The Bird Crescendo

 At special times, usually in the early mornings, bird and bird sounds will suddenly come together in a rousing crescendo. Usually they aggregate around one tree or a clump of trees and chirp/screech/chirp all at the same time. If you happen to be around that area, you will suddenly see many species of birds zooming all around you, you will be in the center of that avian vortex. Your breath will catch and you will stand utterly still. It lasts for a few minutes, then one flock after an another suddenly fly away en masse to another tree. And it all disappears as quickly as it started. But you, in the middle of that maelstrom, can only blink and wonder what happened. And you feel blessed to have been part of that event, whatever it was. 

I have experienced this only twice in my life and the first time was through a glass pane. The window of my hotel room in Gangtok overlooked a giant tree and at 7am in the morning, a few thousand warblers of all kinds descended on that tree. This was in February, the tree was leafless but the birds on it made it seem alive and I could hear their sounds through the glass. I was a few feet away, but felt overwhelmed by it all- the colors, the movement, the sounds, the sameness and yet the vast differences. I desperately wanted to get my binoculars and at the same time, didn't want to move in case I missed something. So I stood transfixed and still. 

The second time was on the balcony of Vidya Bhavan Rural Inst a few weeks ago in Udaipur. I had finished a short run, washed my clothes and had climbed up the building to dry them under a gulmohar tree. And all of a sudden was surrounded by parakeets, doves, hornbills, sunbirds and ioras. It was a stunning sight- the clear cloudless blue of the sky, the bright green leaves and even brighter orange flowers of the gulmohar, the parakeet greens, the hornbill greys and the small metallic punctuation marks of the sunbirds and the eye catching yellows of the ioras. 

For me, birdwatching is like meditation. And the experience of the crescendo is as euphoric as any meditative trance.