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There is a time in the year when birds seem to be everywhere at once. They call loudly from the trees early in the morning. They fly back and forth carrying bits of grass, string and twigs in their beaks. They chase each other around the branches.
This is their nesting season. During these weeks the birds are doing four big jobs:
That is a great deal of work for a creature that weighs less than a small apple. No wonder the chapter is called A Busy Month!
You do not need to go to a forest. Birds nest in the tree outside your window, on a ledge, under a roof, in a hole in a wall, even in an old flowerpot. Look up when you walk to school and you will begin to notice them.
Birds have very sharp eyes and ears. If you run towards a bird, it will fly away long before you reach it. So a bird watcher learns to do the opposite of what feels natural.
When you see a bird, try to notice these things before it flies away:
Write it down at once. Our memory changes what we saw, but a note written on the spot does not.
The tailor bird is a small greenish bird with a reddish head and a tail that it often holds straight up. It gets its name from the way it makes its nest - it really does stitch.
Because the leaves are still alive and still green, the nest looks exactly like the rest of the plant. A cat or a crow looking for eggs will pass right by it. The bird has hidden its home by making it out of the plant itself.
The weaver bird, called baya in many parts of India, is a small yellow-and-brown bird. It builds one of the most beautiful nests in the world, and it hangs.
A nest hanging from a thin branch, often over water, is very hard for a snake, a cat or a monkey to reach. The long entrance tube makes it harder still. The bird has built its safety into the shape of its home.
The male builds the nest first and the female comes to inspect it. If she does not like it, he must build another one!
You have heard the koel calling loudly in summer - ku-oo, ku-oo. The male koel is shiny black with red eyes; the female is brown with white spots.
The koel is famous for something surprising: it does not build a nest at all.
Is the koel being clever, or unfair? Nature does not ask that question - but you can. Notice that the koel has saved itself all the work of building and feeding, while the crow does double work without knowing it.
Once you start looking, you will find that no two kinds of birds build the same nest.
Never touch a nest, and never take an egg. If you disturb a nest, the parent birds may leave it forever and the eggs or chicks will die. Look with your eyes, not with your hands.
A bird has no hands. Its beak is its hand, its spoon, its knife and its needle. So the shape of the beak tells you what the bird eats.
Next time you see a bird, look at its beak first and guess its food. Then watch and see if you were right. This is exactly how scientists work: guess, then check.
Only birds have feathers. They do three jobs at once:
Have you seen a bird pulling at its own feathers with its beak? It is not hurting itself. It is preening - cleaning each feather, putting it back in place and spreading oil on it. A bird that does not preen cannot fly well.
If you find a feather on the ground, pick it up and look closely. You will see it is made of many tiny threads that hook together like a zip. Pull them apart gently and smooth them back - they join up again.
Inside the nest the mother bird lays her eggs. Different birds lay different numbers - a dove may lay two, a sparrow four or five.
Eggs come in many colours and patterns: plain white, pale blue, greenish, or speckled with brown. Birds that nest on open ground usually have speckled eggs, so that they look like stones and stay hidden.
The parent bird sits on the eggs to keep them warm. This is called incubation. In many birds the mother and father take turns, so that the other one can go and eat.
After some days the chick breaks the shell from inside with a tiny hard point on its beak, and comes out. Most newly hatched chicks are:
They open their mouths wide whenever a parent lands, and the parents fly back and forth from morning till evening bringing insects. This is the hardest work of the whole busy month. In a few weeks the chicks grow feathers, and one day they hop to the edge of the nest and fly.
Close your eyes in a garden and just listen. You will hear far more birds than you can see.
Birds call for many reasons:
Try writing down what a call sounds like in your own words - the koel's ku-oo, the crow's kaanv, the sparrow's chi-chi. Once you know two or three calls, you will start recognising birds without seeing them at all.
Notice also that a bird's alarm call is different from its ordinary call. When crows suddenly all shout together, look around - there is usually a cat or an owl nearby.
Dr Salim Ali is known as the Birdman of India. When he was a boy, he shot a sparrow with an air gun and noticed that it had a strange yellow patch on its throat, unlike any sparrow he had seen. He took it to a museum to ask what it was.
That one question changed his whole life. He began watching birds and never stopped.
Salim Ali had no special equipment when he began. He had only patience, sharp eyes, and a notebook. That is all you need too. He showed that anyone who looks carefully and writes honestly can become a scientist.
Take a notebook and draw four columns. Every time you see a bird, fill in one line.
After a few weeks, read your diary from the beginning. You will start to see patterns - which bird comes at what time, which one appears only after rain, which tree they all visit when it is in flower. Nobody told you these things. You found them out yourself.
Birds do a great deal for us without being asked. They eat insects that damage crops, they carry pollen from flower to flower, and they spread seeds so that new trees grow.
When we cut all the old trees and leave no bushes, the birds have nowhere to nest, and slowly they disappear from that place. A garden with no birds is a very quiet and empty garden.
The nesting season is only one part of a bird's year. At other times you will see different things.
Some birds do not stay in one place all year. They fly long distances to a different country when the season changes, and come back later. These are called migratory birds.
Every winter, birds from far away arrive at lakes and wetlands in India, stay for a few months where it is warm and food is easy to find, and fly back when summer comes. Some of them travel thousands of kilometres, over mountains and seas, and find their way back to the very same lake year after year.
If you keep your bird diary for a whole year, you will notice birds you never saw in the busy month - because they were not here. Watching does not end when the nesting season does.