Echoes of the Shikra, the tiny bird with a lion’s heart

I heard them for the first time on the day lockdowns began. As the world around me went silent, I had the time and the mindspace to listen to bird notes. The call of the Shikra can be quite dramatic if you hear it in silent woods. The loud ‘Kekey keee’ almost echoes off the tree stumps and shakes the dew off the leaves. The Shikra is a small bird of prey, one of the smallest, but with a big heart and a lot of courage, as I was to discover through the six months I spent on our farm during the lockdowns. A female Shikra is a little smaller than a house crow, but built like a warrior. Her back is rusty grey, and her belly is barred in rufous bands. Her eyes are golden yellow, the same colour as her legs. Among raptors, the females are larger than the males. A male Shikra is smaller and has a steel-grey back and barring similar to the female, but his eyes are blood red, almost demonic.

Lockdowns were hard, even on a farm. My family and I were fortunate to be on a farm and hence able to wander outside the house a little. The real stress was not about being locked inside, but the anxiety of not knowing what would happen. I spent the first day thinking about it and wondering how to keep myself occupied. And just then, the Shikra answered my question.

I heard their call coming from a Dalbergia tree that stood not far from our balcony. I had seen lots of Shikras over the years, but this call felt different. When I peered closely, I realised why: a female was sitting in a nest built with a ragtag bunch of sticks where two branches stuck out of the main trunk. The moment I saw her, I knew she was sitting on eggs. The call I heard was the male calling from a nearby tree. He had brought a freshly killed garden lizard. The female responded to his call and left the nest to eat the food he had brought. He passed the bloodied carcass to her on the nearby Neem tree and flew to the nest. At first, I thought he would take a turn incubating the eggs, but no — he just peeped in, made sure all was okay, and flew away. The female tore the flesh from the lizard’s carcass until nothing was left — not even claws, skin, or scales. That was when I knew I wanted to know everything about the Shikra pair.

Shikras are very successful birds across the Indian subcontinent. They are found everywhere — from gardens in urban centres like Delhi and Bengaluru to rural countryside, and even open forests. They don’t occur in the very deep rainforests, the high mountains, or the driest deserts, but other than that, they can be found everywhere. Still, I could hardly find anything to read about a nesting pair of Shikras.

I started watching the nest for a few hours every day. Covid-19 spread across the country, and my thoughts went deeper into the life of the Shikra. I believed it was not healthy to delve too much into something as grim as a global influenza pandemic.

The first ‘discovery’ I made was that the female spent over 95 per cent of her time incubating the eggs in the nest. The rest she spent eating the food the male brought for her. It was a finding that made me uncomfortable. I did not want to talk about it with my others on the farm. It would only reinforce the stereotypes about the place of females in society.

The male was a good hunter. He brought a lizard, a squirrel, or a little bird every waking hour of the day. I named him Sheru. I thought that was a good name for a proficient hunter like him.

Just when I thought the Shikras were settling into a domestic life, where the female looked after the little nestlings and the male provided for them, my perception of their life changed.

A large eagle — a crested serpent eagle — made an appearance against the bright blue sky on the horizon. It was mid-morning, and the summer sun was creating upward drafts of hot air rising from the black cotton soil of the ploughed farms. This is the eagle’s forte. Like a fighter jet, this sky belonged to the eagle.

Sheru saw the eagle first. He flew to the top of a banyan tree and called his trademark ‘Kekey keee’, but this one had a different ring to it. In a split second, there was a response — a loud response from the nest. The female, a good 20 per cent larger than Sheru, rose out of the Dalbergia tree, gave a war cry of a call, flapped her wings, and blocked the sun in my eyes for a moment. Sheru followed her. The female did not wait for him; she was directly in between the eagle and the nest. Sheru joined her, and they were a team. Pound for pound, the eagle was bigger than the two of them together, and yet it chose to steer clear.

She, the Shikra, flew around for a couple of minutes and then returned to her nest to incubate the eggs while Sheru went on patrolling for longer and then headed to a wooded grove to hunt again.

An image of Shikra domesticity had taken form in my mind, and now it was broken. I felt free.

Sherni, brave like a lioness, the name seemed perfect for her.

— The writer is director of the India Programme of Snow Leopard Trust