Keep the big trees and the birds will stay

These were the main characters for the time of the year when the monsoon was receding and the nip in the air came rushing in to fill the gap of the “changing season". These constituted a medley of sights and sounds that coincided with Durga Puja, which was a medley of a different kind—full of new fabric, the aroma of delicious food shared between many grasping hands and fingers and late-night song and dance in bright, temporary pandals.

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Many of these trees and grasses are still around us. So the reason I say these are memories from 1990s is because a second set of memories lines the first. In that decade, as I would approach my school building in central Delhi, I’d be able to see solemn, gargoyle-like creatures sitting on the slaty grey building. They would be so still that they looked like statues, petrified like me into going to school. I also remember them being dark, big and very particular about their perch—high buildings where they could sun themselves. The buildings were like cliff perches, and the birds were Gyps vultures, possibly White-rumped ones.

I also remember the end of the monsoon as the time when a set of cheeps would fall silent in our house. A pair of house sparrows would nest each year in a hole in the wall of our corridor, and in the cup above the ceiling fan at my grandparent’s place. Through the hottest months of the year (May-June), the parents would feed the ravenous, screaming chicks. We would turn down our fan speed, keenly feeling the screams of the chicks, like nails drawing blood. Around the monsoon or just after, the chicks would leave, plunging rooms and corridors into silence.

Today there is silence too, but it is hollow, not blessed. The house sparrows are long gone from our houses, and there are hardly any nests inside the buildings we call homes. There are no huge vultures perching on cliff-like buildings, even though the buildings themselves have become taller and more prosperous. Those who remember childhood with food or places rather than animals and plants are already experiencing generational amnesia. They might find it hard to miss something if they don’t recall it being there in the first place.

Yet one bird that still makes it through the 1990s to the present like living, connective tissue is the Grey hornbill. The Grey hornbill is a long-lashed, ash-grey hornbill with a sweet tooth for fruits and figs. Like other hornbills it likes big, old trees to sit on or feed from, making it explicit that only living wood of a certain vintage will do. I first saw them in the 1990s, when I was just learning about birds. A hornbill couple was sitting on a bakain tree, tossing the round, hard fruit into the air and then popping them into their mouth. The throw and the head catch seemed both stylish and playful—like watching a thoroughbred stallion toss its grand head or a dolphin leap through water just because it could. Then I saw one of the birds tuck fruit into its huge casque to feed the other. (This is practice for mating and breeding strategy—the male hornbill seals the female in a hole in a tree and feeds her, and by extension their chick, through an opening in the sealed nest. For a time then, the entire family thus depends on the male for survival.) The calls of these big birds rang shockingly loud and unerringly primeval—it was like watching dinosaurs claim the tree, the soundscape, and the sky. I rushed to tell my parents I had seen large birds with large beaks, unlike any I had seen before. They nodded placatingly because my series of facts sounded fictional. As I have observed dozens of hornbills through the years since, I am struck by the dualities they embody. Though they love fruit, they also pick up chicks of other birds to feed on. They make noisy, low flights but their outstretched wings—confident and wide—give an impression of incredible stillness.

Earlier this year, a study by scientists at the National University of Singapore found that the Oriental pied hornbills demonstrate “object permanence" which is comparable to the cognition of apes. This means they remember objects (and their associations with them) even if they can’t see them. It may explain how the male feeds the female though he can’t technically see her.

The study confirmed what we had already guessed—hornbills are both impressive and intelligent. Yet at this point, I feel we shouldn’t need justification for why we need hornbills. Their presence—a connection to years past, and a time of lesser environmental degradation—is enough. If cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata still have hornbills, it is because we have large, old trees. The key to keeping these birds is thus to keep the trees. Foreign palms and flowering frangipanis are not the way forward, pretty and pliable though they might be. For the hornbills, we need the large, messy trees—the banyans, the peepals, the semals. Other species of hornbills that prefer only forests are sensitive to deforestation of large trees, road-widening projects and land use change.

For a pair of large birds, even a single tree can be very important. Each spring I go and inspect a neem which has a hole in its trunk in a city park. It’s a favoured nesting place for hornbills. A few summers ago, I watched an interesting fight for apartment space. The hornbills were trying to occupy the hole, but were being fended off by a pair of noisy Rose-ringed parakeets. The parakeets would charge with wing-flapping shrieks, both sound and fury. When both pairs of birds would fly off to the next tree to nurse their wounds, a third pair—this time of Common Mynas—would get into the hole.

We might have a lot of trees, but we also need the right kinds of trees. And while the antics of hornbills might not seem much to do with us, the fact that they still live amongst us shows us that one can find unexpected life in otherwise sterile and polluted urban spaces. This is a living reminder that cities carry generational histories—not just of that particular place, but of the landscape they are nestled in, and the tapestries of contiguous forests that have now become single threads.

This year, I saw the hornbill, the shiuli and the saccharum. As I wait for the saptaparni to flower, I hope we can expand spaces for wild birds, and related memories that become fainter each day—of the little sparrow and the gigantic vulture, of houses with cheeps and buildings with living gargoyles.

Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and author of Wild And Wilful: Tales Of 15 Iconic Indian Species.

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