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 August 1999

            For about a week, there was a long legged bird in the garden every morning.  It didn’t quite look like the lapwing that made our lawn its home.  It was a white breasted water hen.

            This month I saw the golden backed three-toed woodpeckers.  They have brilliant colours and move flat against the trunk of the tree.  There is also an Indian great black woodpecker that visits frequently.

            This was a treat month and I also saw a pompadour or grey fronted green pigeon on the garden on the tree directly in front of the verandah.  It stayed on the lawn for a good while too.

            The large hawk-cuckoo and the common hawk cuckoo also came into the garden for a brief spell.  The common hawk cuckoo is the brain fever bird.  Then there was this very interesting bird that looked like a bulbul.  It was the pied crested cuckoo.  The sirkeer cuckoo was also around.  At first I thought it was a tree pie.

            A very frequent visitor this month was a bird that looked like a koel, but had a greenish beak and huge blue eyes.  It took me a long time to find out that it was the small green-billed malokha.  It tends to perch in a covered fashion. But then I found that it was nesting in a tree along the right fence in the next compound, so it was easier to observe it thoroughly.

            Plenty of green bulbuls around this month.  At first I thought they were the barbets or bee-eaters.  They are the gold-mantled chloropsis or the leaf bird.  There are two varieties.  The second one is the gold-fronted chloropsis, and it is also called the leaf bird.

August 2000

          Saw the moorhens with Dileep.  Saw the golden backed woodpecker once more.  This year there are many more bee-eaters in the garden chasing the dragonflies.  I’ve been away most of the month. We had a viper in the bedroom, and it had to be killed with carbon dioxide and removed from a crevice it had crawled into.

August 2001

            This is the second half of the month.  I have been in Gujarat and Delhi for the first half. The rain has let up a little, but the sky is in shades of grey and so is the sea.  There are a lot of sunbirds out and they seem to be collecting long bits of grass and straw.  The tailor bird is out as well.  The sunbirds come into the verandah and sit on my adenium plant.  I can watch them without the binocs.

            There was a magnificent pair of Tawny Eagles on the road in the colony.  They are huge and muscular.  They are brown and have white patches on the epaulettes and under the wing.  The female was distinctly smaller than the male.  They were unafraid and continued to sit on the road even when we drove up quite close.

            A pair of doves are regulars.  They forage on the lawn and are there constantly.

August 2002

A new bird! � the green munia.  It has a scarlet �munia� beak.  It was foraging on the young flowers on the coconut tree.  A really large monitor lizard spent the afternoon on the lawn.  It was not worried by me taking photographs, or of the gardener moving around with the hose.  It was almost a metre long!

The monitor lizard spends quite a few sunny afternoons on the lawn.  The brainfever bird calls intermittently.  The peacocks can be heard and seen every morning!  It has been raining a lot so the birds tend to stay in the shelter of the woods.  But when it stops raining, the orioles, koels, malokha, doves, sunbirds, bulbuls and magpie robins all come out onto the same tree and spread their wings, one at a time, and dry them.  It is a lovely sight!

26^th August was the first day of the wintry sun � only for a bit in the morning.  Along the road towards the nursery, I saw the orange headed and whitethroated ground thrush, a clutch of bush quails and several red wattled lapwings.  I guess they stay there because it is protected from the strong sea breezes.

August 2003

I've been out of the country - so no birds here.