Mother Sunbird
She flew past in mid-April, a glittering secret I almost missed. I had been sipping my morning tea, absorbing the first rays of the sun, when a flash of olive-and-cream shot past my face. She was a regular visitor to my terrace—a creature so tiny I could have cupped her in my palm, yet, carrying the gravitas of a small planet. She was the Loten’s Sunbird (Cinnyris lotentia).
Within days, a marvel began taking shape in the corner of the terrace, where the bougainvillea trellis met the rainwater pipe. She built her nest not like a bird, but like a skilled craftsperson. Using fine, microfibres of jute, twine and stem-threads, dry grass tufts of semal (silk cotton), etc. God knows from where she found enough nesting material! Her partner also helped her in making the nest. And so did other sunbirds of her well-knit community. Tiny twigs kept the nest together and bits of dry grass acted as insulation against the April heat. She suspended a pendulous teardrop from a single sturdy stem of madhu malti, the sweetly fragrant honeysuckle trellis.
Watching her work was exhausting: back and forth, a thousand trips, her needle-like beak carrying materials longer than her own body. The nest swayed violently in the afternoon breeze, yet, she never stopped building. By the week’s end, it was finished—a hanging cradle with a tiny side entrance, no wider than my thumb. A single cavity, at the heart of the nest, marked the entry point from where the female entered her domain.
The Waiting
Then came the waiting. She laid two eggs, tiny as pearl tapioca, and for ten days, she vanished inside that swinging nursery. Here is where sacrifice revealed its true face. The Indian summer blazed—terrace tiles touched temperatures that could blister bare feet. She would leave only to feed, returning within minutes. At night, when geckos emerged to hunt, I saw her wedge herself into the entrance, blocking it completely with her body. A shield of feathers and bone.
I learnt about her species: the males were the showstoppers; glossy violet-black that caught light like oil on water. But she was unremarkable to look at, olive-brown with a pale yellow chest, easy to overlook. That, I realised, was the point.
Flashiness attracts predators. Motherhood demands invisibility.
Grace in Miniature
The hatching came on an April morning that felt like any other until I heard it—a sound so thin it barely existed, like glass breaking under water. Two blind, naked things, all mouth and hunger. And then the real work began. She fed them every 15 minutes, from dawn to dusk. I watched her leave, hover near the trumpet-shaped flowers of the coral tree across the street, plunge her beak into each bloom for nectar. But nectar alone wasn’t enough. I saw her pluck tiny caterpillars and ants from my potted plants’ leaves, hunt spiders in the corners I’d neglected. The chicks needed protein and she became an assassin of microscopic proportions.
Early one morning, as I went to the terrace to greet the sun, I was alarmed to spot one of the chicks on the terrace floor. Clearly, she had fallen from the nest. I rushed to pick her up and with some assistance from my house help, managed to return her to her home. The next morning, the other chick too fell from the nest. Once again we restored it to its rightful place.
I thought that the mother chick, barely a year old herself, wasn’t experienced at nest-building. Perhaps the opening to the nest was too big. Perhaps that’s why the chicks were falling out. From that day onwards, we spread a quilt under the nest just in case the babies fell again. Thankfully, that didn’t happen.
They fledged after 16 days. One morning, the nest was empty. I could tell by the absence of the flurry of activities around the nest and by the cessation of the chirping sounds from inside the nest that the chicks had flown. Mission accomplished!
I still leave sugar water out. She comes sometimes, pauses on the railing, and I swear we recognise each other. But I know the truth. She wasn’t being brave for my benefit. She was being a mother—which is to say, she was doing the most ordinary and extraordinary thing in the world. She just happened to build her cathedral on my terrace, and let me witness grace in miniature.
Vinita Agrawal is a poet, editor and translator
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(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 3 issue, 'The AI Divide', which focuses on how India's AI education ambitions are colliding with the reality of inadequate digital infrastructure, undertrained teachers and AI tools that are not built around Indian students' cultural context)
