On the trail of an ornithologist

Once, when he was all of 10, Salim Ali wantonly shot down a sparrow in the jungles of Chembur. He was puzzled on discovering it had a yellow streak in its throat. He carried the bird home, but even his uncle Amiruddin, the resident expert on birds, could not identify it. With a letter asking for help, Salim reached the office of the Bombay Natural History Society to meet the secretary, Walter Millard.

The affable Walter instantly identified the bird as the Yellow-throated Sparrow, and then took the boy to the museum cupboards where he opened drawer after drawer to show him a few hundred specimens of birds found in the Indian subcontinent.

And this sparked off a fire in Salim Ali that burned for over 80 years, and threw light on birds from the Himalayas to Kanyakumari.

I am only one of the legion of bird-lovers he hooked with his descriptions. The call of a Malabar Whistling Thrush was like the ‘whistling of an idle schoolboy who’s happy to have bunked school’. The shy Malabar Trogon was ‘a bird so conscious of the bright colours on its front that when you approach it to photograph it, it would instantly turn away, and show you its dull, boring back’. His autobiography, The Fall of a Sparrow, which he wrote at the age of 80, is an expression of his love for birds.  

Even at the age of 88, three years before his death, he travelled by a naval ship to the Andamans and stayed on an uninhabited island alone watching birds for six days and six nights, till the ship came back for him.  

Thattekkad in Kerala
In one of his sojourns into the South, Salim Ali discovered the bounty of birdlife in Thattekkad and it was at his behest that it was declared a sanctuary in 1983. Set in the middle of a dense forest formed between two tributaries of the Periyar river, we were welcomed by a wide repertoire of bird sounds. Climbing two flights of wooden stairs, we reached the Tree Top House that was to be our forest home for the next few days.

We set out birdwatching in the late afternoon. There were 270 birds to spot, and we managed to identify 75 in two hours. Some of them we saw; but most of we only heard. As Salim Ali said: ‘Learn to identify a bird by its call. Because, first you hear it, and then you see it. And many a time, you don’t even see it.’

The next day was our tryst with the Ceylon Frogmouth, a rare bird that’s endemic to the Western Ghats. No guide can guarantee a sighting, but Maani assured us that he would show us not one, but three of these rare birds. He took us to a patch of forest where all the plants had dried up leaves. Amidst them were these three birds, so perfectly camouflaged that only Maani’s eagle eye could have spotted them. Being nocturnal birds they couldn’t see in the daylight, and they were staring at us without seeing us. It was a threesome: father, mother and baby.

Chorao in Goa
Floating in the backwaters of the Mandovi and Mapusa rivers are four beautiful islands: Chorao, Divar, Jua and Cumbarjua.
Situated in the mangroves of Chorao is perhaps the smallest bird sanctuary in India: the Dr Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary, measuring just 2 sq km. As we took the ferry from Ribandar, we could see the sanctuary across the river and it looked like any other mangrove forest. But it’s truly a panoramic forest. At every turn the forestscape was different. The place abounds in resident wetland birds like plovers, herons, sea gulls, sandpipers and kingfishers. Many migratory birds like pin-tail ducks and ruddy shelducks make this their winter home.

But the plastic garbage at the side of the pathway would have saddened Ali, who believed that we haven’t inherited this planet from our parents, but have merely borrowed it from our children.