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. Such fruity things did exist, indeed, the same parrots, those colourful 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 stature, with nature’s wondrous artistry chiselling out cavities and holes in them, like dungeons, peepal residences, jails. 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 mobile revolution that I’m still living in my village house enables me to see, sometimes, a few of them making mournful shrieks in the branches of a tall ancient tree by our boundary wall. It is a pity that they stay there and take a long flight to eat the long, greenish, tasteless, fusiform pods of this tree, denoting hardship, scarcity and thanks. But they eat it nonetheless. The fact that they have chosen this particular one, for there are no more, even such acacia trees around, makes it stand on the border 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 defiant, tolerable, chemical, 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, below the pale of this protection, the watchtowers, the vast and distant farming fields are strewn with illegalities. Farming is killing these individuals, either as a species. At the time, it cannot be taken for one particular individual; it is perpetuating the crime against anything particular. When the system is eclipsed by the thing, then it becomes a subtle, nuanced way, unwittingly. Pesticide-strewn 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 faraway villages of man and entering the village like beggars in search of a few crumbs of bread. This big bird, its size reaching the knee, its broad eyes, a crown, a big brown fan of long, exquisitely patterned feathers, now steals a few crumbs. But there are those erotically shivering dances with its full circle of dancing bent tail feathers, somewhere in the isolation of a garden.