“Taiga, there!”
I’ve seen a few people on my bird walks jump when I refer to a Taiga Flycatcher by its first name.
With a hat doff to William Blake, the adult male Taiga Flycatcher’s throat does burn bright in the shadowy woodland when it flits after winged insects. To ardent birders, though, it can be a more tantalising attraction than the striped feline that trophy-hunters pursue. But first, let’s demystify the name.
Taiga refers to the biome where these birds breed. Boreal forests stretch across the subarctic northern latitudes in Russia, Alaska, Scandinavia, northern Mongolia, China, and Japan. The name Taiga (a Russian word possibly of Turkic or Mongolian extraction) principally applies to this biome in northern Eurasia, specifically the aforesaid region from Eastern Russia to Siberia and Mongolia. Conifers of various kinds dominate the vegetation and cold snaps send the mercury plummeting below zero. When their food supply depletes in winter, many species of insectivorous birds that breed here migrate to the warmer southern latitudes where insect prey is plentiful.
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The Taiga Flycatcher (Ficedula albicilla) is one of these migrants. By late September until about April, it can seen in northeast India, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia. It closely resembles the Red-breasted Flycatcher (Ficedula parva), which migrates to our region from western Europe.
In our neck of the woods in Bangalore, eBird checklists begin to buzz with reported sightings of Taiga Flycatchers. Most are correctly identified, but some are mixed up with Red-breasted or Asian Brown Flycatchers. Often, wintering males retain the red throat (compared to the more extensive colouring on the chest of the Red-breasted Flycatcher) but in many cases, depending on a variety of factors including age and sex, they may not show any red on the throat. If you pay close attention to the field characteristics including the diagnostic colouration of the tail, habitat and behaviour, and calls, the two species are not too hard to tell apart in their non-breeding plumages (see this helpful BirdCount India article).
All that is hard science, but my plushie heart bids me to tell you about my brief affair with a visiting Taiga Flycatcher whose pronouns left me dazed, confused, and a little heartbroken.
Taiga, Taiga, burning bright?
Not exactly.
In winter, which is the non-breeding season for most of our long-distance winter migrants, many birds lose their ornamental plumage. They join the league of unremarkable feathered creatures that go into the file cabinet marked “LBJ” or “Little Brown Job.” So, sans red bib or wine blotch on shirtfront, the birds can be challenging to identify, more so if you’re new to birding.
During the lockdown and work-from-home phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, I made it a point to watch birds every day. My favourite hotspot was Saul Kere, a neighbourhood lake about which I have written before. A copse of River Tamarind or Subabul (Leucaena leucocephala) trees, with their pale, flaking trunks and densely matted, intertwining canopies of compound leaves and rattling seed pods, turned out to be a very interesting place to look for oddities in winter.
On one occasion, I watched an Asian Brown Flycatcher conduct an elaborate morning toilette. It was also a great place to watch Sykes’s Warblers, which hunted insects in the canopy and often sang softly to themselves, quite unusually for wintering warblers.
Taiga and I – A tryst among the Subabul
On one walk in early October 2021, a tiny brownish bird flew down from the canopy and perched at eye-level on a Subabul bough. It seemed as curious as I was. I identified it as a Taiga Flycatcher, going by the dark bill and black upper-tail coverts. We tried our best to make a good first impression on each other.
The following morning, as I explored the same stretch, I heard a soft trrk-trrrk call above my left shoulder. The little brown bird was there, perching even closer than it did the previous day. I looked around — there were no other birders with whom I could share this delightful moment. Over the next few weeks, I visited the lake regularly. And, each time, the bird and I had our little tryst. The Taiga Flycatcher would sally after insects and perch at close vantage, but often hidden in the maze of branches and obstructing a clear photograph.
I made mention of this encounter on our local birding chat group, and soon I was joined by a few other birders who hoped to take a picture of what they called my “girlfriend.” It seemed a fair assessment of the bird’s gender, for it did not have a red patch on the throat (which sets apart adult breeding males) and all the other diagnostic features applied. But Girlfriend didn’t show up for my friends.
Jilted in the woods
Throughout that week, when I was joined by other birders, I didn’t catch a glimpse of her. After one fruitless search, I parted company with my birding group and prepared to leave the lake by the northern entrance. From the Subabul grove behind me came an insistent “trrk-trrrk“.
Girlfriend again. Alone together, our eyes met. And, this time, she posed unabashedly for pictures.
Winter wore on. The bird got over her shyness. She began to perch closer as I approached. I felt a little flattered to be the object of her attention. Later that winter, though, she relaxed her exclusivity and began to show herself to other birders and photographers, too. Many gorgeous pictures of her, quite unlike the shaky, blurry ones that I had managed, began to circulate on the forums.
Jilted, I swallowed my pride. Who was I to cast aspersions on fidelity and morality in the avian world?
Winter warmed into a tepid spring. I had to take a brief sabbatical from the lake visits owing to a spate of travel. When I returned to my haunts in late March, most of the winter migrants had dressed up for the homeward journey. The Garganey were no longer a homogenous flock — the males were dapper in their wedding suits, and had paired up already with females. The same with the Northern Shovellers, with the drakes flaunting their gilded irises and shimmery, bottle-green necks. Even the Wood Sandpipers had started to show each other a little aggression as they squabbled over feeding patches, and their dowdy colours were now darker with stylish highlights and accents.
I walked by my favourite spot in the copse, hoping to catch a moment alone with Girlfriend. I paced about a few times without luck. Just as I prepared to turn back, I heard the call: Trrk trrrk!
I spun around on my heel and scanned the tangle of branches. The bird was there, but there was something different about it.
Girlfriend sallied after a mosquito and returned to perch closer to me. At first, her back was turned to me, but one more sortie later, the bird turned to face me.
Her throat was a pale, dusty red.
Embers of parting?
In that reddening of the throat, Girlfriend had a message for me. Would I still love him/her if he/she preferred to be identified as Boyfriend? The pronouns were now as tangled in my head as that Subabul grove where the Taiga Flycatcher and I had our first rendezvous.
The birder in me felt slighted and let down. What signs had I overlooked?
I gathered that wintering male flycatchers perhaps have no use for their breeding colours, which are used to signal their readiness to breed. Colours, especially shades of red, may be rather expensive for the bird in terms of the resources needed to produce them.
I jogged the dial on what I knew about avian physiology, and some additional reading confirmed my understanding. Plumage in birds is an indicator of their age, sex, and specific adaptations like camouflage. While a bird’s colours may result from specific pigments being deposited in its feathers and skin, the rich patterns and colours in many brightly coloured and patterned birds are optical illusions produced through structural colouration. Structural colours, which arise from the microscopic structure of feathers that refract and scatter light, create vibrant hues like blue and iridescent shades. This process involves the bending of light wavelengths rather than absorption, allowing certain colours to appear based on viewing angles. Breeding colours in male birds, on the other hand, may be initiated by a combination of seasonal changes, hormones, and diet.
So, it was perhaps natural even for adult male Taiga Flycatchers, while they were not breeding, to look similar to their dowdier female counterparts. Anyhow, what good is a wedding suit in the off-season?
It is entirely possible that I may have been looking at different individuals on different days, but that doesn’t add up to a romantic story, so let’s yield for a moment to our fantasy. In good faith, I couldn’t complain about what had happened between me and the bird. On the other hand, I could broaden my horizons, and make a little extra room in my mind for possibilities that went beyond obvious binaries. Amid this deluge of thoughts in my head, we bade each other adieu without regrets. By the next weekend, there were no Taiga Flycatchers at Saul Kere; they had probably flown back home for the summer.
Many winters have passed since that last tryst. Another is upon us. Just last week, as I walked among those Subabuls again, I heard a call beckoning to me.
Trrk… trrrk.
This time, I have made room in my heart. The poetry of love is gender-fluid.
- Romancing a Taiga Flycatcher in a tangle of pronouns - November 26, 2024
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