laid the previous night. The egg is a tiny one with whitish grey colour and
little wheatish dots. When I checked in the evening, there was another one too!
In the next morning, the bird didn't go out and I could not check the nest. It
means that the bird started incubating the eggs.
Incubating the eggs
The brooding lasted 15
days. During the incubation period, the bird used to go out often and again,
but would return immediately. On the fifteenth day the eggs hatched. In the
morning of August 25, when I checked the nest, there were two tiny chicks. Eyes
are not opened and there were no feathers. When I touched the nest, one of them
opened its mouth thinking that its father or mother has come to feed it.
The bird goes out at 6.
30 a.m. and the feeding starts from 6.45. The first one who brings food is the
father bird! Then comes the mother, then again the father. Sometimes, after
putting the caught and killed spiders in the open mouths of the chicks, the
birds picked something from the inner side of the nest and flew
away. They were removing the excrement of the chicks! Both the birds took
extra care to clean the nest. And they are not picking the waste and dropping it down on the veranda! (Let's compare
this civilized behaviour of the birds with that of the humans—putting the domestic wastes in plastic bags
and throwing them on the roadside, out of their compound.)
Mother bird feeds
Day after day the
feeding continued. As the chicks are growing day by day, they were always
hungry and demanding more and more and the parent birds fed
them continuously. (When I have seen the male bird's care and concern, I
thought about the many unwed mothers among the poor and vulnerable Adivasi
girls of Attappady and Wayanad in Kerala. These hapless women don't have the
assistance of those people whose lust presented them with their children! These
mothers and their children are destitute)
Father bird feeds
When I checked the nest
on Sept. 1, feather roots appeared only on their wings and by Sept.7, feathers
covered everywhere and they have grown into cute little sunbirds. Now they are
vociferous when the parents bring food.
On Sept. 8, I noticed a
wonderful behaviour of the birds. After putting the caught spider
or insect in the mouth of one of the nestlings, the mother bird
waited for some seconds and the little fellow turned around in the nest and put
his back against his mother's beak and ejected excrement and the
mother directly caught it in her beak and flew away! When the
father bird came, the other nestling did the same thing. Within fourteen
days, they have learnt that they should help the parents to keep their nest
clean and tidy! Another wonderful fact is that the male bird never slept in the
nest and yet he helps to clean it. (Among us the humans, cleaning is still a
compulsory duty of the females even if both the male and the female use the
home. And have you ever seen a human father removing the faeces of his child?
Whenever the child shits or pisses, he summons the mother to clean the place
and the child.)
In the morning of
Sept.10, immediately after the mother flew out; one by one, the little ones
flew after her. No training was needed! In the evening none of the birds
returned to the nest! Nearly for a month, under our roof, apart from my wife
and two daughters and I, there have been three winged souls and when they left,
I felt a kind of emptiness.
If we can witness such activities of
Life around a human habitat where there are some plants and trees, it is
easy to guess what wonderful activities are going on in a forest or on a
village hillock which is covered with trees and thickets. When we fell a tree,
bulldoze a hillock, devastate a forest; we are eliminating Life and its
innumerable manifestations irrecoverably. When we dam a mighty river, when we
dig out the coal and the bauxite by devastating the forest cover, when we
desertise the fertile countryside by filling the ponds and paddy fields; we are
digging the grave for the myriad forms of Life as if we the humans are mere
grave diggers.
