"What do you suppose would happen if you and half-a-dozen of your cronies were to dispense with all privacy for a week and spend the time together,each hour together,awake or asleep?Well,murder could happen,anything could with no decent interval of aloneness, but this is certain:at the end of the week,if you survived it,you and your fellows have acquired an abandoned laxity of dress and conduct.Bristly chins and lose,amorphous clothes are inevitable,and your conversation would have changed to a babble.Prolong it to a fortnight and you could never change back to your fastidious selves thereafter.
This is just what happened to the White-headed Babblers.They live too much together to keep up appearances,and they care no more.Actually they are not the frowziest members of the frowzy babbler family-that distinction must go to the Jungle Babbler.But their long straggling tails,their habit of hopping along with drooping wings,their lax plumage and weak flight all proclaim their caste,and they have the most unstable and querulous voices even among the babblers.
They cheep and chuckle thinly to one another as they go rummaging about and at times their conversation takes on a hushed ans secretive tone- one could believe they were whispering and plotting,except that no one whispers in a high,weak tremelo.Then suddenly, and for no cause, they break into shrill,angry shouts and peals hysterical laughter.There is a squeaky commotion in the bush, and a string of loose-feathered, long-hopping babblers emerges: the birds whirr and sail on rounded wings to the end of the garden,where they grow suddenly casual again and turn over dead leaves in their usual, haphazard manner.
Birds are highly emotional for all their strong instincts,but usually their responses are understandable and follow a set pattern.Few of them have the giddy temperament and moral instability of these babblers,the patent weakness of wing and wits.Perhaps I do them an injustice, for recently I saw a half-fledged White-headed Babbler sensibly and coolly in the face of real danger.This little one was sitting in a tangled hibiscus bush,somehow separated from the elders, when a pair of evil-looking crows noticed it and promptly commenced a combined attack.
An infant of another kind might have panicked and rushed out to the beaks of baby-snatchers, but this one knew when, and where,it was safe.It dropped into the close tangle of the lower branches where no thick crow could follow, and stayed put in spite of determined efforts to drive it out.Then all at once,and appraised in some mysterious way, a squealing, yelling,furious mod of babblers arrived and flung themselves on the crows, who "fled precipitately".
It is true that these birds can look like an old,faded feather mop with a few old quill pens stuck on at the tail end,true that they quarrel amongst themselves and have watery eyes and lunatic,white heads,but they have virtues that are not so common these days-courage,and unity in the face of danger.Every member of the wrangling clan will fling itself headlong at the raiding hawk that has seized a protesting babbler and as a rule the rescue is effective.There is a moffusil club somewhere-I think it is the Union Club,in Madura-that has a bundle of faggots in bas-relief over its door to symbolise the unbreaking strength that comes from unity.A party of White-headed Babblers would, I think,make a more decorative and truer symbol of this sentimemt".-M.Krishnan
(This was first published on 15 July 1951 in the Sunday Statesman)
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