Part 20

The cocks of all have fine voices. At his best the purple sunbird sings as sweetly as a canary. Indeed, on one occasion when I was staying at Bangalore I heard a bird singing in the verandah which I thought was a caged canary; it was only when I went to look at the canary that I discovered it to be a wild sunbird pouring forth its music from some trellis-work!

Sunbirds are always literally bubbling over with energy. They are bundles of vivacity—ever on the move. Although they eat tiny insects, they subsist chiefly on the nectar of flowers, which appears to be a most stimulating diet.

Sunbirds have long, slender, curved bills and tubular tongues, hence they are admirably equipped to secure the honey hidden away in the calyces of flowers. As the little birds insert their heads into the blossoms they get well dusted with pollen, so that, like bees and some other insects, they probably play an important part in the cross-fertilisation of flowers; but they do not hesitate to probe the sides of large flowers with their sharp bills, and thus secure the honey without bearing pollen to the stigma. It is pretty to watch the sunbirds feeding. They are as acrobatic as titmice and strike the most extraordinary attitudes in their attempts to procure honey. When there is no convenient point d’appui they hover like humming birds, on rapidly vibrating wings, and while so doing explore with their long tongues the recesses of honeyed flowers. To quote Aitken, “between whiles they skip about, slapping their sides with their tiny wings, spreading their tails like fans, and ringing out their cheery refrain. As they pass from one tree to another they traverse the air in a succession of bounds and sportive spirals.” Verily the existence of a sunbird is a happy one!

The nest of the sunbird is one of the most wonderful pieces of architecture in the world, and it is the work of the hen alone. While she is working like a Trojan, her gay young spark of a husband is drinking riotously of nectar! The nest is a hanging one, and is usually suspended from a branch of a bush or a tree, and not infrequently from the rafter of the verandah of an inhabited bungalow; sunbirds show little fear of man.

The nest is commenced by cobwebs being wound round and round the branch from which the nest will hang. Cobweb is the cement most commonly employed by birds. To this pieces of dried grass, slender twigs, fibres, roots, or other material are added and made to adhere by the addition of more cobweb.

The completed nest, which usually hangs in a most conspicuous place, often passes for a small mass of rubbish that has been pitched into a bush, and, in view of the multifarious nature of the material used by the sunbird, there is every excuse for mistaking the nursery for a ball of rubbish. Grasses, fibres, fine roots, tendrils, fragments of bark, moss, lichen, petals or sepals of flowers, in short, anything that looks old and untidy is utilised as building material.

In Birds of the Plains I mentioned the sunbirds’ nest that was literally covered with the white paper shavings that are used to pack tight the biscuits in Huntley and Palmer’s tins.

“It is curious,” writes Mr. R. M. Adam, “how fond these birds are of tacking on pieces of paper and here and there a bright-coloured feather from a paroquet or a roller on the outside of their nests. When in Agra a bird of this species built a nest on a loose piece of thatch laid in my verandah, and on the side of the nest, stuck on like a signboard, was a piece of a torn-up letter with ‘My dear Adam’ on it.”

Mr. R. W. Morgan describes a yet more extraordinary nest that was built by sunbirds in an acacia tree in front of his office at Kurnool: “It was ornamented with bits of blotting-paper, twine, and old service stamps that had been left lying about. The whole structure was most compactly bound together with cobwebs, and had a long string of caterpillar excrement wound round it. This excrement had most probably fallen on to a cobweb and had stuck to it, and the cobweb had afterwards been transported in strips to the nest.”

The completed nest is a pear-shaped structure, with an opening at one side near the top. Over the entrance hole a little porch projects, which serves to keep out the sun and rain when the nest is exposed to them.

The nest is cosily lined with silk cotton. The aperture at the side acts as a window as well as a door; the hen, who alone incubates, sits on her eggs, looking out of the little window with her chin resting comfortably on the sill.

Two eggs only are laid. The smallness of the clutch indicates that there is not a great deal of loss of life in the nest. The immunity of the sunbird is due chiefly to the inaccessibility of the nest. The latter is usually at the extreme tip of a slender branch upon which no bird of any size can obtain a foothold. When a sunbird does make a mistake and place its nest in an unsuitable place, the predaceous crows devour the young ones, as they did recently in the case of a nest built in the middle of an ingadulsis hedge in my compound at Fyzabad.

In conclusion, I should like to settle one disputed point in the economy of the purple sunbird (A. asiatica). Jerdon stated that the cock doffs his gay plumage after the breeding season and assumes a dress like that of the hen except for a purple strip running longitudinally from the chin to the abdomen.

Blanford denied this. He appears to have based his denial on the fact that cocks in full plumage are to be seen at all seasons of the year. There is no month in the year in which I have not seen a cock purple sunbird in nuptial plumage. I used, therefore, to think that Blanford was right and Jerdon wrong.

Afterwards I came across the following passage by Finn in The Birds of Calcutta: “The purple cock apparently thinks his wedding garment too expensive to be worn the whole year round; for after nesting he doffs it, and assumes female plumage, retaining only a purple streak from chin to stomach as a mark of his sex. . . . I well remember one bird which came to the museum compound after breeding to change his plumage; he kept very much to two or three trees, singing, apparently, from one particular twig, and even when in undress he kept up his song.”

Since reading the above I have watched purple sunbirds carefully, and have observed that during the months of November and December cocks in full breeding plumage are very rarely seen, although there is no lack of cocks in the eclipse plumage described by Finn.

Moreover, a purple sunbird which is being kept in an aviary in England assumes eclipse plumage for a short period each year at the beginning of winter. Thus there can be no doubt that the cock of the purple species does doff his gay plumage after the nesting season, but only for a short period. In January the majority of cocks are in breeding plumage, and, indeed, in some parts of the country nest building begins as early as February.

XXXV THE BANK MYNA

The bank myna (Acridotheres ginginianus), like the Indian corby (Corvus macrorhynchus), is a bird that has suffered neglect at the hands of those who write about the feathered folk. The reason of this neglect is obvious. Even as the house crow (Corvus splendens) overshadows the corby, so does the common myna (Acridotheres tristis) almost eclipse the bank myna. So familiar is the myna that all books on Indian birds deal very fully with him. They discourse at length upon his character and his habits, and then proceed to dismiss the bank myna with the remark that his habits are those of his cousin.

The bank myna is a myna every inch of him. He is a chip of the old block; there is no mistaking him for anything but what he is. So like to his cousin is he that when I first set eyes upon him I took him for a common myna freak. And I still believe I was not greatly mistaken. I submit that the species arose as a mutation from A. tristis.

Once upon a time a pair of common mynas must have had cause to shake their heads gravely over one or more of their youngsters who differed much from the rest of the brood. As these youngsters grew up, the differences became even more marked, they showed themselves slaty grey where they should have been rich brown, and pinkish buff where white feathers ought to have appeared, and the climax must have been reached when these weird youngsters developed crimson patches of skin at the sides of the head, instead of yellow ones. Probably, the other mynas of the locality openly expressed their disapproval of these caricatures of their species, for mynas do not keep their feelings to themselves. As likely as not they put these new-fangled creatures into Coventry, for birds are as conservative as old maids.

Thus these myna freaks were compelled to live apart, but, being strong and healthy, they throve and either paired inter se, or managed to secure mates among their normally dressed fellows. In either case, the offspring bore the stamp of their abnormal parents.

It is a curious fact, and one which throws much light on the process of evolution, that abnormalities have a very strong tendency to perpetuate themselves. Thus was brought into being a new species, and as there were in those times no ornithologists to shoot these freaks, and as they passed with credit the test prescribed by nature, the species has secured a firm footing in India. This hypothesis accounts for the comparatively restricted distribution of the bank myna. It does not occur south of the Narbada and Mahanadi Rivers, but is found all over the plains of Northern India, and ascends some way up the Himalayas. It is particularly abundant in the eastern portion of the United Provinces. In the course of a stroll through the fields at Allahabad, Lucknow, or Fyzabad, one meets with thousands of bank mynas. There seems to be evidence that this species is extending its range both eastwards and westwards; and one of these days a southerly advance may be made, so that eventually the bank myna may form an attractive addition to the birds of Madras.

This species goes about in flocks of varying numbers, after the fashion of the common myna. It comes into towns and villages, but is much less of a garden bird than its familiar cousin. It is in the fields, especially in the vicinity of rivers, that these birds occur most abundantly. They consort with all the other species of myna, for, whatever may have been thought of them when first evolved, they are now in society. King-crows (Dicrurus ater) dance attendance upon them as they do on the common mynas, for the sake of the insects put up by them as they strut through the grass. The king-crow, owing to the length of its tail and the shortness of its legs, is no pedestrian, and so is not able to beat for itself.

The books tell us that bank mynas feed on insects, grain, and fruit. I am inclined to think that their diet is confined almost exclusively to the first of these articles. I speak not as one having authority, for, in order to do this, it is necessary to shoot dozens of the birds and carefully examine the contents of their stomachs. This kind of thing I leave to the economic ornithologist. I admit that bank mynas are very partial to the fields of millet and other tall grain crops, but I am persuaded that they visit these for the insects that lurk on their spikes.

Grasshoppers are to the common myna what bread and meat are to the Englishman, the pièces de résistance of the menu. This is why mynas always affect pasture land, where it exists, and keep company with cattle, the sedate march of which causes so much consternation among the grasshoppers. Bank mynas eat grasshoppers, but seem to prefer other insects, especially those which lurk underground. Certain it is that wherever they occur they maintain a sharp look-out for the ploughman, and follow him most assiduously as he turns up the soil by means of his oxen-drawn plough. The house crows also attend this function. The other species of myna follow the plough, but not so consistently as the bank myna. The pied starling, although it does not disdain the insects cast up by the plough, seems to prefer to pick its food out of mud. One often sees a flock of these birds paddling about in shallow water, as though they were sandpipers.

It is amusing to watch a flock of bank mynas strutting along a newly turned furrow. In Upper India it is usual for two or more ploughs to work together in Indian file, a few yards separating them. The mynas like to place themselves between two ploughs, and so fearless are they that they sometimes allow themselves almost to be trodden on by the team behind them. Although the progress of the ploughing oxen is not rapid, it is too fast for the mynas, who find themselves continually dropping behind, and have every now and again to use their wings to keep pace with them. At intervals, the whole following, or a portion of it, takes to its wings and indulges in a little flight purely for the fun of the thing. The flock sometimes returns to the original plough, at others transfers its attentions to another. Thus the flocks are continually changing in number and personnel, and in this respect are very different from the companies of seven sisters. The latter appear to be definite clubs or societies, the former mere chance collections of individuals, or probably pairs of individuals.

Bank mynas are so called because they invariably nest in sandbanks, in the sides of a well, or some such locality, they themselves excavating the nest hole. Like sand martins, bank mynas breed in considerable companies, but they are not so obliging as regards the season of their nidification. They usually select sites which are not only at a distance from human habitations, but difficult of access, and, as the birds do not begin to nest until well on in May, when the weather in Upper India is too hot to be described in literary language, one does not often have a chance of seeing the birds at work. Their nesting passages do not necessarily run inwards in a straight line. The result is that neighbouring ones often communicate. At the end of the passage is a circular chamber which is lined with grass and anything else portable. Cast-off snake skin is a lining particularly sought after. Mr. Jesse informs us that from one of these nests in the bank of the Goomti, near Lucknow, he extracted parts of a Latin exercise and some arithmetic questions. The owners of the nest were not going in for higher education; it was merely a case of putting a thing to a use for which it was never intended, a feat at which both birds and Indian servants are great adepts. Notwithstanding the fact that the eggs are laid in dark places, they are blue, as are those of the other mynas. Young bank mynas lack the red skin at the side of the head, and are brown in places where the adults are black. Young mynas of all species have a rather mangy appearance. Like port wine, they improve with age.