Chronicle of a bird foretold

Tragedy struck yesterday at 4 pm, as I had long suspected it would.

The bulbul in my garden - whose song kept me enthralled for days - had found himself a mate and built a little nest, only to have the eggs destroyed yesterday afternoon.

I’m not a sentimentalist, not even an animal lover, but it’s hard to remain indifferent when you watch the courtship of a bird so closely, and then see violence done to it in your own garden.

I knew something had happened when I heard the little birds shrieking. I looked out of the window to see the two bulbuls in a frenzy, their feathers all ruffled and fluffed, frantically crying out while a greater coucal, that big sinister bird, was hopping about inside the zai bush where they have a nest. Slowly it slid out from among the leaves and flapped away, no doubt after having eaten whatever was in the nest. In a dog eat dog world, why should it be surprising that birds prey on each other?

The wailing bulbuls fluttered about the bush for a while. Then they perched on the horizontal rope that holds the madhavi-lata creeper, looking about them in a shocked kind of way, not making a sound. Perhaps it was grief.

I have not seen them since.

But the death was foretold in a harsh jungle law that says almost every baby garden bird must be killed, while eighty percent of adult garden birds must perish in their first or second year of life, long before their normal lifespan of four to fourteen years is over. A house sparrow can live up to 13 years, but almost never does. Who has ever seen a doddering old bird?

Large birds and sea birds tend to live longer. The sea eagle will often live twenty years. While the albatross, at 37, holds the record for the longest living bird.

Aristotle said that man is a rational being because he can calculate. Apparently, arithmetic in ancient Greece was impossibly difficult. Perhaps the birds are fortunate that they can’t count their dead. Their grief must be short-lived.

Funnily enough, birds in captivity are known to live to a ripe old age. A common Australian parrot who lived in a zoo died at eighty.

But does the caged bird sing?

And given a choice, would a bird rather be free and dead before its time? Or caged and alive?

Who can say. It’s something even we humans might ponder if we had such a choice.