Birds of different feathers

How often we take for granted the wonders of nature that lie on our doorstep — or in our gardens, our balconies or indeed the skies above us!

We see it all. We may even gasp at the sight of something unusual or unusually lovely — but soon we accept it matter-of-factly and we don’t wax lyrical about it!

When my closest friend in school and my sibling left for another continent within a few years of each other, we were constantly in touch and letters flew back and forth. Thus, I had a pretty good idea of their daily routine and their food habits and their studies and work and I knew what changes these had undergone, given the new pressures of life in a different culture altogether.

My parents visited them, and they returned with all kinds of tales and details and descriptions of the flora and fauna of the continent-country that had wended its way southward when Pangaea broke up.

Decades flew by and they were many meetings between us. It became customary for us to share our ideas on relationships, careers, cuisines, and everything else that was a part of our lives — but we didn’t realise that there was something that everyone had failed to mention.

It was only when I travelled to Australia myself that I realised that there had been a gap in all the stories I had heard until then — because no one had ever told me about the splendour of the beautiful birds that were part of the Australian landscape!

Even though I had grown accustomed to the grandeur of the magnificent peacocks strutting around our residential area in the morning, dancing on rooftops and flying from tree to roof and back again, long tails somehow staying aloft as they did so, still — still — I could not get over the sheer variety and the brilliant colours that we saw around us in the birds of Australia.

The crimson rosella (a parrot) seemed to be the most common bird around — and soon became my favourite. With flashes of bright blue amid its crimson and red feathers to catch our attention, it hopped around everywhere on the grass, flew close to the windows, almost within arm’s reach on many occasions as if it knew it was being admired. Another common bird was the galah cockatoo, not paid much attention to by my now “native” Aussie family and friends, but drawing oohs and aahs from me as it flew past in a beautiful blend of pink and grey.

Just those two birds would have been enough to keep me engaged — but there were so many more. The white cockatoos had me open-mouthed with wonder, but were reported to be destructive and were shooed off by my friends who wanted to preserve their carefully tended fruit trees! Those crests, those beaks, those cries — how different from the mostly green parrots back home in India!

The stately emu, the shy lyre bird, the elusive kookaburra, the fierce cassowary with a look in its reminiscent of the velociraptors of Jurassic Park — there was excitement on a moment-to-moment basis during that short sojourn Down Under, and when we got back to India, we just had to close our eyes and we were back there, marvelling at those gorgeous birds of many-hued feathers.

While floods now ravage eastern Australia, earlier, in Western Australia, fires destroyed the habitat of a huge number of birds — and I wonder, will our friends and family who live there no longer have the luxury of taking the presence of such magnificent birds for granted?

Will they, like us today, miss all those beautiful creatures the way we miss the house sparrow that was once everywhere, chirping busily near us as rice was cleaned or chaff was blown off wheat?

— Cheryl Rao is a writer based in India