Birders could put in an absurd number of hours at a habitat, one next to their own “burrow”. Every dawn, they could be sleepwalking to the patch, trussed up in camouflage rags, bent under the weight of expectations and gear, shutter sack on the shoulders and binoculars around the neck. And yet, that one rarity could defiantly stay out of their radar. Counter to this, someone strolls in from another city, strays on to the patch, as all other options for the day got crossed out. And lo and behold, there it is! The bird directs a red-billed smile at them.
Anu Parthasarathy probably would have preferred sighting a Red-billed tropicbird after waiting for it for years, to the way she actually sighted it — just like that. A Banglorean who manages once-a-month visits to Chennai to bond with close relatives, she decided to bird around the Broken Bridge area of the Adyar Estuary on December 14, as all other plans for the day had peeled off like paint flakes. How one big plan fell, in her own words — “I ended up at the Broken Bridge because I could not get online tickets to the renovated Tholkappia Poonga.”
A birder through-and-through, Anu’s mind instantly associates leisure with bird walks. Social visits to Chennai are always a package tour with time for extemporaneous birding trips thrown into it. But prior to this visit, she had ambled down what is unofficially called the Broken Bridge Road only a couple of times. Her parents living in Velachery, a peek at the Pallikaranai marsh and Sholinganallur marshland is more common.
