A page from my diary

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.