Country notebook:m.krishnan

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

"........For the Roller is a sedentary bird at other times,respectable,even gentlemanly in a lazy sort of way.All day long it sits on some exposed perch,drab,squat and inert,indifferent to the blazing sun and breeze that ruffles its plumage.I have seen a Roller knocked off its balance and post by a gust of wind, pick itself up in air and resume its seat in the open in the most off-hand manner.

From time to time it comes out with a deep chortle (not a specially refined sound,but guttural enough to have tonal strength), but nothing breaks its bore,slumped repose otherwise.Even when it sights some passing insect and gives chase,bursting into dazzling blues with the spread of its pinions and tail, there is nothing hurried or indignified about its movements-it flaps lazily along on board, sapphire and azure wings, like some gigantic butterfly, takes its prey casually from the air and then flaps in way back to its pole.

What is gentlemanliness,after all, but a superiority to crude emotional displays(or its affectation when others are looking) ? The Roller has it even when feeding till late in March.

Then all at once it sheds its reserve,and becomes a thing demented. Love is a powerful influence,even in the highest animals it has been known to induce a sudden, abandoned silliness.The birds ,however,whose emotonal lives are not screened by reason or self-consciousness, it often reaches its climax of expression in aerial displays and melody.There is a quickening pattern leading upto a grand finale in their courtship displays, or else an undercurrent of audible, welling fervour.

But the courting Roller goes plain crazy, abandons its perch and flies about with maniac energy and aimlessness.It scours the heavens, not in soaring circles, not in steep,acrobatic loops, but just anyhow.The broad wings lose their good-nature flapping action and beat a pathless course for the bird through the air.At times it flies high and wild, when the colours of its flights and tail grow invisible and dark against the sky.So lost are the blues in the distance, so unlike its lubberly self is it on the wing now, that one who has not seen an ardent Roller before could mistake it for some other bird.

And not cntent with this exhibition of incoherent flight, the Roller sings-all the time it is flying-an incredibly hoarse voice, but usually it is discreetly laconic.In March ,however,it sings as it flies, and its song is even more pointless than its flight, but fortunately confined to a single note, a long-drawn, grating shout.

It climbs into the sky and dives recklessly earthwards, singing its harsh song unceasingly-on a stii day you can hear the courting Roller from half-a-mile away, and the increase in volume of the song alone is sufficient to tell you for its headlong descent.There are many unaccomplished musicians among birds, but few with such araucous or persistent voice.However, it is voice of love, inspired by the same feeling that prompts nightingale and the lark.

Luckily, the inspiration passes.Once it mates and nests-the event varies with place and climate,but is from April to July-the Roller settles down to the business of perpetuating the species, a thing that it does with its usual sang-froid, and it has no time for giddy flights and song.Later still you find it on some pole in the sun,so staid and sober tat you would have passed the bird by but for a deep-throated chuckle."
-M.Krishnan

(This was first published on 25 March 1951 in The Sunday Statesman)