Country notebook:m.krishnan

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan : BIRD CALLS : The Sunday Statesman : 10 April 2016
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BIRD CALLS

"RECENTLY, writing a note on 'Calls of Indian Birds', I was reminded irresistibly of a story by P G Wodehouse. The long-suffering heroine of the tale, a keen naturalist working as a wage-slave under an uncontradictable boss in Hollywood, asserts himself at last when the man lays down, with a striking lack of originality, that the cuckoo says, "Cuckoo, cuckoo!" She ups and tells him, in front of an outraged army of yes-men, that the Cuckoo says no such inane thing and the its call is, in fact, a spirited " Wuckoo, wuckoo!"

How she gets the sack in consequence of this closely-studied contribution to natural history and is restored to office and even promoted by a typically Wodehouselan development is the theme of the story. The fact is that if one were to assert that the cuckoo says "Buckoo" or "Luckoo" or even "Tuckoo", that would be as close and fair a rendering of a call as the traditionist's "Cuckoo".
Birds are not much good at consonants.

But, of course, a number of birdcalls do seem strikingly like the renderings we know them by. This is because these renderings accurately indicate the syllables, the stresses and the modulations of those calls -- but not their articulation. The Cuckoo tribe in India provide excellent examples of truth of this. My first acquaintance with the INDIAN CUCKOO (Cuculus micropterus) was made in a deciduous forest long, long, ago; I heard the bird's repeated call and guessed its identity from the popular rendering of the call, "Broken pekoe", even before I saw it. Now the same call is rendered differently in different languages: in Bengali it is "Bokotako"; another good rendering is "Kyphul-pukka" and a different version is "Crossword-puzzle".

There is no question of any similarity in consonants or even in vowels, between these four renderings, but all faithfully echo a call of two closely-spaced words both disyllabic and both with the accent on the first syllable. The "KOEL" and the "BRAINFEVER BIRD" or Papiha (The Common Hawk-Cuckoo) have names that echo their calls.

The accepted rendering of the LAPWING's call, "Did-he-do-it?", gives the syllabification of the bird's alarm call, and even suggests the sense of urgency in it. The renderings in Indian languages of some birdcalls are no less happy. But all of them can be equally suggestively and more unmistakably rendered in a series of "ki's" (standing for short syllables) and "kee's" (standing for long syllables) if we add a mark to denote where exactly the accent falls, but naturally one prefers a rendering in words, sometimes in romantic words to a system of meaningless sounds.

The Tamil rendering of the SPOTTED DOVE's coo, "Kappalchhetti kodoo, kodoo kodoo!" is remarkably good and there is a touching little story to explain the words -- I shall not retail the story here since it is best told in Tamil. No doubt other renderings of birdcalls in Indian languages have similar associations with sentiment or a story.

Not that any sophistication or culture is needed to appreciate, or even to invent a rendering of a birdcall. The best rendering that I know of the RED-VENTED BULBUL's call was provided by my son, when he was four. At that stage of his life, he was most at home in English, the only language that my wife and I have in common, and potatoes boiled in their jackets was part of his regular diet One morning my son came up to me and announced that there was a hungry little bird in the drumstick tree by the kitchen that kept on saying "Big, Big, BIG potato"!"

What a contrast has been provided by pretty poetic fancy! I don't suppose many people read The LIght of Asia these days, but her is Edwin Arnold's account of Bulbul's song:

The Koel's fluted note, the Bulbul's hymn,
The "Morning! Morning!" of the Painted Thrush............

Whoever heard a Bulbul singing a hymn! Bulbul's are noted not for their ecstatic song but for their cheery, rollicking staccato voices. A last point. It has been said that a distinction between a phrase of many syllables with a defined cadence, used regularly by a bird as a call and birdsong proper lies in the greater complexity and fluency of the song. Not at all. Birdsong can consist of one or two notes and still be authentic song.

I have heard many gifted avian singers, among them the SHAMA wild in the bamboo jungles but in my list of Indian songbirds I would certainly include the PIED BUSHCHAT, The cock chat's song consists of a single rather cheery clear whistle, repeated a few times from atop some elevated perch; then suddenly this call rises steeply to an untamed and ecstatically sweet note, which ends as abruptly as it began. No rendering in words can suggest the call, and if this is not birdsong, I do not know what is it."

- M. Krishnan

This was published on 25 March 1962 in The Sunday Statesman

# One beautiful sketch of birds drawn by M.Krishnan has not been reproduced here.

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK : M.Krishnan : A MIDDAY CHORUS : The Sunday Statesman : 24 April 2016
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A MIDDAY CHORUS

" ABOUT one o' clock it came on to rain. It began gradually and mildly, with a great pearl-grey cloud spreading itself across the sky, rendering the midday light wonderfully soft and clear. There was a refreshing coolness in the air, but no palpable breeze. In fact, it was as if the hot, sweltering jungle has been magically air-conditioned and furnished with diffused artificial illumination and a mother-of-pearl ceiling.

I was lying on my back in sandy riverbed, in a shade tall tree. I had gone to sleep dog-tired and feeling ill, and woken only minutes later to find the sky and air and jungle transformed, and euphoria in me. Almost a hundred feet above me was the top of a giant clump of bamboo leaning over the nullah; a pair of GREY DRONGOs was perched on that swaying bamboo-top and all at once they burst into song -- a series of trilling, wildly sweet calls.

IMMEDIATELY, as if this was the signal for which the other birds had been waiting, a medley of the musical bird bird voices filled the air. It was a chorus such as I have never heard before -- and I have heard the exhilarating chorus of WHITE-BELLIED DRONGOs in the cold greyness before dawn, the RACKET-TAILED DRONGO's ecstatic song to the rising sun, the welling rhapsody of the SHAMA at the dusk in the bamboo jungle and many mixed dawn-choruses, but this was something different, differently compound.

A TREE-PIE, nearby, joined in with almost-chimed metallic calls, varied from time to time with its familiar " ting-a-'ling "; the loud melody of a party of HILL-MYNAHs came through clearly, and nearer at hand some other DRONGOs (probably White-bellied) were singing; the cadenced "broken pekoe" of the INDIAN CUCKOO, a call that I love, was so pleasantly repeated from behind the bamboo clump, and less musical voices, the distant screams of PARAKEETs, the jabber of JUNGLE MYNAHs and even the faintly heard axle-crack call of a SERPENT EAGLE circling high overhead somehow did not seem out of place in that chorus. And dominating everything was the insistent, never-ending "papiha, papiha, papiha!" of the HAWK-CUCKOO -- the bird was some distance away, but its call cuts through distances effortlessly and has a peculiar penetration gets through nearer bird voices.

A great black woodpecker almost the size of a crow ( this was the MALABAR GREAT BLACK WOODPECKER) was hammering away a dead limb of the tree above me, providing the throbbing drum accompaniment to the many-voiced chorus. The hammering of this bird is sustained over a length of one -and-a-half to two seconds, and I have often timed it with a stopwatch. I have often tried to count the number of evenly-spaced billstrokes within this period, but never was able to get a precise count. There were from 15-20 "beats" in each long-drawn throb of hammering. Since these were evenly spaced, each impact and interval must be about 1/20 of a second long. I had thought it would be much shorter.

The chorus was sustained and continuous and ended as suddenly as it began. I heard the mahout and his assistant summoning the elephant, browsing at a nearby clump of bamboo, just before the Drongos burst into song, and since it takes about 15 minutes to get a reluctant elephant to abandon its lunch and lie down, lay the pad on its back and tie it down securely, probably the chorus extended over that space of time. A lazy drizzle arrived with the elephant, and gradually the rain gather momentum. The bird voices were stilled the minute the drizzle grew brisk.

We reached the shelter of a permanent observation platform just as the rain came down in earnest. For two hours, it rained heavily without a break, the long, vertical streaks of water coming down relentlessly all around us. Visibility was very poor, and no sound came through the dreary noise of the rain. But when the rain stopped abruptly and the sky began to clear, I saw a curious sight.

There was a great mango tree close by, and two HILL-MYNAH were practising a remarkable exercise right at the top of its towering bole. There were some holes in the wood high up in the tree, and when I saw them first, through the slackening rain, the birds were sitting in these holes, ruffled up and sheltered from the downpour.

Then they came out, and clinging to the bark with their claws, slithered down a few yards and then climbed up the bole again using both feet and violently flapped wings to propel them: then they slithered down again and flapped their way up once more. I thought that there was a definite purpose in this game to dry the flight feathers before the birds dared to take wings again. They flew away after five minutes to another tall tree, where they went through the exercise again, thrice of four times, and they flew away for good."

-M. Krishnan

This was published on 10 June 1962 in The Sunday Statesman

# Not reproduced here is the Nice Image of a Hawk-Cuckoo with the caption at the bottom :
'The Hawk-Cuckoo which builds no nest'