Delhi’s Secret Winter Guests: Small and Chirpy Forest Birds

When searching for orange-headed thrushes, I tend to search for water. At the right time of the year, the thrush will often be found next to a gurgling stream. Sometimes though, water can be secretive. As silent as land. To search for water then, one has to follow one’s nose. In an undisturbed forest, a stream will smell like wet earth, green, like the delicate fronds of new plants.

Closer home, water tends to smell like sewage — forgotten rubbish, clothes entangling in two-day old dal, rubbery plastic looped around the bends of the water.

I was in one such stream in Delhi NCR, looking for the orange-headed thrush. A gush of water came out of a temple, oily and grey. It spattered over old rocks, and wound slowly around the roots of trees. Most tap water comes from streams or rivers, but this “stream” at least partially came out of a tap. The backside of the temple was partially the water source. In certain angles of the light, the water looked green and blue, in others, it looked more like what it really was — a stream burdened with domestic refuse.

And amidst the grey, the orange-headed thrush landed in a flurry. As I watched the bird, the lovely, plump thing that looked like it had been coloured by a blue and orange crayon, I noticed it pecked at some of the litter in the water. Little yellow pieces of dal went down its throat in micro seconds. “So you come from the Himalayas to eat junk food?” I said aloud to the bird.

Most people think migratory birds are synonymous with wetlands and coasts. They equate them with tall cranes, honking geese and long-legged waders that come to slips of water. But a quieter, more secretive migration happens yearly too. Those of smaller birds that fly long distances to come to forests or woods; lovers of shade, undergrowth and wooded streams. If you don’t know what you are looking for, you could completely miss the forest migrants.

The Orange-headed thrush comes to North India from the Himalayas. As I watched, onthat January morning, more small birds emerged near it. First was a tiny bird that looked soil-coloured, moving constantly, like a winged seed snatched up in a breeze. When it lifted its head though, I was dazzled by colour. It had an electric blue throat with a red dot at the very centre, looking like a beating heart as the bird moved. This is the bluethroat, a flycatcher-like bird migrating to India from the Palearctic region. Occasionally, the bird holds up its tail like a fan, as pretty a migratory bird as could be. Not far from the bluethroat, another little migratory bird, the lesser whitethroat, took advantage of tiny grey insects hovering over the dirty water. Birds make do with what they can get. If the garbage attracts little insects, the birds will follow. In Guwahati, towering greater adjutantseat off municipal dumps, here the smaller warblers were drawn to insects on garbage. On a cleaner patch of rocks near the stream, the sulphur-bellied warbler, another migrant, hunted relentlessly for food. 

The area was Bhondsi, a place that once belonged to a politician and now belongs a bit more to the wild. Previously a farmhouse owned by former Prime Minister Chandrashekhar, the area is now with the Haryana Forest Department. With some parts running wild, a tiny stretch of water and damp surrounding areas — situated within the larger green belt -—migratory birds flock here each winter and summer.

That was winter of 2021. In summer, I went back. This time I was there for a different kind of migrant. This is a domestic migrant, with nine colours on its body, that comes northward from the peninsula to raise its chicks. It seems amazing that the splendid Indian pitta would leave the sylvan forests of South India to head towards the arid North, and within that latitude, still choose Delhi-NCR as a breeding site. The NCR’s ancient Aravalli mountains, gently passing through Delhi and Haryana, have witnessed much of human history. Most recently it has seen unbridled mining, conversion of forest to farmland to apartment complexes with many other proposals waiting to bite chunks of hill slope out. Next to Delhi, and almost analogous with the NCR region, this is choice real estate for builders. But importantly, it’s also real estate for the pitta. I know of two spots where the bird breeds near the din of Delhi. One is the complex, old and protected sacred grove of Mangar Bani in Haryana, the other is the woodland at Bhondsi.

Birds know all the best places. Undoubtedly the pitta must be nesting in other spots in the NCR Aravalli too. We just haven’t found them.

So on a sultry July morning, in the middle of a heatwave, I waited to see the pitta. Even at 6 am , the air was oppressive. In the winter, I had seen a tiny red-breasted flycatcher in the same spot. Sweat ran in a stream into my eyes, stinging each time I blinked. It always seems hottest (or coldest) when one is looking for a favourite bird. Two and a half hours later, I heard the pitta’s music. The call is a two-note whistle, an uplifting sound resonating through the amphitheatre of the trees.

The hot forest seemed alive, with music and anticipation. I waited some more: the sweet tenterhook wait between hearing the music, recognising the call of the bird, and waiting to actually see it. When I finally saw the pitta, it had landed gently next to a rock, hopping between a tapestry of leaf litter and fallen twigs. A nest was nearby, because it was inspecting twigs to take away. The pitta’s is a life spent on the secrets of the forest floor —where the light is almost green, and the more the ground is cluttered with layers of leaves and detritus, the more the bird has to live on. I was going to name this place — next to a mundane parking lot — Pitta Rocks.

The stream where I saw the orange-headed thrush was not too far away. I remembered the dal-eating bird, the sad smell of the water, and a grey-winged blackbird that had alighted close by. The year had started with smelling a silent stream and continued with hearing a sweet, beloved whistle. My nose wasn’t happy but my ears were delighted — arguably a summarisation of life in a wildlife-rich metropolitan area.

And this life is possible because Bhondsi and Mangar abound with old native trees — kaim, palash, peepal and dhau. The habitat is complex enough to call Himalayan and Palearctic birds, even if their streams are not clean, resilient enough to survive pollution and heat, even as they adjoin demanding, great cities. These are special places not just because they are where the urban birder can see birds. They are special because the birds return year after year, making the rocks ring with pitta music.

These little pockets are essential for tired migratory birds, precious stones in the necklace of a linked landscape.

However expedient trees and forests may seem in the city, they are necessary for many other creatures who did not sign up for urban masterplans. And as Delhi gears up for a new masterplan, it should work with the greens and blues of the entire NCR landscape.

Where our own imagination fails us in understanding which areas to protect, the pittas, thrushes and warblers show us the way.