Sanjay Austa

The Birds I Shot in my Orchards.

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When I was growing  up I wanted to become a hunter. I was   encouraged in my bloody endeavor by my father when he got me my cousin’s hand -me -down air-rifle. With it, I  shot a wide variety of birds that live in my  orchards and its periphery, in Himachal. An adjoining forest feeds the orchards with a panoply of Himalayan birds – some of them migratory.

The easiest to take down was the streaked laughing thrush. In fact, it was the first bird I shot as a 12- year old and after this first kill,  I tasted blood as they say in hunting parlance.  I would look forward to my holidays from my boarding school,  just so I could go to the orchards and  hunt.    Whenever I set out with the air-gun I was tailed  about by the  village boys  who not only pointed out the birds to me but served as efficient retrievers. Risking the rasping nettles and   thorns,  which tugged at their clothes and skin, they bulldozed  into  the bushes to fetch the kill.

 

The hardest to shoot was the crow. In fact, I managed to shoot only two in all. The moment I leveled my gun towards them, they would fly.  Even when I leveled a stick towards them they flew. They, among all the birds knew what the gun  could do.

The birds were shot for morbid boyish pleasure of course but there were some like the streaked laughing thrush and the oriental turtle dove, we barbequed in the jungle and ate.  The streaked laughing thrush was particularly delicious and as a bird- lover now , disconcerting though the thought is,  my mouth still waters at the memory of the flesh.

Today the thought of killing any bird repulses me. I have graduated from shooting birds with my gun  to shooting  them  with my camera- though  amateurishly.

 

Though the intentions are so divergent, one  diabolical and deadly,  the other full of empathy and love, I wonder if shooting birds  – with a rifle and now with the camera- is just a way of making a sort of connection with the birds.  A way of getting close to the bipeds and perhaps nature itself.

Perhaps that explains the reason why once ferocious hunters could so easily become some of the world’s greatest conservationists. Steve Irwin, Jim Corbett, Frederick Selous to name a few.

It was because of the gun that I woke up before sunrise without my parents prompting and ventured out into the orchard and the forest,  perking my ears to sounds of birds and soon enough learnt to revel in   the sounds of the jungle itself and its eerie  intermittent silences.

 

 

I learnt to observe the flight patters of birds as they dashed from one barbed bush to another  and  I learnt to recognize the bushes themselves and the wild berries  that grew  on them, some  so addictive that I  forgot all about the birds as I  stood  picking and  eating them till my mouth was purple.

In winters, I learnt to wait patiently at the edge of the forest in  my wellingtons in more than three feet snow for the bush babbler and the bulbul to show up. And when nothing emerged, I followed tracks in snow to the bushes.  Some of the  bushes  formed a hollow carven  with the snow weighing  down the bush to the ground.  These bush hollows had no snow and you could creep into their dryness and  use them to dislodge the snow from your boots and rest. They were also the  hedgehog’s dwelling, though no one really saw them except for their   nocturnal snow tracks  in winters.

Many years later, when I decided to shoot the birds again- this time with the camera- it was uncanny to realize  that my body language was the same. I  had the hunter’s eyes, ever watchful of any stirrings and wary of camouflage. My ears were alert  to every scratch and rustle in the bush.

And when I saw a bird, I tiptoed towards it  in that same steady single-minded way; the zoom-lensed camera held firm between my legs pointing to the ground, the way the gun would have been, and then lifting it slowing to focus and shoot.

And when the bird flew just before I pressed the shutter, as it mostly did,  I felt the familiar twinge.

But for me, most importantly, for  very  different reasons of course, the gun and the camera ensured that I ventured out into the nature and explored.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 25th, 2013 at 10:30 pm. It is filed under Thoughts/ Articles and tagged with apple orchard birds, avians in india, biped india, bird lovers paradise, bird photography, bird photos, birds, birds in the hills, birds in the orchards, birds india, hill birds, himalayan birds, photographs of birds, ratnari baghi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.