Bird watching with Sálim Ali

Our nocturnal friends, the pygmy owlets and shriek owls, are alas, fewer now than when we moved in first two decades ago

Our terrace penthouse adjoins a lovely small public park with many tall trees and some water bodies. The summer heat was on us until a month ago and the cuckoo-shrike’s early morning call used to wake us up. It was “a rising crescendo of coo-hoo coohoos, followed by cooroo-cooroos as a signing off.” He often sat on a rusty shield-bearer, flicking his feathers like “a nervous gentleman tugging at his tie, an action rendering identification easy at a distance.” These vintage observations are from the ten-volume masterwork Birds of India and Pakistan by Sálim Ali and S Dillon Ripley (as