A Trogon and a Frogmouth in Amboli

Amboli is a village that lies in the Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra’s Western Ghats. On a zoomed in map of South India, you’ll find it at that trisection of Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka. Its language, Malvani, is a dialect of Konkani that has loanwords from Marathi and a few from Kannada. For those familiar with coastal Karnataka food though, Malvani cuisine will show a stronger influence of the state here. You’ll eat sukkas, neer dosas, kokum and plenty of coconut even though the porous laterite rocks and cashew trees would have you believe you’re in Goa. But I was here for the bird life. Located at the centre of the Western Ghats, Amboli has birds that are found only in the South or North of the range.

The other reason I was here was for trying out my stepdad’s cameras and lenses. Ever since he died, I’d been meaning to try them, if only to figure out if wildlife photography is for me. So I took a camera and lens that I had recently serviced. I was testing the focus and zoom where I was staying and when I tried to delete the first photo I took, the camera said it couldn’t delete the photo because it hadn’t stored it in the first place. Shit. I panicked, opened the port where the SD card goes, and of course, it was empty. I was trying to delete the photo because despite my best efforts, the bird I had focussed on was blurred. At first I thought it was because I had to figure out how zooming in happens with these lenses. Then a couple of hours later, Asif, the leader of our expedition looked at my 70-200mm Nikon lens and said that that’s a great lens – for elephant photography. Everyone else had a 180-600mm lens since we were here for birds and I’d left that one at home. Smriti - the driving force behind getting me started on photography and finding a place to service my camera - was amused and disappointed in equal measure. Worse still, my camera was the only one without a strap so I couldn’t hang it around my neck. I had to rest it on my binoculars making them redundant. Soon my left wrist started hurting under the weight of holding up the contraption and my bird photography began with an albatross around my neck. So that’s what I decided to name my camera.

In these parts, I was told that instead of Bhaiyya or Anna you say Kaka or Dada. Neither of these words rolled of my tongue with ease to refer to a stranger like Bhaiyya or Anna did. So on the first day when I had to ask our driver a question I began with,”uhh KakaDada KakaDada….” Sounding more like one of the birds I’d come to see than a human. As everyone in the car guffawed I buried my face in my hands. Then things were simplified for me. Mahadev Bhise, our host, was the Kaka around these parts. I could call everyone else Dada.

Kaka, a moustachioed man in his fifities, turned out to be resourceful and he arranged for an SD card for me from a friend. He was, as he described it, ‘into reptiles’ and although it was still early summer, he was waiting for the monsoon when snakes, frogs and lizards are everywhere in Amboli. We were sitting in his restaurant and he waved a hand and said all this - the tables, chairs and your clothes - are wet all the time in those months, but people get used to it. Not me, I thought. I hate everything being wet around me all the time and rainy days are my biggest challenge on treks. My comfort zone is the dry and pleasant weather of Bangalore so I couldn’t help noticing the nostalgic smile and anticipation with which Kaka was describing my hell. That’s when his job as a guide begins so he had arranged two other guides for us while he came along just in case some reptiles showed up off season. One of them was Bhagyashree who was doing her PHD and had helped write two books on the birds of Amboli. The other was Praveen, a young man with a pencil thin moustache and a ready smile who had grown up in these parts. He had lost his old job during the pandemic so he had taken up work as a full-time bird guide.

On the second day, after a session of birding, we stopped in a clearing surrounded by dense forest where we ate our breakfast of Idlis. This was an early breakfast so while appreciating the Malvani style coconut chutney, we heard a number of bird calls. Halfway through our meal, Praveen said that he had heard the Malabar Trogon and we would go in to look for it. When I heard that, I wolfed down the idli on my plate and ditched the idea of seconds. The Trogon had been on my wish list since my earliest birding years as a kid in school. I had seen a picture of it in my first bird book by Salim Ali that my stepdad – then family friend – had given me. The male had a black head, purple eyes and beak, and a white band on its torso that marked the beginning of a vermillion body with long tail feathers. The dimorphic female’s camouflage colours were not dull either. She did have a brown head but she shared the male’s purple features. The rest of her body was in shades of yellow. All Trogons have dramatic colours but from the distribution details I knew that the Malabar Trogon was the only one found in peninsular India and my only chance of seeing one. But Trogons are shy birds that prefer dense forests and although I had been to Nagarahole, Bandipur and K Gudi where they are found, I had never seen one.

So when Praveen mentioned we’d go looking for it, I thought that seeing one would make the trip worth it even if it ended up being our only sighting. As soon as breakfast was done, he led ten of us in single file down into the valley. Praveen walked in the general direction from which the call had come. He’d stop, listen, and continue walking. Every now and then one of us would whisper, “Sunai de raha hai kya?: Can you hear it?” He’d nod his head - his silence an indictment of our inability to shut up - and continue walking. After a while he stopped at a clearing, raised his hand demanding silence, and waited. And then we heard it. Five loud, high-pitched and evenly spaced-out bursts. Think of that first note of the Koel in summer ending abruptly as though it was sick of the heat. Praveen looked at us, smiled and nodded. We were close. Then, as I peered into the direction of the call through my binoculars while holding Albatross in my other hand, I heard the call on my shoulder. Startled I whirled around and saw that Praveen was mimicking the call. I couldn’t tell the difference. He got everything right, the pitch, the number of bursts as well as the spacing between them.

At this distance, the game began. The Trogon would call and Praveen would answer. We were being incorrigible so Praveen mimed at us with a finger over his lips ordering us not to make a sound. This time we obeyed and the silence that followed as everyone stood still became uncanny. Sure enough, the Trogon’s call started getting louder. It had found the responses interesting and was coming to take a look. Every time it called, I turned around to the others and mimed my disbelief. Smriti mimed back with a mock encouraging nod which meant, “we get it, relax”. Suddenly there was a flash of yellow and despite the warning to maintain silence, some of us gasped. So it was a female. But just as soon as she had revealed herself, she disappeared into the canopy. This was the mating season and she was probably looking for a partner. We followed in pursuit and Praveen kept up his call. She stopped a couple of times, allowing us to see her a bit better at a distance but then she flew away for good. The game was up. She had seen humans and wouldn’t come back, Praveen said. I couldn’t help feeling that we may have disoriented if not scarred the poor Trogon a bit. Instead of the resplendent male she was expecting, she got us, a bunch of bumbling humans with heavy contraptions crashing through the foliage in single file like a hydra in pursuit.

We trudged back to the spot where we’d had our breakfast. I lay down under a tree exhausted and tried to nap for a bit. Meanwhile Praveen had gone back into the forest. We’d rested there for half an hour watching a pair of giant squirrels when he came back and said he’d spotted a Frogmouth and we were going back in to see it. From the pictures in my Salim Ali book, it was evident that the Frogmouth was one of the most unique looking birds. Actually if I’m being honest, unique is a bit of a euphemism; If you had to use an adjectives to describe it, ugly would fit. But somehow cute would too. It was called the Ceylon Frogmouth because it was first identified there. When the Lankans gained independence, they decolonised the bird too for good measure and it became the Sri Lanka Frogmouth. But it is found in India too, in the dense forests across the Western Ghats. Its name tells you what its bill looks like but its power lies in how the rest of its body is crafted. Frogmouths are rarely seen because they are nocturnal creatures. And as I was to soon find out, when they rest during the day, they become invisible.

Once we had descended down the valley again, Praveen stopped in front of a thicket that had branches with dried leaves. With a wry smile he announced a challenge. He said that the Frogmouth is on this tree two meters in front of us and he drew an outline in the air just above our eye level. It sits within this space, find it, he said. We were a bit startled. As a rule, birds and birders are not used to being in such close proximity to each other so when he said that, we were worried that if we put a foot wrong, it would bolt. So we began craning our necks and bending this way and that, no doubt looking ridiculous like kids trying to imitate Michael Jackson’s moves to spot a bird that was apparently a few feet away from us. Thankfully Praveen put a hasty end to this performance and said its ok, you can take steps, it won’t fly. The mystery deepened. What kind of bird won’t fly away? While that intensified our search, no one succeeded. When we gave up, he did the honours. He even used a pointer that Smriti had carried but it still took explanations from those who understood its form to explain it to others. You know how people say once you see it you can’t unsee it? Yeah, this wasn’t like that. Even though the Frogmouth hadn’t moved, a few seconds after Asif had shown it to me, I had lost it. All this, even though it was perched only a few feet away from us in clear view.

With its light brown shades we could tell this was a male. The Frogmouth is one of the few species I can think of where the female is more colourful. He had raised his head at an angle as though he was looking at the sun and refused to move a muscle. He looked like he was meditating with his nose in the air, refusing to acknowledge the humans around him. But I could see that his eyes were open, taking in our every move. All thought of the strict silence we had maintained with the Trogon was forgotten and Praveen gave us a free reign to chat and bumble around. We took turns to get close to him and take our photos. I got so close that even Albatross was no longer useless and I took some snaps. Its wings, with white flecks on it, were indistinguishable from dried leaves with powdery mildew on them. Stoically maintaining this pose when we were so close must have taken courage on the Frogmouth’s part, I thought. It isn’t enough that his body was crafted for this foliage; what wraps the whole act together is absolute stillness. But I was wondering how close is too close? At what point does its brain, already stressed, finally change tack and switch from fright to flight? It felt like I could just reach out and grab his frog-beak in a rude reality check.

Kaka gave Praveen a thump of appreciation on his back for spotting the elusive creature and I asked him how on earth had he managed it? He said that Frogmouths are very picky and that’s their undoing. They have favourite trees. This tree is one of them and a pair live here but despite knowing that, it took me 15 minutes to spot him. We left him there on his favourite tree, no doubt feeling satisfied with his performance.

Over the next couple of days Praveen was able to spot species we hadn’t seen before. He was either aware of their favourite trees or spaces but even so, his spotting skills left us incredulous, as though he was the director of a play who had placed them there. I asked him whether his learning started as a kid growing up in these parts, watching and observing them. He said he had observed them as a kid but his learning only began when birders started coming to Amboli. He would accompany them to make sure they didn’t lose their way. They taught him. He smiled and rattled off the Trogon’s scientific name, Harpactes Fasciatus. The Latin name reminded me of one of those silly Roman centurions in the Asterix comics pronounced in a Malvani accent so I chuckled and nodded approvingly.

The Frogmouth