Sunbird the jewels in the forest

Sunbirds are tiny slender birds, feverishly active and fly so fast that it is photographer’s nightmare to get one. The above pic is that of Purple-rumped Sunbird that is no more than 10cms, the most common sunbird specie in the continent. This specie of sunbird is endemic to south Asia and usually found where there are abundant trees and shrubs. They prefer vicinity of human habitat and visit gardens and rarely seen in dense forests. As can be seen in the pic they don’t hover to forage nectar (as hummingbird or some other sunbirds), they perch and use long down-curved bills and tubular tongue adapted for these. They thus also help pollinating certain species of plants. These adorable little birds make quite a noise for its size, and are found merrily chirping most of time. I couldn’t help saying “oh come on that’s enough!!”, but the tiny bird doesn’t seem to give much damn.

While going through the Net I came across these lines from the poem ‘The Passage’ by one of the outstanding postcolonial English poet of Nigeria, indeed whole of Africa: Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo(1932–1967)

solitude invites,
a wagtail, to tell
the tangled-wood-tale;
a sunbird, to mourn
a mother on a spray.

I find these lines quite evocative. Chinua Achebe writes “For while other poets wrote good poems, Okigbo conjured up for us an amazing, haunting poetic firmament of a wild and violent beauty..”. Eliot was quite an influence on Okigbo “its casual references to German, French, Italian, Latin and Greek literatures in the original languages, its acquaintance with Bhagavad Gita, Dante, St. Augustine and the chants of Siberian shamans, its unsettling existential wit, its mastery of both expository and lyrical poetic forms, Eliot’s poetry both tranquilized the heart and stimulated Okigbo’s active emulation”. Another line I came across that I absolutely loved was

Silences are melodies
Heard in retrospect

These lines below reminded me of the programs one tend to watch in wildlife channels:

Gentle hunter

his tail plays on the ground

while he crushes the skull

Beautiful death

who puts on a spotted robe

when he goes to his victim.

Playful killer

whose loving embrace

splits the antelope’s heart.

I wrote the poem Beginning (posted in the blog www.depalan.blogspot.com) yesterday morning, now as I read Okigbo I feel should dedicate the poem to him. Quite an amazing guy.

The stamp herein is of Purple throated Sunbird from Vietnam, below pic is of Purple Sunbird.