The Grey Tit

Next, I would like to discuss about the Grey Tit (Parus major cinereus). This bird struck me as a rather industrious one, consumed in its own activites and almost overtly oblivious to its surroundings. Perhaps, I always happened to see it when it was in such a mood. Busily foraging and gathering its food from one branch to the other, it seemed to be going about its business with some purposeful intent. It is not that the other birds aren't so, but this bird never seemed to waste even a glance on unnecessary details and events happening around it. Even now when I see this bird, like the one I saw this morning with sleepy eyes, it looks consistently busy, checking and picking things on and between the branches and twigs with its short, straight and pointed beak. It has a neat beak, something like what a small kid would draw in his drawing book for a bird's beak. With this beak the Grey tit normally feeds on insects and their eggs as also on small seeds and nut kernels. The strong short beak helps it to crack hard nuts and seeds. It is around the size of a sparrow, in fact slightly larger, I felt. This bird is coloured in patterns of black and white on grey and it is from this that the bird also derives its common name, the Grey tit.

When I tried to read some on this bird, I realised that this bird has been extensively studied since a long time. There is a more popular variant of this tit, known as the Great tit, which occurs all across Europe. The Great tit shows very good adaptability to the human presence, and also great adaptability in general, and has therefore apparently led to and aided a lot of research.

The grey tits, on the other hand, predominantly occur in Asia. They are believed to forage mostly in pairs through the winters and then summer is their normal breeding season. They communicate in pleasant twitters (yes, I know...it occured to me too).

And now to the photographing part of it. Grey tits, despite their busy continuous bustling, have given me some good frames to capture. They keep frequenting the branches near my house. I have also photographed one (the third one below) at the chowk near the Akurdi-Nigdi Pradhikaran dumping grounds, where I used to wait for my morning office bus. It sure makes for a lovely subject to capture in a photograph.




-Vindy

Scaly breasted munia

Scaly breasted munia was one of the birds that caught my attention when I came to Talegaon. It was monsoon and in the open space that my window overlooked, tall grass and weeds had grown aplenty. Amidst the swinging greens, I saw two brownish specks busily pecking away at things. I wasn't familiar to that kind of birds. I clicked a few snaps and sat down to correlate what I had seen with one of the bird illustrations in a book. The scaly pattern over their breast and the finch like beak were prominent pointers, apart from their colour.They were munias. And how apt their entire name was, Scaly breasted munia!

For a bird, their existence near the ground for prolonged periods appeared surprising to me. From some literature, I came to know that they feed on the grass seeds and insects near the ground and prefer building nests in low bushes. That explained their behaviour. When they weren't busy eating near the grass, they would fly up to the branches and perch calmly. Their sound to me felt like a milder version of the sparrow's sound and also less regular. When in the winter, the grass all dried up and later cleared away, the munias weren't there to be seen near our house for a long time. The monsoon came and the grass grew back and there they were again with their clan! While I wasn't satisfied with their photos captured during the first monsoon, they came out slightly better in the second season. Here are a couple of them.

Although munia appeared more like a finch to me, I saw that it doesn't belong to the conventional family of finches. The baya weaver, the sparrow and the munia, all belong to the same family, Ploceidae.

-Vindy