Falcons for Breakfast!

I am a huge raptor nerd. I can sleep, eat, and breathe raptors. If raptors are on the menu for an entire birding trip, I’ll come home bursting with joy! My rapture for raptors knows no bounds. See, I can’t stop when professing my love for them. Something about watching them soar in a blue sky or keeping the lookout from a perch on a dead tree branch triggers an ineffable awe in me. Ever since I came upon the term “Raptorphile”, I’ve been able to put a name to my obsession.

As the name suggests, this blog has to do with Falcons. More specifically, the Red-naped Shaheen Falcon, aka the Barbary Falcon (Falco Pelegrinoides Babylonicus). Now, to be completely honest, this was one of those birds that I never thought about seriously. Not because I had any objections to seeing them, but I just thought that opportunity would never come for an amateur birder like me. Therefore, occasional glances on the pages of the Grimmett book were my entire consideration for Shaheens. Meanwhile I was busy satisfying my appetite with more common raptors of the plains.

So, it took a magical place for an encounter with this magical bird. This was during my Ladakh trip in October 2017. For those who haven’t been to Ladakh, all I can say to you is all you’ve heard is true. Yes, it’s as beautiful as those over-edited photos promise. It’s that alien, otherworldly and different from any other place that you’ve ever visited. 

For a geologist like me, Ladakh is the wonderland. It’s where rocks have won the battle! Everywhere you see, the rocky ridges, the thrusted jagged peaks, the towering granitic edifices whisper of their violent geological past. The only thing I want to change about Ladakh, is the overflow of tourists. However Ladakh is not to blame for that.

Banded hills outside of Leh

The mythical More Plains

Among all the places I visited during that trip, the beauty of Nubra Valley stood out to me for it’s contradictions. Colossal snow peaks paved way for smaller rocky cliffs, which seamlessly transitioned into a vast undulating desert, dotted with monstrous dunes.

The valleys of Nubra

I had started the Ladakh trip with dreams of soaring Golden Eagles, peeping Little Owls and perky Groundpeckers. What I got up to that point were accentors, unidentified warblers and a boatload of Eurasian Magpies. But, fortunes changed just as soon as we entered Nubra, with a long distance sighting of an Eurasian Hobby! So when we started from Nubra pretty early the next day, I was optimistic. I secured a window seat on our car and clutched my camera. For most part of the journey, my head was almost out of the window, searching the sky with squinted eyes. Suddenly, something caught my eye at the ground level, and I shouted out for the speeding car to stop. As the dust started to clear from the screeching of the brakes, I could look back and make out a familiar shape sitting atop a boulder on the side of the road. I let out a muffled yell “Falcon!” and in a instant two more cameras were on it. In nervous excitement, we bumped each other with elbows thinking it would fly away the next second. But it didn’t. Instead it taught it’s neck and started calling. The call reverberated from the rocky walls and wafted through the valley of sands. The beauty of that moment I can never put into words. It was still early morning and the thin sunlight shrouded the bird in a heavenly halo.  It almost seemed like all the natural elements of the place transmuted themselves to reappear as that shrieking bird, in some kind of secret alchemy ritual.

Red-naped Shaheen I

Red-naped Shaheen II

This experience was even more mysterious, because I could not identify the bird. At that moment it was driving me mad, but a good kind of mad. I don’t remember how long the encounter lasted. As it flew away, we sat down exhausted from keeping still in the most awkward of postures. The name “Merlin” popped in my head and I proclaimed it with a slight hint of smugness! Nobody challenged the identification, because we knew so little about them, and none of us had seen them previously. So, many fist-bumps and high-fives later we settled on Merlin.

Red-naped Shaheen calling

Parting shot of Red-naped Shaheen

It was not until I came back and started going through the photographs that I realised that I had been wrong. I was about to post an image of that bird in an forum, and just thought to recheck the id. Although of similar size, shape and colour, Merlins have a prominent supercilium that this bird didn’t have. So all my efforts to rebrand this bird as the Merlin failed and I realised that this was one those rare times when I had a magical encounter with a bird, without knowing its name. It was a strange feeling. I like putting names on things and categorize them. It comforts me. Thus, what ensued was a frantic search of literature and the internet, to come up with the proper identification of the bird. About half-an hour later, I was satisfied with Red-naped Shaheen, (Barbary Falcon). The surprise of what I saw hit me then, as I realised I just stumbled upon a bird I had never given a second thought to. A bird I had never imagined I would be fortunate enough to encounter. A bird whose only reference to me before, were the tales of Falconry from old movies and documentaries. And the funny thing was, not only I saw a bird that I thought I’d never see, I saw it perched atop a boulder, in the golden early morning light, surrounded by the majestic peaks and dunes of the magical Nubra Valley. It was too good to be true!

Golden Eagles and Little Owls can go suck it!