A Bird Calendar for Northern India

by Douglas Dewar

In the monsoon many tanks are so completely covered with vegetation that almost the only water visible to a person standing on the bank consists of the numerous drops that have been thrown on to the flat surfaces of the leaves, where they glisten in the sun like pearls.

Two species of jacana occur in India: the bronze-winged (Motopus indicus) and the pheasant-tailed jacana or the water-pheasant (Hydrophasianus chirurgus). They are to be found on most tanks in the well-watered parts of the United Provinces. They occur in small flocks and are often put up by sportsmen when shooting duck. They emit weird mewing cries. The bronze-winged jacana is a black bird with bronze wings. It is about the size of a pigeon, but has much longer legs. The pheasant-tailed species is a black-and-white bird. In winter the tail is short, but in May both sexes grow long pheasant-like caudal feathers which give the bird its popular name. The bronze-winged jacana does not grow these long tail feathers.

The nests of jacanas are truly wonderful structures. They are just floating pads of rushes and leaves of aquatic plants. Sometimes practically the whole of the pad is under water, so that the eggs appear to be resting on the surface of the tank. The nest of the bronze-winged species is usually larger and more massive than that of the water-pheasant. The latter's nest is sometimes so small as hardly to be able to contain the eggs—a little, shallow, circular cup of rushes and water-weeds or floating lotus leaves or tufts of water-grass. The eggs of the two species show but little similarity. Both, however, are very beautiful and remarkable. The eggs of the bronze-winged jacana have a rich brownish-bronze background, on which black lines are scribbled in inextricable confusion, so that the egg looks as though Arabic texts had been scrawled over it. This species might well be called "the Arabic writing-master." The eggs of the water-pheasant are in shape like pegtops without the peg. They are of a dark rich green-bronze colour, and devoid of any markings.

The nest of the handsome, but noisy, purple coot (Porphyrio poliocephalus) is a platform of rushes and reeds which is sometimes placed on the ground in a rice field, but is more often floating, and is then tethered to a tree or some other object. From six to ten eggs are laid. These are very beautiful objects. The ground colour is delicate pink. This is spotted and blotched with crimson; beneath these spots there are clouds of pale purple which have the appearance of lying beneath the surface of the shell.

The white-breasted water-hen (Gallinula phoenicura) is a bird that must be familiar to all. One pair, at least, is to be found in every village which boasts of a tank and a bamboo clump, no matter how small these be. The water-hen is a black bird about the size of the average bazaar fowl, with a white face, throat and breast. It carries its short tail almost erect, and under this is a patch of brick-red feathers. During most seasons of the year it is a silent bird, but from mid-May until the end of the monsoon it is exceedingly noisy, and, were it in the habit of haunting our gardens and compounds, its cries would attract as much attention as do those of the koel and the brain-fever bird. As, however, water-hens are confined to tiny hamlets situated far away from cities, many people are not acquainted with their calls, which "Eha" describes as "roars, hiccups and cackles." The nest is built in a bamboo clump or other dense thicket. The eggs are stone-coloured, with spots of brown, red and purple. The young birds, when first hatched, are covered with black down, and look like little black ducklings. They can run, swim and dive as soon as they leave the egg. Little parties of them are to be seen at the edge of most village tanks in August.

The resident ducks are all busy with their nests. The majority of them lay their eggs in July, so that in August they are occupied with their young.

The cotton-teal (Nettopus coromandelianus) usually lays its eggs in a hole in a mango or other tree. The hollow is sometimes lined with feathers and twigs. It is not very high up as a rule, from six to twelve feet above the ground being the usual level. The tree selected for the nesting site is not necessarily close to water. Thirteen or fourteen eggs seem to be the usual clutch, but as many as twenty-two have been taken from one nest. Young teal, when they emerge from the egg, can swim and walk, but they are unable to fly. No European seems to have actually observed the process whereby they get from the nest to the ground or the water. It is generally believed that the parent birds carry them. Mr. Stuart Baker writes that a very intelligent native once told him that, early one morning, before it was light, he was fishing in a tank, when he saw a bird flutter heavily into the water from a tree in front of him and some twenty paces distant. The bird returned to the tree, and again, with much beating of the wings, fluttered down to the surface of the tank; this performance was repeated again and again at intervals of some minutes. At first the native could only make out that the cause of the commotion was a bird of some kind, but after a few minutes, he, remaining crouched among the reeds and bushes, saw distinctly that it was a cotton-teal, and that each time it flopped into the water and rose again it left a gosling behind it. The young ones were carried somehow in the feet, but the parent bird seemed to find the carriage of its offspring no easy matter; it flew with difficulty, and fell into the water with considerable force.

August is the month in which some fortunate observer will one year be able to confirm or refute this story.

The comb-duck or nukta (Sarcidiornis melanotus), which looks more like a freak of some domesticated breed than one of nature's own creatures, makes, in July or August, a nest of grass and sticks in a hole in a tree or in the fork of a stout branch. Sometimes disused nests of other species are utilised. About a dozen eggs is the usual number of the clutch, but Anderson once found a nest containing no fewer than forty eggs.