One day at work, I got an excited call from my wife. She said that a bird looks to be trapped in the light-well of our apartment building and we should do something to rescue it. Since morning, she said, she is hearing a bird in the otherwise quite light-well. She started observing the bird from the bedroom window. It was a new bird she said. According to her, It looked similar to oriental magpie robin however, its calls were quite different from the robin. Since both of us had spotted the robin multiple times in the JP Nagar forest during our morning walk, I was pretty sure it must be some other bird. She quickly made a short video of the bird and shared on Whatsapp. It was not a robin for sure. I noticed it kept moving its tail up and down while walking. This was the vital clue. Spending sometime on Google, we determined that this was in fact a ‘White-browed Wagtail’. True to its name, the bird kept wagging its long tail. This is how we were introduced to our new neighbor. The bird made our apartment’s lightwell as her home for about a week and then she left not to be seen again.

White-browed Wagtail is a beautiful and slender bird similar in size to common Mynah. It has a long tail which it continuously moves up and down. It is generally found near water bodies. Maybe, the small water bodies that form in our backyard during monsoon coupled with high number of insects and the relative safety from predators made the building look as an attractive place to camp. I think its preference to water bodies earned it the name dhobin (washer woman) in Hindi.

Whenever, we see a new bird we tend to go overboard with our camera. This time, it led to capturing an interesting sequence of images.

So the bird was walking around next to our window and we were clicking away in excitement :

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Then, something caught its eye and it wasted no time:

Looks like its lunch time:

Attack mode on:

Looks difficult, Misson aborted:

Lucky day for the moth/butterfly, phew !

Uh oh, why did it just walk into it..

Gone!!

Now, its back to just hanging around:

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Now that we were comfortable in identifying the bird, it started turning up everywhere. We saw it on Kaveri banks near Galibore Nature camp. At Hampi, when we took a coracle ride on the Tungabhadra river, the bird was everywhere. Recently, I went birding to Gulakamale Lake and there were multiple wagtails there too. The bird is found throughout India. The bird as the name suggests, keeps wagging its tail, the reason behind this however is not properly understood. One theory suggests that its a way of flushing out insects, another suggests that it is a signal to predators that the bird is vigilant and healthy enough to escape or fight. Whatever, the reason, it is an interesting bird to observe and it is common enough to add to your birding list conveniently.

All the picture credit goes to my wife, Tapasya, you can read her at : The Realm of Fantasy.