Yesterday morning, something stopped me mid-step. A call from the mango tree, sharp and familiar, the kind that takes a moment to place when you hear it somewhere it has no business being. I have heard that call in the sal forests of Jim Corbett, in the damp understorey of Periyar. Not in a garden in Kochi.
I stood still. The call came again.
I scanned the branches slowly, not looking for a bird exactly, more letting my eye catch movement. And there it was. A small copper-coloured bird working its way along a branch, pecking at the bark, unhurried. I recognised it at once. A Rufous Woodpecker.
Micropternus brachyurus. Medium-small, around twenty-five centimetres. Almost entirely rufous brown, with fine black barring across the body. The male has a small red patch under the eye. Easy to miss unless the light is right. The female has none.
Most woodpeckers go after beetle larvae in dead wood. This one does something different. It has a thing for the carton nests of Crematogaster ants, those papery structures you see attached to trunks and branches. It excavates its nest directly inside them, raises its chicks there, feeds on the ants and their larvae. The ants appear to tolerate it. Nobody seems entirely sure why.
The bird is found across South and Southeast Asia, through the Indian subcontinent, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, parts of China and Indonesia. Within India it turns up across forested and wooded habitat, from the Himalayan foothills down through the Western Ghats. It is not rare. But it needs old trees, thick bark, branches with enough age in them to be worth investigating.
My mango tree is old. The bark is rough and furrowed. The bird spent a good ten minutes on it, moving in short hops, pausing, then striking. It did not seem bothered by me.
Skipper, my dog wandered out to investigate and sat at a respectful distance, watching with what I can only describe as professional interest.
I have been maintaining this microforest for years, planting deliberately, letting certain things grow as they will, keeping the leaf litter undisturbed. Mornings here bring a reasonable count of birds. But a Rufous Woodpecker is new. It tells me something about this small patch of urban Kochi, that it has become old enough and dense enough for a bird like this to find it worth stopping at.
I did not reach for the camera immediately. I just watched. That felt like the right thing to do.