The Return of MG Marg Swallows

AMEET OBEROI
GANGTOK: Finally some good news for bird lovers of the capital, the swallows are back. Five recently born chicks can be seen waiting with their beaks open for their parents to fly in food to their nest on the ceiling of GS Agency at MG Marg here in town.
“This is the third year in continuation that the swallows have raised a family in the ceiling of our shop,” informs 58 year old CL Kandoi, the owner of the shop. In 2009 there were four chicks, in 2010 there were another four and this year [2011] there are five chicks, he informs.
“We have been living here in Sikkim for the past 130 years and our family has been running this shop for the past 50-60 years. Earlier the swallows used to come and make their nests. Then they stopped coming, but now again over the last 5-6 years they have started to come back and making their nests and in the last three years they have been hatching their eggs right here,” he further informed.
He further stated that it usually takes the eggs about 15 days to hatch, about another 15 for the chicks to learn how to fly and after few days of practice, they take off.

Slicing through the air in graceful swoops and darts, snapping up unsuspecting midges and flies along the way, spiritedly pursuing aerial game only they’d know the rules of or simply perched meditatively on wires and edges of rooftops, this twittering avian life was once a familiar sight along the capital’s MG Marg stretch, making for constant source of comfort and reassurance to its residence for whom the swallows were as much part of their lives as anything, well, less air-borne.
Of course, they can still be sighted, but in far fewer numbers and certainly stripped of their former glory and presence among the bazaar residents. While earlier, they could be see adding to the exuberance and bustle of the town in the thousands, now, even a 100-200 is count hard to come by, a number which has been noticed dwindling with each passing season, more significantly over the past few years.
Gregarious by nature, the swallows are known to keep close to human habituations and civilizations: their local name gaonthali connotes this fact roughly translating as belonging to the vicinity of a village or ‘gaon’. This is most clearly manifested in their choice of location for the nest, which, over time, has travelled from overhanging cliff faces and caves to manmade structures like barns, bridges and dwellings which offer easy accessibility and are yet sheltered from weather and predators.
Also, their insect-feeding habits make them more tolerable to man, insectivores being beneficial to famers especially. Heralding the arrival of spring-summer season, these migratory birds which can be distinguished from the martins and other smaller birdlife from their characteristic deeply forked tail (‘swallow’ tall) and appear around the months of March-April when they almost immediately set to nesting.
The mating season is usually from May to June-July during which they lay eggs at least twice and fly back to warmer climes towards the end of August. Apart from the distinctive tail, their physical features include steel blue upperparts and a chestnut coloured throat patch separated from the off-white under parts by a blue-black breast band.
Indian ornithologist and naturalist, the late Dr. Salim Ali, the “Birdman of India”, gives a vivid account of the swallow presence on the MG Marg of yore, according them a near-heritage status and rightly so, in his book, The Birds of Sikkim (Delhi: OUP, 1962) which establishes two kinds of swallow species frequenting the “Gangtok, Aritar” hills.
In the section on the “Eastern Swallow” (Pg. 108):
“Gangtok town and bazaar, it is a familiar sight to see numbers of swallows shooting up and down at high speed close over the road surface in pursuit of midges and flies, twisting and dodging their way in amongst mules and, loiterers and other obstacles with the utmost dexterity and confidence of safety…birds take possession of traditional sites within bazaar shops and dwellings, perching on brackets, wall clock and the like, and twittering spiritedly an arm’s length above the heads of noisily haggling customers!”
In the section on the “Himalayan Striated Swallow” (pg. 109), Dr. Ali Narrates:
“In April 1955, there was an occupied nest in the Dewan’s office in Gangtok. The pair of owners flew in and out freely all day long regardless of the noise of the telephone and typewriters and the bustle of chattering clerks and visitors in the low ceilinged little room. The building was shut up every evening after office hours and not opened again next morning till well after sun up, so that the birds had to co-ordinate their daily chores closely with the working hours of the Government Secretariat!”
Come modernization, urbanization, beatification, or what have you, the MR Marg swallows are fast losing their strength in their numbers with the gradual transformation in the town’s landscape over the years. While they are undoubtedly other factors which have contributed to the decline, for instance climatic variations, the trading of the wooden structures that donned the town face of then, for the swankier glass-and-concrete wonders of now, has compelled the swallows to relocate their summer haunts to less concretized habitats, a fact which senior scientist, Department of Forest Environment and Wildlife, Usha Lachungpa confirms.
“These highly social birds have always been a pleasant feature around MG Marg and other parts of the capital; sadly, they are getting raw deal with modernization and it is shocking that one has to actually search hard to be able to even sight them, but thanks to few establishments in town like Sikkim Medical Hall, you still do,” expressed Ms Lachungpa who, enviably, has her own swallow tryst each year with the nest right inside her residence.
While earlier times saw nearly every shop or residence sheltering at least one nest, nowadays, only a handful enjoy the rare privilege of annual swallow house calls, primarily owing to the consideration of these few families who have tried to ensure that the birds return the next season.
[with background material from “The MG Marg Swallows: The Lost Flight” by Remuna Rai, published in NOW! issue dated 03 June 2008]