Raptors, silence and wide blue skies: A day on the Socorro plateau

The vast blue skies are empty – there’s not a bird to be seen, and yet I know I just have to bide my time. As I sweep through the arid landscape I spot the first birds: a pair of dusty looking hoopoes. With their salmon pink plumage (looking like it could do with a wipe-down with damp cloth!) and zebra stripes they, merge beautifully into their landscape and simply vanish when they keep still.

They keep disappearing behind a low, round structure in the middle distance and I wonder if they are scouting for a nesting property or indeed have begun stuffing their chosen site with nesting material, though it is still a little early in the season for that. Hoopoes are not the most house-proud homemakers, their homes are notorious for their stench and filth which can be so powerful and revolting it keeps would-be predators away from their fledglings. If their homes can stink to high heavens, one can imagine what the eggs and babies might taste like. With their sickle-shaped heads and pickaxe bills, they waddle around probing the ground and fly off in their typical butterfly manner.

You note with a grin: the shabby and the shiny are cheek by jowl here, for keeping watch from various bare branches, are black drongoes, shining a glossy boot-polish black, looking absolutely spiffing, sharp as throwing knives as they take off after insects in topsy-turvy flight. From nowhere, an Indian robin, a silken dark blue-black, with its exclamation mark tail upright, and russet rump suddenly appears on another branch before vanishing all too soon. Later, a lone laughing dove turns up and repeats the performance. A flash of swimming-pool blue catches your eye, before turning to cinnamon: the Indian roller, a bristly looking fellow with a wicked expression and gorgeous Oxford and Cambridge blues on its wings. The bird looks as if it’s grinning at some schoolboy prank, it has just successfully pulled off. But all in all, birds here this afternoon are few and far between, not like the crowded skies of north India, sadly now befouled with toxic gas. Here it is clear, clean and the breeze fresh and cool. The silence envelopes you and with a smile you realise that you can ‘meditate’ here (whatever that means) without technically knowing how to.

One more sweep of the skies, reveals nothing and then, poof, out of thin air virtually, you spot a dark raptor high up, circling. Again, far too high to identify but an eagle of some kind given the shape of its tail (wedge-shaped). Suddenly, it folds its wings and dives steeply gaining speed as it swoops down on something hapless on the ground, but you don’t see it rise up again with its prey, if indeed it caught any. As if on cue a couple of Brahminy kites turn up and circle above, probably to check it out and as always you admire and envy the languid grace with which these birds ride the winds, planet earth spread across below them.

Then, flying across the horizon, another raptor. It reminds you of the Montagu’s harrier you saw the last time except this bird’s wingbeats are heavier and more deliberate, not light and buoyant. A long-legged buzzard perhaps, but it keeps its distance and identity. Raptors at the best of times are hard to identify: many go through various wardrobe changes as they grow. Thus, a two-year old bird may wear a completely different outfit to what it did a year earlier and males and females may dress in different outfits too. Also, females are usually larger.

You seem to be the only human being in the area, solitary in this vast blue and russet landscape when you hear voices: a small group of trekkers come down the path: they are not birders (no bins), and greet you as they go past. And then the sacred silence is broken by the crunch of tires on gravel and the grunt of engines: the dog walkers have begun to arrive. One gentleman in a bright red Jeep with a happy black dog in the rear, the second lot in a BMW SUV. As the sun softens, a herd of goats, brown black and white totter past, snatching at leaves followed by a semi-hobbled cow and then their owner.

Birds here have been few and far between, but again you realise that the fewer the number of species you see, the better you see them and get to know them. Like any teacher would tell you: the smaller the class the better you know your students and what mischief they may be up to. And also, this afternoon you have learned to ‘meditate’ without having to sit in the lotus position, Padmasana or Sukhasana, eyes closed, expression ‘oh-so- ious’ and insufferable. You’re just someone sitting in a chair gazing into the silent wide blue yonder. Yet another hidden plus birding has to offer.