William Wordsworth, the champion Nature poet, advises:

Let Nature be your teacher,
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Babblers preening.		White-headed Babbler. (Photographs: S. Jayasankar)

Babblers are gregarious little birds found in our scrub-jungles and wooded gardens, living an exemplary communal life. I lived with these fascinating White-headed or Yellow-billed Babblers (Turdoides affinis) for 40 years in the serene scrub-jungle campus of Madras Christian College in Tambaram. This species of babblers is endemic only to southern India and Sri Lanka. They are social birds that live and move in small flocks of 6-10 birds and, hence, they are called popularly in English the ‘Seven Sisters’, and in Hindi the Saath Bhai, the Seven Brothers.

Babblers are early risers and they go about as a team in the morning, on routine foraging trips, flying or gliding from tree to tree, within their territory. Only when they are assured of high security do they alight on the ground and hop about to rummage in the dried leaf-litter for insects and worms and share a community meal. As they move round, they keep on chirping or squeaking constantly in a kind of a gossipy social communication or bonding within the team. One or two of the team keep a watch silently from a higher branch, taking turns as sentinels or patrols. On sighting a predator, such as a cat, mongoose, snake, dog or even a human on the ground, or an overhead raptor bird, they give a shrill alarm-call, to enable all the feeding birds to fly to the nearest perching site.

Babblers love to feed symbiotically in the company of the common Five-Striped Palm Squirrels which, when they trot along a white ant-infested branch, call babblers to wait right underneath on the ground to pick up any white ants that may drop from the tables of these squirrels on the tree. Strangely, babblers and squirrels have identical alarm-calls, so that either of them noticing an intruder first warns all the others.

Babblers are used to taking a relaxed siesta in the afternoons, when they preen (groom) each other, pick body-lice, or socialise or bond in their sisterhood. Later in the afternoon, they enjoy community games, chasing each other on the ground around the base of a large tree-trunk, or engaging themselves in mock fights. Babblers can even feign death, when cornered by a predator. Finally, at the end of the day, the whole family may participate in a water-bath or mud-bath before going to an early bed.

At night, each flock roosts at a secure site, but keeps changing the site, like VIPs, for secrecy and security. While roosting, they squat crouched and huddled, side by side, one against the other, despite their sentinels keeping guard, in turns, from a higher branch on the same tree or bush.

Babblers have a uniquely altruistic communal or cooperative breeding practice, wherein two or three couples of the same team join to construct a common nest, pool together their eggs, all in one nest, incubate, feed the nestlings and also guard the nest, all in turns. The young fledglings are the common property of the sisterhood. They are taken round by the team on their foraging rounds and in field training.

Babblers are so altruistic that they may even consciously incubate the eggs of some parasitic birds like the Pied Crested Cuckoo and the Common Hawk Cuckoo, which lay their eggs stealthily in a babbler nest. Such alien eggs are also hatched, fledglings fed and taken round on their foraging rounds, along with the babbler fledglings, till the parasitic orphans voluntarily desert the foster parents.

Babblers may be shy and timid birds, but their orphaned fledglings can be reared, domestically, or they get so used to foster human parents as to beg for food and to follow them in and out of the house. Even if the hand-reared fledglings join their biological parent flock ultimately, they would still continue to visit a foster parent’s garden on routine foraging rounds, to have water- or mud-baths and even roost in the yard every night.

As Wordsworth rightly advises us:

What else on social behaviour can even any sage preach or practise.

More profoundly than these lowly babblers in nature can?

– P.J. Sanjeeva Raj
rajsanjeeva@gmail.com