Passing long hours during holidays is the easiest thing one can do in this Internet age. At least that’s what I thought. Until a couple of years ago, my idea of a lazy holiday is to start my day with Facebook. After refreshing the home page several times, I’ll invariably stumble upon a friend’s vacation pictures, that only annoyed me even more! So, I’ll move onto YouTube to watch random, stupid videos. When that becomes boring, I’d eventually end up spending long hours in front of my laptop watching sitcoms with beer and chips till I fall asleep late in the night.
I’d wake up for lunch the next day and the cycle would repeat. Then came WhatsApp, only to ruin the least bit of social interactions I had with people. So I went in search of more interesting sitcoms, and when I found none, ended up watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S episodes for the Nth time.
Saturday evenings were a respite, when I’d get a chance to cheer for my favorite football club.Not that these evenings were the most memorable, watching the team you rooted for wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences! Fantasy Premier league only irritated me more!
In such a state, I didn’t live, but merely existed. At that lowest point of my life, came that beautiful morning, like sunshine let into darkness.
As chance would have it, I once agreed to go on a birding trip with like-minded people from around the area, nature photographers and bird-watchers, I had recently met.
Hailing from the same locale, organizing that trip was easy and in a few minutes we seemed to have bonded well. With the photographers carrying their SLRs in hand and the bird-watchers their binoculars, I took on the wheel, volunteering to be the chauffeur. Living in close proximity to nature and forests, we didn’t have to venture far in search of birds.
Within a few minutes, we reached the track along the forest boundary, our birding destination that we had identified for the day! Being my first day on field, the initial few minutes were frustrating, disappointing, annoying and I was already beginning to lament the loss of late Sunday morning in bed. While they spotted birds, named them effortlessly, and before I could even try spotting them, the birds would have flown away and more frustratingly my friends would have gotten a hundred pictures by then! I could see those beautiful, colorful birds only in the camera displays. Occasionally, if the bird sat there for long, I would only embarrass myself, failing to spot it, despite constant guidance from my friends.
As the trip proceeded, the frustration slowly transitioned into curiosity. I was interested in knowing more about the birds we spotted. There were so many of them, and I started to ponder how I never noticed birds beyond crows and mynahs, in all those days I had passed through the same roads in the past.
Curiosity then transformed into excitement once I started getting a hang of things and before I knew it, I was enjoying the trip, despite being completely ignorant of the birds that I was seeing. Apart from the birds, I thoroughly enjoyed spending time amidst nature, where my cell phone had no reception and my facebook had no connection. I was just surrounded by trees, where the wind was the only guide and the call of the bird the only companion. I felt liberated!
In a really long time, I felt Alive! My mind was alert, my eyes focused, my heart racing, in anticipation of the sights that lay ahead.
Since then, I never missed an opportunity to go on birding trips; I just tagged along, everytime my friends went into the forests. Suddenly I found myself talking about birds with random people and my friend list was growing rapidly. To add onto my new found excitement, came that unforgettable morning, a trip to Valparai in search of the magnificent Great Pied Hornbill. I had never seen one in my life before, except in pictures.
We reached the place, where it was spotted feeding the female and chick inside the nest, regularly. My friends told me, the male Hornbill is very punctual and almost never misses timing to feeding. We were 15 minutes early and the build up to the spectacle, awaiting the hornbill was thrilling, exciting and exhilarating. Then, came the moment. It was sudden, it was unreal, and it was absolutely hair-raising stuff! I least expected to see such a huge, magnificent bird that sounded, like a steam locomotive firing its engine, while in flight.
I have never looked back since then. Fired by passion but lacking direction, I use every little opportunity, to escape into the jungle, sometimes even combining work and client meetings, to find time for birding.
My knowledge on birding might have grown considerably since I began but its still nascent but the excitement only grows with every trip! There’s still a long way to go, I haven’t even learnt how to use a binocular while birding but I will cherish every trip into the forests. They’re so rich, and never disappointing, unlike the times I went on safaris in search of tigers, elephants or leopards and came back disappointed. Every minute I spend birding is new, unanticipated while at the same time pleasant and soothing in its own way.
Birding truly has liberated me. The pleasure I get out of checking birds off lists is only short-lived but the overwhelming feeling of serendipity lasts longer. I feel blessed and happy, in the lap of nature, when I get to be with a bird. Like for instance, when I stumbled upon a yellow throated bulbul recently, while looking for barbets, was a sheer surprise and the adrenalin rush never subsided for quite sometime.
Today I consider, birding happened to me as a brilliant stroke of blessing from God, to liberate me from the boring, destructive routine that I was into. Birding has also propelled my thinking to act more actively towards conservation and drives me to work and improve my skills everyday! Birding is a feeling that one ought to experience. It has inspired me to write, it has opened up blocks in my mind, it has done me a whole lot of good, more than what I could scribble here in this article! And if you’re lucky, just like me, you’ve found one of the greatest gifts, life can offer.
Here’s to more birding!
Cheers!
