The Pied Bushchat
I first met her on Christmas Day a few years ago. In the late winter afternoon I was looking for birds in a large field in Purbachol. I found her perched on the very top of an Akond shrub. I couldn’t recognize her from a distance and, intrigued, came closer. Her underpart was cream coloured and she was brown on the top. Her wings had brown stripes and three dots near each shoulder. She was hardly larger than a sparrow. I photographed her, came closer and photographed her again.
She didn’t seem to mind me, and, standing on one foot, seemed preoccupied with other things. Occasionally she dived to the ground, then returned to perch.
When I came too close, she flew off reluctantly, retaking her perch when I had backed off. Once she landed near my foot and - craning her neck - scolded me until I moved away.
I returned the next afternoon, a cooler day, to look for her. She had moved to a new location about ten feet from the Akond, on the top of an old dry bamboo erected for the fence of a vegetable patch in the middle of the field. She was puffed up like a ball in the cold and it took me some time to recognize her.
It was the time of year when many birds are around but she held her perch and did not share her territory. Shrikes and bulbuls came by and tried to land but she ferociously buzzed them, forcing them to keep their distance. She made short forays into the vegetable patch or dived into the grass, often emerging with a small insect in her mouth which she swallowed by the time she had resumed her perch.
That night, I sent a photo of the bird to my birding friend Shahadat who identified it as a female Pied Bushchat. Females of many birds are harder to identify because they appear drab and lack the distinctive colours of the males. The male Pied Bushchat, for example, is black with some white on top. I had seen it before and would have recognized it instantly.
Pied Bushchats are flycatchers and live on insects they catch from the ground. They are found over a wide area from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. About five inches long, they are smaller than their more common cousin, the Siberian Stonechat. They nest in cavities on the ground or along riverbanks and are usually seen in open fields and scrubland. In Bangladesh they are seasonal visitors and considered somewhat uncommon.
A fascinating fact about Pied Bushchats is that they differ in appearance and colour in different islands such as Sulawesi, Flores and New Guinea. About sixteen races (subspecies) of the bird are recognized today.
I returned several times to the same spot at the same time in January to photograph her. Then, one day, she was gone. Perhaps she had found a mate and they had built a nest to raise a family. Maybe she had left for another year. Who knows?
And the field where I found her? Today, it is the intersection of two roads.
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