Parrots’ Plight: Where Are the Fruit Gardens?

 **2004**

Where are the fruit gardens, fruit trees here and there, scattered among the scrub forests dotting the countryside, berry bushes landmarking the dusty pathways?

Well, such times did exist during the childhood of our fathers! But it now sounds unbelievable. If such fruity things did exist indeed, then the parrots, those riotously coloured winged lives whose colourful endowment privileged them to lay claim upon the ripened fruit first, must have had a beautiful time.

Then there were mighty trees of majestic trunks, with nature's woodcarving artistry chiselling out crevices and holes in them, like banyan, peepal, sheesham and jaal trees. In these safe recesses, their domesticity thrived. Alas, all that is long gone!

Even during our childhood, during the eighties, we saw packs of these shrieking greenies. But all that sounds a dream now.

It is the first decade of this new high-tech century. The simple reason that I am still living in my village house enables me to sometimes see a few of them making mirthful shrieks in the branches of tall acacia trees by our boundary wall.

It's a pity that they twitter and take a long flight to eat the long, greenish, tasteless, juiceless pods of this tree, denoting hardwood, scarcity and thorns. But they eat it nonetheless.

The fact that they have chosen this particular one, for there are now numerous such acacia trees around, makes it stand as the bearer of the sweetest such fruits, if they can be called so, among their prickly foliage in and around the village, which now almost single-handedly denotes the treeline of the area.

All in all, it sounds like a sad anecdote: loss of trees, loss of birds, loss of titillating varieties to life.

A parrot eating, and that too with a decent, tolerable choice of acacia pods! It sounds like the last poor and pathetic chapter in the beautiful bird's life, at least in our part of the world.

A similar fate is shared by the national bird of India, though its hunting is banned. But below the pale of this protection, the watchtowers, the vast and distant farm fields are strewn with illegalities.

Farming is killing them as individuals rather than as a species. The crime can't be proven. No one in particular is perpetrating a crime against anything particular. When the system as a whole adopts the thing, then it becomes a subtle, nuanced way, unimpeachable.

Pesticide-driven monotony of farming finds the landscape treeless and insectless. Where will this big, colourful pageant of life find something to eat?

So the few survivors, perhaps the last of their generation, are abandoning the fear and shyness of man and entering the village like beggars to get a few crumbs of bread.

This big bird, its blue velvety neck, white-bordered eyes, a crown, a big broomful of long, exquisitely patterned feathers, now steals a few crumbs.

But where are those erotically shivering dances with its full circle of drawn-out tail feathers?

Somewhere in the isolation of a grove.