Birding from a Balcony in Goa

Birding Goan style, for me, means planting myself at a vantage point (here, a balcony that overlooks a pool, a garden, trees, and a good expanse of sky) and keeping track of all the avian comings and goings during the day. I’ve been doing this consistently for years, and some of the revelations have been quite remarkable.

One summer, I was awoken at around 5 am by a magpie robin singing its heart out from one of the terraces in the complex I lived in. Three low-rise buildings were arranged in a U overlooking a blue swimming pool. Oh God, I thought. Would it be too rude to put a pillow over my head? I was supposed to be a birder, and here was a tuxedoed maestro performing for me first thing in the morning. So much for sleeping in! Of course, the maestro was actually singing for his girlfriend and warning other bozos to stay away from the area.

The next morning, the fellow was at it again — but mercifully, he stopped after 5-10 minutes. Great. But then, another magpie robin began performing from a nearby stage and sang an even more complex melody. Our maestro had competition, I thought. We have a jugalbandi on now! And then, on the third morning, I heard a third artiste adding to the repertoire.

I was slightly puzzled because searching the garden revealed only a single magpie robin couple. The matter faded away until I read in a book on bird song that some canny males sing different songs from within the same larger territory, pretending to be different males, thus ensuring no outsider dare pose a challenge. The outsider could fight perhaps one adversary but not two or three. And, by doing so, our maestro was ensuring he was lording over an area much larger than he might otherwise have — a lush garden stuffed with insects and a pool to boot. Which lady robin could resist that?

The other thing I soon figured out was that, like us, birds have a pretty routine life. Before dawn, I usually hear what I suspect is a pair of scops owls duetting among the trees, until the resident white-throated kingfisher starts off like an old-fashioned alarm clock. Smiling all over his face, this guy occasionally dips in the pool — and has been doing so for years. As the sky lightens, small parties of little cormorants scissor north, followed by croaking egrets and night herons, which fly somewhat like big fruit bats. A team of fluting black drongoes arrives and toss themselves into the sky like notes of music. Troupes of green bee-eaters do a skating ballet every evening, trilling musically. The resident pair of black-rumped flamebacks (nee golden-backed woodpeckers) arrive with their ringing laugh and clamp themselves onto the lighthouse-like palm tree at the end of the garden. They scuttle up and down it, snaffling up insects, occasionally peeking around the trunk with bright eyes before taking off, leaving another ringing cackle in their wake.

From amidst the bushes, crow pheasants call echoingly, “coup-coup-coup”, while treepies mix dulcet tones with harsh throaty calls. For some reason, the koels here seem in a perpetual tizzy. It’s winter, yet they are dashing about from one end of the garden to the other, both the slick, silky black gents (with their effete waists) and their bark-camouflaged partners, calling manically to one another. The crows get pretty rattled.

The top of the mango tree at the far end of the garden is a favourite perch for parties of plum-headed parakeets that rocket across whistling “tooi-tooi” like mischievous schoolboys. Here, they far outnumber the rose-ringed parakeets as well as the Alexandrines. Other birds use this vantage point too — red-whiskered bulbuls and barbets, whose “kutroo-kutroo” calls travel far and wide.

Every three or four days, the harsh, succinct “chrr!” of the paradise flycatcher puts you on full alert. Both males and females occasionally grace the property, whizzing from tree to tree, sometimes taking a very quick dip in the pool.

There are surprises too. On one occasion, a friend pointed out a lovely mushroom and alabaster barn owl meditating on a window sill like a yogi in a cave. It meditated there for two days before vanishing.

But there are absentees that have begun to worry me. In the earlier years, the purple-rumped sunbirds, scintillating in green, crimson, purple and yellow, were par for the course: I haven’t seen them in recent visits.

As for raptors, Brahminy kites wheel in huge circles, calling peevishly to each other and occasionally pausing to rest on the lighthouse palm. In russet and white, they are handsome birds but call like petulant children. The shikra may make a sudden silent appearance, panicking the smaller birds like the scaly-breasted munia. (One munia couple seemed to be nesting in a potted plant on an adjacent balcony, and the shikra seemed to have got wind of it.)

Of course, you can’t loll in an armchair all day, so there are beach trips. In winter, there are little solemn flocks of wide-eyed, biscuit-beige sand plovers, which are migrants, darting about on the rocks and scuttling across the sand, deftly picking up invisible crabs. Occasionally, they are kept company by sandpipers, wagging their tails in appreciation. On the rocks, grey reef herons mince haughtily, picking up crabs with all the finesse of socialites picking canapes off a tray with a toothpick.

On one memorable occasion, I glanced up from the sand (while looking for hermit crabs) to find a gigantic pearl-grey and white, white-bellied sea eagle take off from the beach not fifty metres away. It flew directly overhead as it gained height; with fishing nets laid out on the sand, it was planning to snaffle up the bycatch. On another occasion at the same beach, I saw it perched on one of the clifftop trees; it’s probably a long-time resident here.

The birds of Goa seem to live pretty sorted, settled lives and get on with their day in just the same way as most of us do!