On top of having scared off the worms, the noise of the siren was an annoying distraction. Bird was listening for the tweets of other birds, tweets saying that they had found something delicious to eat. Bird mostly found food by sight and sound, and her keen senses were affected by the loud noise and the incessant barking of the neighbourhood dogs.

Sometimes, Bird wished she was like those birds that lived in rural areas, the ones that dove for food in large lakes and rivers that teemed with fish. Those country birds had such an easy life and a bucolic existence. She imagined what it would be like if she was one of those birds, like the parrots and vultures who could find food by using their olfactory senses. Bird was a smart creature (just examine her vocabulary) but there were definite limits to her ability to find food.

In the city there were minimal options. Bird’s city life involved much more hopping around on endless lawns looking for nourishment, searching for and eating insects that were attracted to lights in parking lots, flying around on the lookout for other birds who had identified a choice meal.

Like humans, Bird conjectured, her consumption, too, was directly proportional to her work. When she searched widely, paid close attention, or flew long and hard, she got what she needed. But if she decided to be lazy, there was no such thing as a free lunch! Occasionally, she would get lucky and be able to eavesdrop on messages from birds on nearby trees. That listening-in would help with procuring a juicy morsel. And every so often, she used that one strategy that large birds of prey like falcons and eagles used to locate food: watch for other circling birds to drop down suddenly!

“Hey, did you feel that vibration? That is an earthworm moving underground,” was the kind of message that she sure would have welcomed right about now. Bird was quite proud of her ability to feel that movement below the earth with her ultra-sensitive bird feet, but it was so much quicker to rush to the place where the early bird had already found a worm!

Bird had enough sense to know that she shouldn’t complain too much. She had such sharp senses compared to so many animals. Like Hummingbird, she, too, could discern ultraviolet light, which allowed her to see many different colours; even those combination colours like violet plus green or violet plus red. Hummingbirds, of course, needed this specific super sense to differentiate between different coloured flowers because of their endless desire for sugar, but even for Bird, this fourth colour cone in her eyes was useful. Her fourcone vision ability (tetrachromacy, a word she loved) showed her the lush green leaves of the trees, their hues shifting with the seasons from light to dark, from green to ochre, telling her in advance when the weather would change. She could also see the soft lavender of the sky at twilight, because her eyes could see purple, ultraviolet purple, ultraviolet green, ultraviolet yellow and ultraviolet red. The grass beneath her, too, had many vibrant shades. And most importantly, it helped her distinguish between the brown of a worm and the brown of dirt, and the green of grass and the inky green of a small frog, from a distance.

Bird felt the thrill of her unique vision. She was aware that her sight allowed her to see combinations of colours that others couldn’t even imagine. While she knew that fish and reptiles shared this gift, and even dinosaurs had once roamed the earth with similar abilities, it still filled her with a sense of wonder. Her vision was something worth singing about even with her croaky voice! She was not unique. So what? It still made her feel important.

Bird was hungry and getting a bit grumpy. These days, despite where she lived, it was becoming more and more difficult to find prey. She had had to settle for soggy crumbs for more than one or two meals recently. All the noise of gardeners and their mowing machines and leaf blowers, the banging and sawing of house construction and loud turbo-charged cars didn’t help. In the past few weeks, Bird had seen and heard two noisy fire trucks in the neighbourhood as well. The first time, the red truck was driving fast with lights flashing but no sirens, and it disappeared, turning the corner, almost as soon as she saw it. The second time, the fire truck was full of light and made a lot of sound and created so much drama. The truck was accompanied by police cars and ambulances. Something BIG had happened. Was it an accident or a house fire? Bird did not want to be part of the commotion, but she had rushed to check out the affected area after the trucks left. She had not found anything out of the ordinary. City life was certainly not peaceful!

Bird imagined herself as a flying fire engine sometimes. She would be the one to swoop and rescue and be hailed as a hero. “I’m in a hurry, please don’t block me,” she would call out shrilly to other birds in flight. “Can’t you see I’m on a rescue mission!” And, of course, in this imagined narrative, while on her job in a new unexplored neighbourhood, she would have the opportunity to fly and scope out the perfect landscape. She would spot bird feeders brimming with feed, bushes full of luscious berries or a cleared patch of dirt teeming with worms. Food shortage would be a problem of the past!

But alas, she was not Super Bird or Flying Fire Truck. She was only Bird, and her growing hunger was making her cranky.

Excerpted with permission from Bird/Dog, Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan and Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan, Perky Parrot/Niyogi Books.

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