What the ruby-cheeked sunbirds lost

 It was cause for celebration which quickly turned to grief, for both human witnesses, and victims or so we perceived of the Ruby-cheeked Sunbirds (Chalcoparia singalensis).

But do birds grieve?

They come together, they pair, some for life like the eagles and owls, then they breed, then they display admirable parenting traits, and eventually give without expecting returns, for when it’s time for the young to leave the nest, parents and young go their own ways.  Some stay a short while with the parents, couple of weeks, some longer like the owls and the hornbills.

We rejoice to find the ruby-cheeked sunbirds building nest, anticipating nestlings and fledglings but hardly ten days into intense nest building, they lost it, to a macaque, a fellow inhabitant of their habitat.

The nest that looked half completed when first sighted, and seemingly well located and camouflaged.

The ruby-cheeked sunbirds are not park or garden birds but of sub-tropical or tropical lowland moist forests, moist montane forests and mangroves.

It was such a delight when I first learnt of their presence in the bukit the year before, sighting an adult male and its sub-adult female because these birds are not commonly seen even if they are of Least Concern status.  

So one can imagine the ecstasy of birders when the breeding pair were spotted with a nest so visible, low and by the roadside.

The male is visibly different from the female with gorgeous metallic green upper-parts and ruby cheeks (what else!) compared to the female but both sport similar orange throat.

These birds' behaviour was exemplary of industry, focus and boldness, venturing openly and single-mindedly to fortify their nest every other minute despite the presence of photographers capturing their movements at close range.

The male entering the nest to mould its bowl-shaped bed.

The female contributed her equal share of work too.

An amusing moment of 'bird stacking' when the female held on even as the male flew in.

Or was she instructing him what to do?!

No, you don't have to tell me, lady!

But they're indeed a perfect match.

One always reinforced the other, especially in time of crisis as the undesirable happened sooner than expected.

Two weeks later, birders were shocked to learn that a group of long-tailed macaques had past by and one broke away, headed the nest way, and on spotting the nest, nonchalantly ripped down the nest and then discarded it like a piece of scrap waste on finding it empty.

The unfortunate discarded nest that looked almost completed after approximately two weeks of intense refining.

The shreds that were left on the branch.

A sombre moment of disbelief, uncertainty, and eventual acceptance of its loss?

It was indeed heart-breaking watching the pair fluttering about as if trying to make sense of what had happened to their painstaking labour of love.

As the loss sank in, the pair set to work immediately to carry out damage control.

The immensity of their habitat vis-a-vis the sunbirds' size being one of the smallest inhabitants of the bukit cannot be over-emphasised.

The habitat that had nurtured their survival and reproduction had also taken from them in the end, in this case fortunately only a minor mishap in a nest loss.  There was no malice when the macaque did what it did.  It was purely survival instinct. 

We feel for the weak but we forget that the strong too needs to survive.

Perhaps the pair did grieve momentarily but they moved on eventually.

Having learnt their bitter lesson which could recur in their life cycle, they looked like they have gone elsewhere to rebuild even as they did return a few days later to check out again the old site.