Ask me what are the joys associated with farming and you’re likely to be at the receiving end of a verbal volley by an otherwise taciturn individual. I can go on endlessly telling you about watching a seed spring its ears, hearing the chatter of birds come to get their share of mulberry, catching a glimpse of the long-tailed pheasant crow alighting from a tree to settle around a bush to pick an insect, glancing the early morning dew shining as pearls on the broad shoulders of a banana leaf, stepping barefoot on the moist grass on a November dawn, lying on my back on a January noon watching the clouds being chased in the cerulean skies……………..
But during my latest visit, I chanced on something which I had never witnessed before: a nest settled on a growing banana bunch. On coming across I shouted at Mangal and he told me it was a nest of a bird, called Pavsha or Common Hawk Cuckoo which frequents our mulberry trees. As the bananas mature the chicks will come out and soon fly out deserting the nest.
