Birds

Birds flying in the sky are always fascinating and young boys like me then was always attracted to birds. We always imagine ourselves to be eagles that could fly high up freely above the sky and see the whole world!

If you are staying not in big cities, birds become part of our life especially morning and in the afternoon. They perched on trees, electric power cable and telephone lines, fences, bushes etc. and sometimes even venture into the pens of chicken and ducks for a free feeding. The calls of these birds amongst the roosting of the cockerels made a typical day in a village life!

Breaking the dawn in the village would always be the noisy yellow vented Bulbur and the loud call of the Oriole, noon time would be the Tailer birds making the "Beep Beep" sound in the bushes and jumping on the branches and fence. Afternoon and evening time would be the occasional distant calls from the doves! Sometimes it was a mingle of all the callings of these birds together at no specific time of the day!


Villages are normally planted with a good variety of fruit trees and these vegetations are the favorite feeding venues and natural habitat for them. They also pick on the more bushy trees near houses to build their nests and raise their youngs. We called these birds by special names which are nomenclatures specific to the village community there. Yellow vented Bulbur (White headed grandma), Oriole (Yellow bird), Tailor bird (Small Doubit), Mynah (Ngat Cheng Cheng or Cow Dung bird), house sparrows (Mahjong bird), Spotted dove (Boku) and Zebra dove (Fire bird) can be sighted commonly in the village.

My grandma who worked as a cook in mining company used to keep spotted dove in cages and I started to learn from her the way to keep these spotted birds in captivity and feed them. Spotted birds used to  build nests on the Rambutan trees that surrounded our house. As young boys, we heard the sounds or noise of the young birds, climbed up the trees, caught them and brought them home and then fed them using a piece of cloth wrapped up a kind of seeds that could be bought from Indian sundry shop on the other side of the village, just behind the police station! Spotted doves are very good birds for keeping, and when they grow, they shed their feathers and put on a new coat of shiny, smooth and attractive bright colored feathers. And the male bird would recognize and greet me whenever I returned home from school by raising its head up and down and making the "Ku Ku" sound and thus the name " Boku" I believe!

When I grew a little bit older at secondary school age, my brother KM Lee and I were more aware of the cruelty of keeping birds in captivity and we had stopped all activities of keeping birds in cages of any form. We even put on barbed wires on tree trunks to prevent our neighbors from climbing and catching young birds on the trees near our house!

Birds are creatures of God for our pleasure to listen to their calls and enjoy watching them. Going through life all these years imparted us a special feeling towards these birds that had accompanied us a good portion of our childhood days in our life.  Thinking of how we humans treasure our own freedom and that in return giving us even a stronger desire to see these birds flying freely in the sky without worry being hunted down or kept in captivity. How we wish we could be like them, flying freely and happily, finding their food, raising their youngs, growing old together and be part of God's wonderful creation plan!