There
were reasons to be upset and I was. The dull foggy sunless winter afternoon
didn’t help. Maybe, I was just going through the winter afternoon blues. And like
I always do when I am down, I tried to find solace in English grammar.
A
flight of mynas – I later found out from the Net, they were pied mynas or pied
Asian starlings – were passing by. They felt sorry for me and decided to cheer
me up by settling down on the peepul tree outside my study, and chirping
noisily. They were saying many things … I could catch only one sentence. They
were asking me to take out my camera.
Wikipedia
says: “This myna is strikingly marked in black and white and has a yellowish bill
with a reddish bill base. The bare skin around the eye is reddish. The upper
body, throat and breast are black while the cheek, lores, wing coverts and rump
are contrastingly white. The sexes are similar in plumage but young birds have
dark brown in place of black. The subspecies vary slightly in
plumage, extent of streaking of the feathers and in measurements.”
And
this is what they looked like in the dull light.
