Mumbai’s tiny dancer: The white-spotted fantail
It seems fitting to begin the New Year, a leap year at that, with a song and dance. And what better way to do that than through the white-spotted fantail, Mumbai’s ultimate pirouetting birdie!
It doesn’t even need bottled spirits to get ‘high’. Why, it’s even called nachan (dancer) in Marathi, because this super-animated little bundle of feathers is always in song-and-dance mode.
It has been said that were it not for birds, insects would rule the earth. This may sound fanciful, but there is much truth to it.
A huge number of the two-legged birds thrive on the six-legged empire of insects, and the family of featherfolk that simply annihilates the insect fraternity has earned the name of Flycatcher a bit of a quandary, one it’s not even responsible for. Until fairly recently, it had the addendum ‘flycatcher’ tacked on to its English name. With much recent turbulence in the field of bird taxonomy, several birds and bird families have been placed into newer families, and so the fantail has lost its ‘flycatcher’ tag.
But this zippy, snappy, adventurous and at times overconfident danseur cares not what category humans place it in. It does what flycatchers do, and does it right in our midst.
The word ‘still’ is not in this bird’s dictionary. Watch it and you will see it flit endlessly through the leafy boughs or tangled foliage of the mango, jackfruit, tamarind and other dense trees it is partial to.
Like a ballet dancer the bird twitches this way and that, trying every posture and step, now dropping its wings, then jerking its head. And every few moves is punctuated by the fanning of its longish tail, which opens and closes, in seeming flirtation with everything around it Never was
All this dancing and tail-fanning helps disturb tiny insects. Suddenly the fantail launches a mad-dash of an aerial sally, and even here there is daredevilry evident. You can hear the faint snap as a tiny winged insect is snatched up; no winged thing is too tiny. I have even seen this bird flit on white-spotted fantail is a regular on my porch and has even charged right into my living room.
There’s more. Every few minutes, the bird bursts into song, a rich and rambling mix of whistles with a surprising human quality. This song can end as abruptly as it may begin slate-brown above, white below; its defining features are its white throat and white-spotted, ash-grey breast band. The very similar looking white-browed fantail is sometimes seen in the region too, mostly on the edges of forest areas, but it has a longer, broader white supercilium and a blackish ash-grey breast.
In a metropolitan region where many species of small bird are on the retreat, losing out to ‘development’, crows, cats and so on, the fantail is a survivor, a fighter, an invader even. To me it is an evolutionary marvel of sorts. Like the silky smooth crow of Mumbai, the fantail is learning to live life in our fast lane.
During pre-dawn walk down bylanes in Bandra, Juhu, Colaba, Malabar Hill, Lokhandwala and Orlem, I cannot but be captivated by this carefree character’s aptitude for survival. While it loves leafy corners and age-old trees, the bird has also discovered a larder in Mumbai’s mangroves. It is one of the few birds that can teach the notorious Mumbai crow a lesson or two and even takes on the cats.
Just outside my home, one plucky bird lost its tail to a feline, but even that didn’t keep it from pirouetting.
(Sunjoy Monga is a naturalist, photographer, and
the author of over a dozen