My enchantment with birds began when I was ten years old and visited the bird markets in Jama Masjid. Entranced by the twittering, uttering creatures in cages and baskets, I came away with a bunch of budgerigars, which I looked after with the sort of devotion only a young boy could muster. I added a variety of pigeons – white, grey, brown – to my makeshift aviary and spent many happy years breeding and flying them.
However, my first proper experience of birds in the wild took place when I visited the wetlands of Bharatpur – I was fourteen or so. That experience remains etched on my mind. India is one of the world’s richest birding habitats – the country boasts nearly 1,400 species – and many of them are found in Bharatpur. The sight of tens and thousands of birds wheeling overhead, with thousands more squawking and chittering in their nests, as numberless others darkened the surfaces of lakes, ponds and other water bodies is something I have never forgotten.
In the years that followed, birds were never far away from my everyday life. I would watch white-backed vultures nesting in the silver oak trees in the garden or baya birds building their elaborate hanging nests. Parakeets, green jewels in the mild winter sun, would arrow through the air, and peafowl would wander amongst the bushes. Every so often I’d spot a grey partridge or the extraordinary grey hornbill raiding the fruit trees. At night, spotted owlets would split the dark with hair-raising screeches. Delhi was a good place to be at the time for its green cover attracted an enormous number of birds.
During my last years in school and college I didn’t have much time for birds but when I found my vocation as a wildlife enthusiast, tiger devotee and environmental conservationist in Ranthambhore in 1976, birds made a reappearance in my life.
Excerpted with permission from Winged Fire: A Celebration of Indian Birds, Valmik Thapar, Aleph Book Company.
