Home alone with Indian pitta
WHENEVER sighted, it is almost always a solitary avian presence but full of verve and utterly true to his two appellations: “Dawn and dusk” and “Six o’ clock” bird! Now take a goodly Easter egg, insert two thin but very sturdy sticks of the length of the egg on its base, stand it upright and you have the perfect likeness of the charming Indian pitta!
In Martin Woodcock’s words, the Indian pitta is “one of the most beautiful birds in India… not especially shy and can readily be watched hopping about in gardens where there is plenty of cover.”
And that is what we witnessed played out for a full 16 days in our backyard. Though the prefix Indian signifies that of the 40 pitta species in the world, he alone is endemic in India but sadly the City Beautiful is not on his favoured wandering stop-overs. So last month, when my wife spotted a lone Indian pitta striding jauntily across our forecourt in Chandigarh, it was a moment of great excitement.
Shortly, our avian friend shifted to our backyard, the ideal likeness of pitta habitat; plenty of leaf mulch sheltering heaps of favoured diet comprising earthworms and assorted insects and he felt at ease scattering leaves in search of tidbits even as we sprayed water on the plants in his close proximity, amassing ample photo-imagery to satisfy Doubting Thomases. Aasheesh Pittee, one of India’s leading ornithologists and author of the encyclopaedic 845-page bibliography Birds in Books, had from among 1,257 species of Indian birds, settled for a painting of the Indian pitta on its covers and he was simply amused that our visitor had availed 16 days of ‘home stay’.
Specific to the pitta is an endearing memory of a piece by DA Stairmund from the News Letter for Bird Watchers which we had read in the 1970s. Stairmund had been listening to the BBC’s Classical Music series when the programmer asked the listeners their choice of 10 music discs to take along should they be banished to an uninhabited island? Stairmund, who was a regular birding weekender from Mumbai to Khandala, decided to replace music with birds of choice.
And he begins with his fatal attraction for the Indian pitta thus: “This delightful bird would be my first choice. Once the bird became trusting, it would be a great joy to watch it hopping around on the ground and digging violently into the mulch for insects all the while, with leaves flying and the pitta keeping a dead-pan face.”
I for one would look out for the spectacle of the pitta in the flight-glide mode when on the middle of each spread-out primary (outer wing), prominent on display would be a perfect white moon, over black flight feathers!
