Country notebook:m.krishnan

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: A change of fare- M.Krishnan :The Sunday Statesman 3-November-2013
(Sparrows Hunting Insects)

"ANY third form text will tell you why the sparrow has such a thick bill. The better to eat seed with, of course. Most finches have stout, short bills that come in very useful in getting the grain off the ripening crop and in battering people know, the bird is not born with this seed eating bill. The infant sparrow is horribly naked and helpless, just a blob of greedy, pink flesh with a wide, soft, yellow-rimmed gap for a mouth. It cannot thrive on hard seed. So its fond parent brings it grubs and insects with all appendages removed so that it might grow apace on softer and more readily ingested fare.

Many other seed-eaters, besides sparrow, also feed their young on an insectivorous diet. But sparrow and weaver-birds are, perhaps, more adventurous in their hunting when they have young than even some insect-eaters. The size of the quarry these stout-built birds will tackle then is truly astonishing. They will pounce upon fat, big grasshoppers and batter the prey to pieces till only the soft body, free of all chitin remains.

Once I watched a hen sparrow kill a large green mantis quite as long as itself. Thebird began the attack with a few sharp sideways pecks that disabled but did not immobilise the insecct; the matis flew around desperately, its hunter following every turn and twist in the air, driving in a peck at every landing, till it was no longer capable of flight. Then followed a slow process of dismemberment. The killing, from the attack to beheading, took almost 15 minutes.

When you see sparrows hunting insects you may be reasonably sure they have broods. I used to think this an infallible sign of a loud nest somewhere at hand, but am less sure now. It is about this time of the year this sparrows are most given to nesting, but for the past week I have been following activities of three sparrows hunting insects steadily and I have watched them sufficiently closely to know the fact that they have no nests or young.

These are grown birds, a cock and two hens, but all of them look first-season birds to me. Beyond a lack of fullness in the cock's black bib, and a certain uniformity in the grey-brown of the hens' plumage, I have no reason for thinking that they are not quite mature but that is feeling I get. From the morning till nightfall the haunt the open garage and the many eaves of the two houses next to the cottage where I am now. .................................................. .........#

Sparrows in this place, by the way, are rare birds. These three start their hunting with the earliest light, and are busiest in the mornings and late afternoons. One of them hangs in the air on quick-beating wings below a skein of cobweb, very much in the manner of a sunbird hovering before a flower; it clutches the skein in a foot and flies away till it is dragged clear of the roof, then just lets go (as we couldn't if we swept it aside - the web will cling to our fingers) and darts up into the cleared space for a quick peck. The bird descends to the ground with a spider in the beak, which it pecks at once and then gobbles up, before resuming its hunting. I think it is the small spiders which spin neat little tents of white across pits in the wall that the birds hunt oftenest, but I have often seen them tugging at the long, dust-laden festoons of cobweb, silvery grey against the dark paint of the roof.

Another sparrow is looking for termites. It pecks at a crust on the garage wall, hovering on quick wings an inch from sheer mortar, and then pecks up the termites that emerge. The way it goes up and down vertically, chasing a termite on the wall, displays a deftness of wing that one would not normally credit a sparrow with.

I can give no list of the insects and arachnids these birds hunt, but once I saw one of them catch some prey in the air - this was the only aerial hunting I noticed. And I have even seen them chasing the small grasshoppers on the withered grass, though I don't remember seeing one caught. It could be that living in a place where their natural food is scarce (as is shown by absence of seed-eaters here) the birds have been driven to seek strange meat, and it could be that when they are more mature they will learn to foraging far for grain, but all this does not really account for the quite remarkable adaptability that these young seed-eaters show in getting their sustenance, and their efficiency hunting fleeing quarry."
- M.Krishnan

This was first published on 15 May 1955 in The Sunday Statesman

*The beautiful sketch of a sparrow hanging in the air on quick-beating wings in hunting mode is not reproduced.
# A few lines omitted.