Papageno's Birds

 

‘Papageno, that’s my name, catching birds, that’s my game’. As Papageno introduces himself in Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’, we are invited – not to catch – but to observe the birds in our own backyard.

In the winter of 2020, for the first time in many years, I don’t have to go in to work. So, I watch the sun in its short path across the sky and I watch the birds that have chosen to winter in the field outside our home.

This land, cultivated part of the year, and flooded during the rest, has escaped the hatchet of urbanization. Here in the wintertime, as I first learned in 2020, a number of birds show up – a few dozen egrets, a handful of ducks and half a dozen cranes.

I fish out an old pair of binoculars. The ducks swim in and out of the wetland reeds. The egrets settle at the edges. The cranes are huge and when I watch them fly close, they look primitive. I imagine myself in a younger, warmer, wetter world, staring at the creatures that dominated those skies, destined to be the dinosaurs that didn’t die.

When the new year comes, and the covid cases reduce in our area, we have a few friends over. Unfortunately, they arrive after dark and everyone declines my invitation to stare at the field. Once we hear a faint chorus of bird calls and going outside, we watch the egrets flying back. In the shadows, they gleam a ghostly white.

In the rural campus where I work, I often observe the black split-tailed drongoes, calling and fluttering after dark. I am surprised – do they not rest after a long day? I fish out my copy of ‘Bird Business: Illustrated peeks into the daily lives of Indian birds’, by Rohan Chakravarty. This book desires to help the uninitiated to appreciate watching the vivid avian world. With its few lines of text and its dazzling illustration, it explains that the drongo hunts insects displaced by a fire. While it is essentially diurnal in nature, in the absence of fires, it simply hunts the insects hovering around the street lights after dark. Bravo, Drongo, adapting like a badass!

One afternoon, as I am engaged in my usual blissful occupation of staring at the field, I get a shock. The ducks have swum close to the edge of the wetland, near a bunch of reeds. A man comes up and rushes into them. The ducks flutter upward, agonizingly slow. The man catches a brown fat duck and walks away with it tucked under his arm. My heart sinks - are the birds going to be eaten one by one? There is hardly a dozen of them. But a few steps later, he raises his arms and throws the lucky duck into the sky. It flies hurriedly across to the middle of the water. All the other ducks follow. I notice that from then on, they keep well away from the edges.

It’s mid-February and I am reminded of an old refrain from my childhood book ‘Charlotte’s Web’ - ‘Summer is going, going’. The sun’s still gentle but there is a quality in the air that bites, that seems to anticipate curling up in the glare. It is the winter which is going. While these birds will not make long journeys, they don’t want to hang out in this wetland any more. A few still linger, the ducks, a few egrets - but a deserted empty look hangs over the whole. The clumps of reeds have withered and turned brown.

While the birds I had seen were not migratory, I remind myself that no matter where you live on Earth, every spring and autumn, the skies above you and the seas around you are filled with the most incredible species, zooming across the planet.  Every winter, India receives a very special visitor, the bar headed goose, flying in from the freezing lakes of Central Asia, across the Himalayas.

And then we witness another bird of passage, heard but not seen. The cuckoo begins calling, that celebrated bird of Indian literature. Its deep sweet lingering notes penetrate far into the night, beginning early in the morning and at all times of day.

I had a friend who was once haunted by a cuckoo. He used to complain that one special bird really seemed to have it in for him, disturbing both his rest and his work. He was about to move house soon, and he assumed the bird and he would part ways. In fact, at his new place, all remained quiet for a while, with just the gentle everyday sounds of the usual bird chorus. But when the spring rolled around – oh yes, that bird had followed him!

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Stephanie Hendrix, educator at the Metropolitan Opera Global Summer Camp for inspiring this blog post. In the week that the summer campers studied the 'Magic Flute', she assigned an activity titled 'Papageno's Birds', which sparked for many an enduring love both for Papageno and for the birds around us.