Birds of the Indian Hills

by Douglas Dewar

In the summer this bird is not likely to be seen below altitudes of 8000 feet above the sea-level.

TITS AT WORK

The average Himalayan house is such a ramshackle affair that it is a miracle how it holds together. The roof does not fit properly on to the walls, and in these latter there are cracks and chinks galore. Perhaps it is due to these defects that hill houses do not fall down more often than they do.

Thanks to their numerous cracks they do not offer half the resistance to a gale of wind that a well-built house would.

Be this as it may, the style of architecture that finds favour in the hills is quite a godsend to the birds, or rather to such of the feathered folk as nestle in holes. A house in the Himalayas is, from an avian point of view, a maze of nesting sites, a hotel in which unfurnished rooms are always available.

The sparrow usually monopolises these nesting sites. He is a regular dog-in-the-manger, for he keeps other birds out of the holes he himself cannot utilise. However, the sparrow is not quite ubiquitous. In most large hill stations there are more houses than he is able to monopolise.

I recently spent a couple of days in one of such, in a house situated some distance from the bazaar, a house surrounded by trees.

Two green-backed tits (Parus monticola) were busy preparing a nursery for their prospective offspring in one of the many holes presented by the building in question. This had once been a respectable bungalow, surrounded by a broad verandah. But the day came when it fell into the hands of a boarding-house keeper, and it shared the fate of all buildings to which this happens. The verandahs were enclosed and divided up by partitions, to form, in the words of the advertisement, "fine, large, airy rooms." There can be no doubt as to their airiness, but captious persons might dispute their title to the other epithets. A kachcha verandah had been thrown out with a galvanised iron roof and wooden supporting pillars. The subsequently-added roof did not fit properly on to that of the original verandah, and there was a considerable chink between the beam that supported it and the wall that enclosed the old verandah, so that the house afforded endless nesting sites. An inch-wide crack is quite large enough to admit of the passage of a tit; when this was negotiated the space between the old and the new roof afforded endless possibilities. Small wonder, then, that a pair of tits had elected to nest there.