Prinia, prancing…

Prinia, prancing… that’s my mumble on spotting this busy bee of a bird, flitting impatiently across bushes with the tail moving in a rather autonomous manner, like a music conductor’s baton waving furiously to navigate a busy section of the symphony… well adapted to the chaos that is urbanity, its dismissiveness to the idea of hiding from human presence is quite heart-warming, this daring bordering on foolhardiness…

These passerines are live wires, small packages forever bubbling with energy… tchup, tchup, tchup or zeet-zeet-zeet or tee-tee-tee, their calls as hurried as their movements… swaying on the bushes one instant and ferreting out insects from the ground the next, washing them down with some nectar afterwards… forever on the run… even the nest seems to be put together in haste, a rather flimsy assemblage of leaves and grass, quite strange considering that the eggs are quite colourful and the chicks are born altricial — underdeveloped and helpless requiring a fair amount of parenting, maybe a factor that makes them monogamous… then there’s that sound it makes while flying, the origins of which still remain to be confirmed, lending an air of a mystery to an otherwise familiar and ubiquitous fauna…

I was out chasing butterflies on a warm March afternoon as the birds went about their chores… one Prinia took to exploring every nook and corner of a lantana bush, weaving its song around leaves dry and green, dropping to the ground every now and then to flick a bug or two, all the while refusing to drop that grumpy look off its face… it weighs around 10 grams and lives to around 10 years, I chewed at the thought while waiting for a clear frame, watching these restive dispositions animate their small patch of habitat on an otherwise sultry day…

Musing on an Ashy prinia, Haldwani, Uttarakhand, India