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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M. Krishnan : Exercise in Barbet-watching : The Sunday Statesman : 12 April 2015
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EXERCISE IN BARBET-WATCHING

"ALTHOUGH I admire Wordsworth greatly, I am unable to see quite eye to eye with pundits over some of his poems, particularly the much-vaunted 'Solitary Reaper', which strikes me bathetic in places and sustained by mere euphony with no underlay or thought. And the other day, standing in a hollow between two hills that rang with the never-ending " koturrr, koturrr, koturrr" of the 'Small Green Barbets' I knew at once what was wrong with the poem.

O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound

When a valley overflows with sound like that, you don't need to listen -- what you need is cotton-wool, to plug your ears with!

Few birdcalls are more characteristic of low-elevation hill jungles in the South than that of this Barbet. It is a predominantly green bird all right, though brown on the head, but it is not small, it is a mynah-sized and very chunky in build, with a square, top-heavy head. Its call is so penetrating that you can hear it a furlong away, and it can keep up its persistent, unvaried "koturrr" for 10 minutes on end and then, it is a sociable bird, not much given to lone calling, and what you hear all day in the jungles is not one Barbet but a congregation of them calling and answering, one taking up when the other gives over!

In a nullah flanked by 'gulmavu' (Machllus macrantha) trees in the fruit, I found dozens of Small Green Barbets and was able to observe them from close by. In a tree holding a dozen birds, only a few, usually only one or two would call. From another tree some 50 yards away, there would be an answering call, then from still another tree, and then the chorus would be kept up full blast for 10 or 15 minutes. Then suddenly, as if on a prearranged signal, the birds would give up and a blessed silence would descend on the place. But not for long. Presently, another Barbet would initiate the chorus again and in no time at all the hillsides would be echoing the calls.

The most familiar of our Barbets, the flamboyant little Coppersmith, which you can hear all over the plains of India just now, jerks his head as it comes out with its endless "tonk, tonk, tonk" -- this makes it difficult to place the bird from its call. The Ceylon Green Barbet (which too has a "koturrr" call) is said to close its beak and quiver its head strongly while calling. The Small Green Barbet has its own way of rendering "koturrr".

Over a week I studied several of these birds calling from a mere 15 feet away or else through a small telescope and am quite definite on the point. As with other major Barbets, the call begins with a loud, long "krrrrrrr" on an ascending scale: then the bird settles down to its "koturrr" call, some birds (timed with a watch, of course) coming out with 64 calls a minute, others (especially in the mornings) with only 56 calls, but once a second is accurate enough. The bill is closed while calling and there is some movement of the head, but that rolls the rs in the "koturrr" isa noticeable and powerful pulsation of the chin and the upper throat -- the skin over this area (what would be the skin over the larynax in a man) vibrates like the tymmpanum of a drum, a vibration that is so pronounced that in profile the chin is blurred by the quick, up-and-down throbbing, like a plucked violin string. The syrinx or voice-box is much lower down in a bird, and I take it that the Barbet's call also originates in the syrinx, like most birdcalls -- when it is rolled and given its peculiar ventriloquial and penetrating quality by the throbbing of the chin and upper throat.

Incidentally, I did not see any of these birds eat anything except fruits, but the sort of negative evidence proves nothing, and I believe they do take in insect fare ( all fig-eaters do willy-nilly! ) and perhaps even other animal food.

At the end of my week of Barbet-watching, I had occasion to reflect on the remarkable adaptability of man. By that time I had got so used to the din around me that I had to look at a Barbet to know that it was calling. And when I left the place, I actually missed the chorus that I had been hearing every day and I thought of Wordsworth again:

The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more. "

-M. Krishnan

This was first published in on 17 May 1959 in The Sunday Statesman

#The photograph of the Barbet not reproduced here.