‘A forest or lake may have a mind of its own’: A new book explores trees and birds for children

Every year, at the end of March, I love walking around Chennai and beyond as the trees come into bloom. The golden showers, its flowers – small yellow waterfalls – full of stingless bees and tiny insects; the coral tree and its bloodclot red blossoms into which sunbirds somehow can fully vanish; the butterfly orchid tree, silk cotton, Indian beech and indigo – each calling to their pollinator friends – “I am ready, come to me. Drink from me and help me make seeds.” Of these I seek out the palash in particular – a tree I have spent a lot of time with during my high-school years at a campus called Pathashaala, in the Palar river’s basin.

The path to the school was a small road with a lake’s bund to one side and paddy fields on the other. Much of the palash’s heartwood was carved out by insects and weather, and the tree was mostly hollow – you could step into and out of its trunk.

When it rained, streamlets from its branches collected into its empty girth and flowed down the bund, furrowing the mud. It was a wonder to me how the tree managed to keep alive its wide crown with its trunk being mostly hollow. In its shade and across the road were dozens of palash saplings of various heights. Some were even young trees at a blooming age, and all were their children. For a portion of the road, I had gotten used to the familiar rustle of the flat, wide, brittle leaves of these palashes. It wasn’t like the thick gurgling of a neem tree, nor was it like the torrential sound of a banyan. The sound of the palash was like a crowd of paper hands applauding or like the rustle of open books under the fan. I imagine the wood wide web under the tree – an internet of communication and kinship underground made of wires of fungal filaments – a phenomenon discovered by forest ecologist Suzanne Simard.

This was clearly a “mother tree” – one of the trees in the landscape considerably making, feeding and holding this web together. I can imagine its wide roots beneath the road in contact with those of all its children. Maybe many years ago, it nourished them, sending down all the surplus nutrition it made in its leaves. Now as it ages and its trunk withers from inside, surely, it is in its offspring’s care, which are holding on to it and supplying what it needs to keep alive.

In March, the terminal tips of all its branches would shed all their leaves and would sag with buds. And, suddenly, one morning, they’d all come into bloom – from brown to bright orange, dripping and bleeding with magmatic flowers. The road and bund below would be carpeted. The canopies of the smaller trees around would be topped. Its flowers would bob all along the shores of the Vallipuram Lake, whose edge it stood by. Palash flowers have five petals: one is like a placard held upright, calling out to others; two enclose its carpels, stamens and nectaries, and the fourth petal sticks out like a folded tongue, serving as the landing site for its large pollinator friends.

The palash tree has a specific and intimate relationship with the rosy starling, a migratory mynah in India. They hang out in larger gangs than our common mynahs but have a smaller vocal repertoire, preferring to call in bubbly gargling most of the time. They merge with the leaves of a canopy or a bush and take off almost like wind-blown foliage. Sometimes, they can seem like a full canopy when they sit on a leafless or dead tree.

Rosy starlings are late migrants into the southern reaches of the country, and it is only by mid or late December that I first see little troops trickling in. They travel here from Central Asia during winter. During this time, around Chennai and surrounding districts, many farmers would have ploughed their fields and sowed the Navarai crop (the paddy to be harvested in summer). But much of the agricultural land in dry and semi-dry areas is fallow, overgrown with ban tulsi, tephrosia, countless grasses and little shrubs. These untilled fields are where you will find the starlings for most of the day. The flocks will descend steeply from above, swerve parallelly to the ground and, in a flicker, abruptly vanish into the low vegetation.

A second ago, there would have been a crowd of nosediving shapes striving to slow down their momenta, seemingly a moment too late, and in the moment after, they would have all submerged into the shrubbery as if it were water, with no thuds or squeals. The plants don’t twitch with their activity. I imagine them moving on mute feet, carefully stalking insects hiding by the stems, under leaves and in the soil cracks. Here and there, a starling jumps above the vegetation and lands back in. And then, one can tell they are running behind and trying to catch the insects they have flushed. When they decide to, they all take off in a single explosion, as if two hundred of them were a single organism.

During a few dusks over the lake and the palash trees, I have seen these birds murmurate. A murmuration is an impossible phenomenon to describe. Hundreds of birds spiralling and snaking in the sky, a cloud of black masses clustering, stretching, folding and evolving in abstract ways. I have seen a whale, a hook, a boomerang and some other vague resemblances that my mind strives to identify with something of its own world. They do it unpredictably and suddenly, one day, as if for no reason, as if just to paint the sky. Watching them I’ve been convinced that a mind, an intelligence can exist across a bird flock moving as one, not just within close-fitting skulls, feathers and flesh.

How then does one explain starlings and the shapes of their murmurations? How then does one explain a whole flock, dispersed across an overgrown pasture, spontaneously taking off together? How also does one explain the settling of the entire flock, all together, in the afternoon on a flowering palash or at dusk on the same leafless tree, as if all were of one mind? Then, perhaps, a forest or a lake may have a mind of its own. A star cluster may have a mind. Perhaps we don’t know or cannot know how to perceive this.

Rosy starlings also remind me of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring. In the last chapter titled “The Other Road”, like a lamp of hope at the very end of a deeply disquieting and illumining book, she writes about using nature’s principles for our means to grow, to feed and to coexist with the rest of life as opposed to butting heads with the intelligence of something as old as time – whether it be flooding our food crops with poisons or be it among the countless other practices our contemporary ways of life demand – which has made every stratum of the biosphere less fit for life.

Rosy starlings could be a mascot for such living through a story they are known for in Xinjiang. This is an agricultural district in China where these starlings naturally bred every summer. The croplands here were perpetually under the scourge of locusts and grasshoppers, and these phytophagous insects seemed to quickly develop a facile resistance to the expensive quantities of insecticides used on them. It took one sharp observation by a local to discover that rosy starlings primarily fed on these very insects when they foraged the fields. The farmers set up artificial nests around their farms to invite the birds to breed nearby, and it is reported that in a few years, the locust populations fell so low that insecticide use was practically stopped.

Trees have personalities, have you noticed? Some trees behave differently when alone and when in a group of their own company. Mango growers have told me this. Mango trees planted alone succumb more quickly to beetle and fungal attacks than those growing in an orchard full of kin. A banyan, on the other hand, likes to be a loner and is likely to not let another grow too close by. Their aerial roots can attach to other trunks, parasitize them and finish them off over time. Quite often, an infant banyan reaches adolescence by choking a palmyra tree – a very common choice of host given that its trunk is full of crevices – and over many years, swallows it into its trunk and replaces it. Other trees are not as antisocial. A row of five pride-of-India trees, all of similar age and height, at the parking lot of the school I work in now simply never flower together as one might expect them to. One begins, and the other catches up in a week or more.

Then the other, and the other; one is growing seeds while another is still flowering.

But see the tabebuias and golden showers; how they flower in such unison, all the neighbours and extended family in chorus.

A palash, too, is a sought-after tree for its flowers. Schools and institutions take home a single sapling to plant in their courtyard. I have come across so many such lone-standing trees within paved perimeters that look sickly and refuse to flower. Or, at the most, flower reluctantly once in many years. But witness for yourself in the places where generations of these trees have been allowed to grow together as close neighbours. The mature trees blossom punctually year after year while the younger ones blossom sooner.

In smaller groups and ones and twos, the starlings also visit the flowers of the silk cotton and the coral tree. Maybe sometimes they forage the babuls and subabuls for insects. But from what I have seen, the nectar of palash blossoms is their single most favourite thing to consume. The palash is also visited by many other nectar feeders. I would sometimes see pale-billed flowerpeckers on it, which would have travelled from the nearby hills. One wouldn’t see these tiny tots anywhere near here during the rest of the year. The collective sounds of the starlings emanating from the tree’s crown would be like a noisy gurgling stream collapsing on the rocks, drowning out the cackling of the treepies, sunbirds and barbets, the bawling of the common mynahs and also the bullock carts and motorcycles passing below. Conversations would briefly pause when we went by this palash tree during morning walks. The birds were like a dining hall full of children at lunch break.

By April, the red flowers would start turning into flat pods – the rustle of the tree changed into rubbery whispers – and the rosy-starling flocks would also turn north for their summer home. This old, worn tree, still flowering each year, with its ruggedness, holds a kinship between a population of migrating birds and a remote village in the southern reaches of the country.

I have often taken my notebook, binoculars and camera under the palash tree and left them beneath it untouched, just letting myself be utterly washed by starlings gurgling. If not them, the hum of hundreds of rock bees, which come to the palash. The tree’s presence would have lent itself, in some subtle or small way, to all those who travelled beneath it. I have felt it has a field around it where living organisms thrive but also where one palpably feels thought or any kind of human conflict to be diminished due to its presence. And when resting beneath its trunk with a stillness, one may be touched by this dimension. After a while, walking away with a burst of clarity.

Excerpted with permission from ‘The Old, Worn Palash Tree’ by Yuvan Aves in Go Wild: Stories, Essays and Comics That Celebrate the Earth, edited by Bijal Vachharajani, Puffin India.