Glimpses of Indian Birds :: XI THE INDIAN ROBIN

XI THE INDIAN ROBIN

Speaking generally, the birds of India are to the feathered folk of the British Isles as wine is to water. The birds, such as the blue tits, which we looked upon in our youth as possessing gay plumage, seem to have lost some of their lustre when we again set eyes upon them after a sojourn in the East. It is not that they or we have grown older, that their feathers have lost their ancient splendour or that the rose rims to our spectacles have worn away. The explanation lies in the fact that we have for years been looking upon allied species of brighter hue. The English robin, however, is one of the few exceptions to this rule. He is in all respects superior to his Indian cousins—the Thamnobias. I mean no offence to the latter, for they are charming little birds, nevertheless they must bow to the superiority of their English brethren. The Indian robins lack the red waistcoat that gives the British bird his well-to-do, homely appearance. It is true that our Indian robins wear a patch of red feathers under the tail. But this, notwithstanding the fact that they make unceasing efforts to display it, is not adequate compensation for the lack of the red waistcoat. It is not so much what one wears as the way in which one wears things that matters. To wear brown boots with light-coloured clothes is no offence against good taste, although at one time the undergraduates at Pembroke College, Cambridge, were not allowed to wear brown boots in chapel; but to don this description of footwear simultaneously with a frock coat is a sin that is likely to be visited upon the children—I was about to say—unto the fourth generation, but in this horrid, democratic, Lloyd-Georgian age I think it would be more correct to say “unto the second generation.” Nor is this the only point of inferiority of the Indian robin. Although he is by no means a poor singer, he is not nearly so brilliant a performer as his British cousin.

Then again, the Indian robin has not the confidential manners of the English species. Often when I have been sitting in an English garden, has a robin come and perched on the arm of my chair, an example which his Indian counterpart has never shown the slightest inclination to follow. In England the robin is a semi-domesticated bird; in India, although a pair often take up their abode in the compound, robins prefer to dwell “far from the madding crowd.” If the truth must be told the Indian species love not the shady garden. The cool orchard has no attractions for them. They abhor the babbling brook. Their idea of an earthly paradise is a brick-kiln, a railway embankment, or a flat, rocky, barren, arid piece of land. Aloes and prickly pear are their favourite plants.

But enough of these odious comparisons. Let me now describe the two Indian species of Thamnobia—the black-backed robin (T. fulicata) which has possessed itself of South India and the brown-backed species (T. cambayensis) which is found all over Northern India. The cock of the former species is a glossy, jet-black bird, with a narrow white bar in his wing, and the brick-red patch under his tail which I have already had occasion to mention. The hen is sandy brown all over save for the aforesaid patch. The hen of the northern species differs in no appreciable way from her sister in the South; while the cock of the North varies only from his southern brother in having the back brown instead of black. It is my belief that the black-backed species arose as a mutation from the brown-backed form. The hen and the two cocks probably represent three stages in the evolutionary process.

I am sorry to be under the necessity of making a statement which may offend the ladies, but the fact is that among birds the cocks tend to be ahead of the hens as regards evolutionary development, they are, in a sense, superior beings. The tendency is for all birds to assume brilliant plumage, and it is fitting that this should be so, for are not birds the most exquisite ornaments of the earth? In some species both sexes have travelled equally far along the evolutionary path, and in such instances the sexes are alike. In other cases one of the sexes is one or more stages ahead of the other, and it is almost invariably the cock who leads and who is, therefore, the more beautiful. It is my belief that at one time both sexes of both species of Indian robin were coloured as the hens now are. Later, a mutation arose in the cock whereby all his plumage save the back became black, and when this mutation became fixed in the species, the cock had advanced a stage in his evolutionary progress. A still more advanced stage was reached when the whole of the plumage became black. Could we peep a thousand years into the future, it is quite likely that we should find that the northern species of Indian robin had acquired a black back.

Some may think that these statements are far-fetched. I submit that they are nothing of the kind. Not infrequently it happens that hen birds develop the plumage of the male. Again, sometimes of two closely allied species one displays marked sexual differences, while the sexes of the other are difficult to distinguish. Every one is familiar with the showy drake and the dull-coloured hen of the common mallard or wild duck of Europe (Anas boscas), and we in India are equally familiar with an allied species the spotted bill (A. poecilorhyncha), in which both sexes are dull-coloured like the female mallard. The cock mallard is a stage ahead of the hen mallard and of both sexes of the spotted bill as regards evolutionary development. A thousand years hence the male spotted-bill may have developed a coat of many colours. The foregoing will not be acceptable to the old-fashioned Darwinians, but as these cannot explain satisfactorily how it is that natural selection has given cock robin in Northern India a brown back, and a black back to his southern cousin, they are not entitled to dictate to us. The Darwin-Wallace hypothesis has been of great service to Science during the past fifty years, but zoology has now outgrown it, and sooner or later all scientific men must recognise this fact. But we have made a long digression into the arid field of science, let us hie back to our Indian robins.

Perhaps their most interesting characteristic is their fondness for queer nesting sites. There is nothing particularly remarkable about the nest itself, which varies according to its situation, from a mere pad to a neat cup composed of soft materials, such as cotton, grass, and vegetable fibres. The nursery is cosily lined, frequently with feathers. The lining almost invariably contains some human or horse hair, and often fragments of snake’s skin. In April and May of one year I came upon the following robins’ nests at Lahore: No. 1, in the disused nest of a rat-bird (Argya caudata) placed about five feet above the ground in a thorny but dense bush; No. 2, on the outer sill of a window, which was guarded by trellis-work, the meshes of which were so fine that it was with difficulty that I could insert two fingers into the nest; No. 3, in a hole in the mud wall of a deserted hut; No. 4, among the roots of a sago palm tree; No. 5, in a very dilapidated disused rat-bird’s nest; No. 6, in a hole in a railway embankment; No. 7, in a hole barely a foot from the ground in the trunk of a tree—in the same hole was a wasps’ nest; No. 8, in one of the spaces between bricks that had been stacked in order to become dried by the sun.

The above form a varied assortment of sites; but there is nothing very remarkable in any of them. Colonel Marshall records a nest built in the hole in a wall intended for the passage of a punkah rope.

At Fategarh, some years ago, a pair of robins built inside an old watering pot that had been thrown into a bush. Another pair went “one better” by nesting in the loop of an old piece of cloth that had been thrown over the branch of a tree.

Mr. J. T. Fry records in The Countryside Monthly a nest built at Jhansi in a long-haired brush used for taking down cobwebs. “The nest,” he writes, “is constructed of the fine roots of the khus-khus lined with hair into which onion peel and scraps of cast-off snake’s skin have been incorporated. The brush, when out of use, was placed against the wall at the side of the bungalow, being fixed to the end of a long bamboo. It was only in use about a fortnight before the nest was discovered.”

The above were all nests of the brown-backed robin, but the black-backed species selects equally curious nesting sites. As examples of these mention may be made of holes in railway cuttings within a few feet of the line, holes in walls, the side of a haystack, a hole in a gatepost. Dr. Blanford found the nest of this species inside the bamboo of a dhooly in the verandah of Captain Glasfurd’s house at Sironcha. Mr. J. Macpherson records a nest in an elephant’s skull lying out in his compound at Mysore.

Both sexes take part in nest construction. At the mating season cock robins are very bold and pugnacious, but these characteristics do not always save the nest from destruction, as the following incident will show.

In May, 1912, a pair of brown-backed robins elected to nest in the verandah of my bungalow at Fyzabad. The roof of the verandah is supported by longitudinal beams which rest on a series of cross-beams that project from the main wall of the house and lean at their far end on the verandah pillars. The upper surface of the cross-beams affords admirable nesting sites of which the doves and mynas take full advantage. The robins in question built their nest on one of these cross-beams. No sooner had the nursery been completed than trouble began. The first intimation I received of the existence of the nest was much swearing (if I may use that expression to denote the angry cries of a little bird) on the part of cock robin. The temperature on that day was well over 100° F. in the shade, consequently I did not open the doors of the house to ascertain the cause of the robin’s wrath. But the angry cries of the bird persisted, and I heard them repeatedly on the following day, so I braved the heat and went into the verandah to prospect and discovered that a myna was the object of the robin’s wrath.

During the following day the language of the robin abated neither in quantity nor quality; indeed, his noise began to get on my nerves. He used to perch when giving vent to his feelings, just above the heads of the chaprassis who sat in the verandah awaiting orders. These men are not usually very observant, but even they noticed and grew annoyed at the robin’s noise, and on several occasions I heard them flicking at the robin with a duster. During the early part of the fourth day there was comparative quiet in the verandah, and I thought that the robins and mynas had settled their differences. I was mistaken. The quiet proved to be the lull before the storm. This burst about 4 p.m. The uproar brought me to the window; from there I saw that the robin was hissing with rage at a myna who was peeping into the robin’s nest. Then the cock robin flew at the myna and pecked at him. The myna, although three times the size of the robin, fled and flew from the verandah, followed by the swearing robin. A couple of minutes later cock robin returned alone. He then perched on the floor of the verandah, drew himself up to his full height, like the heroine in a penny novelette (who, by the way, appears always to slouch except when she is very angry), and stood there hissing with rage. This continued until a chaprassi, who was squatting in the verandah, drove the angry bird away. The next morning I found lying on the floor of the verandah the wreck of the robins’ nest, and noticed that a myna was constructing a nest on the site recently occupied by that of the robin.

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