Book on nesting habit gives a peek into a bird's love life

CHENNAI: The female little ringed plover (Charadrius dubius) lies on the eggs when it rains. When water enters the nest, it clears it out with its beak and when strong winds blow, the little ringed plover embraces its eggs with its wings to prevent them rolling off the nest. If the eggs do roll out, the bird and its mate roll the eggs back to the nest with their head.After doing so, they spread their wings and seem to jump in joy.
This is a brief account of the nesting behaviour of the little ringed plover, a tiny wader which can also fly fast, in the Diary On The Nesting Behaviour of Indian Birds' authored by amateur ornithologists Chinna Sathan, a Central Excise employee in Coimbatore, and Bal Pandi, a villager taking care of orphaned birds at Koothankulam bird sanctuary in Tirunelveli district.
"Salim Ali once stressed on the need to study the nesting behaviour of common birds of India. The last studies were done at the beginning of the 20th century. The diary is the result of four years of field work and countless hours of observation,'' said Chinna Sathan. "The next time you walk through an estuary, look for the little ringed plover," he says.
"The nesting behaviour is instinctive for birds,'' says Bal Pandi. A young Painted Stork brought up by him instinctively began building a nest on black stone boulders above a forest guest house at Koothankulam. Initially, the little one piled thick twigs in a circular manner, then small twigs, and after that used leafy twigs as cushion. "It was a lonely five-month-old juvenile bird which automatically got into nest-building,'' he recalls.
The diary is adorned with 300 photographs, 50 sketches and unique information on the nesting behaviour of 50 birds gathered from observations in the field for four years. "If you have noticed, the juveniles of spot-billed pelicans can call with a sound resembling amma' but when they become adults they lose their voice," says Pandi, who has been taking care of orphaned birds which fall from treetops and get injured, in the sanctuary for the past twenty years.
On courtship of the rose-ringed parakeet, the authors say the cock whistles and moves little by little near the female on the branch and gives delicate kisses to the hen. "These parakeets don't believe in belligerent love. Their approach is tender and actions slow and pleasing. The cock rolls its eyes and pulls the hen aside. From that moment onwards, they search for food, fly and sit idle," Chinna Sathan says.
If you did not know, the mynah is a mimic; the kingfisher nests in clean tunnels; bee-eaters clean their feathers with the sand; black drongo can drink water from the surface of the pond while on the wings; the male Indian Robin shares the domestic duties like bringing food for the hen and the chicks; the purple sunbird has a pendant nest and the Koel is lazy to build its nest and to bring up its offspring. "I have seen twice a crow spoonfeeding a Koel chick near the Sulur big lake and near my residence,'' Sathan says.
"Though the scientific accuracy of the species-wise descriptions could not be vouched, the painstaking effort of field observation and detailed notes make the book a value addition to the growing literature on birds of India,'' says Ashsih Kothari of Kalpavriksh in his foreword. Nearly a dozen wildlife photographers have lent their pictures for the book. For more, visit www.nestingbook.webs.com.
arvind.kumar4@timesgroup.com