In celebration of National Bird Day 2015, Barry Kent MacKay, Senior Program Associate for Born Free USA and lifelong bird enthusiast, is writing a special eight-part blog series in December and January where he will describe some interesting avian species. Below is the eighth and final installment.
Many folks may think that most tropical birds are brightly colored. Actually, a great many are colored in shades of brown, tan, or rust—the Earth colors—or black and white or shades of gray. But, although not bright of color, they can be utterly charming when you get to know them. And, that would include a species of small, finch-like birds called the “silverbills.” The Indian silverbill is found in northeast Africa, from eastern Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, east to Nepal, including nearly all of the Indian subcontinent.[teaserbreak]
True to its name, this tiny bird does have a silvery-white or very pale blue, conical beak. The top and back of the head, upper back, and wings are sandy-brown. The face, breast, belly, and lower back are white. The tail is black.
There is also a related species known as the African silverbill (Lonchura cantans), which is equally non-descript, having a sandy-brown head, face, back, and wings; a white throat, breast, and belly; and a dark brown, or blackish, tail. They are found across central Africa and the southern Sahara desert, from the Senegal and Mauritania coasts east to Arabia. African silverbills from east Africa are darkest, and have thin barring on the brown areas, rather like a wren, and traces of barring on the flanks.
It is the Indian species most often seen in the North American exotic pet trade. Sadly, and precisely because these birds have such bland and neutral colors, their feathers are often dyed an unnatural bright pink, green, yellow, or some other garish tone. The birds revert to natural color when they molt, of course, but the process of staining them can be very traumatic for the birds.
The species was first known to European science in 1758. It has, at times, been considered a race of the African silverbill; however, it is now generally considered to be a separate species. In Arabia, the two species’ ranges overlap—but the Indian is easily distinguished from the African by the bright, white rump. Fortunately, it is common through most of its range, although rare in Sri Lanka.
It has been described as one of India’s dullest birds, having nearly no differences in color between the sexes or between age groups, and being non-migratory. That may be, but their charm derives from their highly social habits. It’s not unusual to see large flocks with several sitting adjacent each other—not only touching, but often preening each other, helping out with those hard-to-reach areas around the face and neck. When not breeding, several birds will sleep together in an otherwise unused nest.
Breeding corresponds with the rainy season. My friend, Robin Restall, has described the courtship display: “In low intensity display, the male will stretch upright and sing with little movement, but will twist towards the female. He displays by holding a length of nest-building material by one end, perching nearby or alongside the female, bobbing up and down by stretching and bending the legs in the inverted curtsey, jerking the head up, thereby moving the straw. He will drop the grass and twist from side to side, edging close and bowing before attempting copulation.” (Munias and Mannikins, Robin Restall, Pica Press, 1996). Sometimes, an unmated female will hold the grass and do the head-jerk part of the display, to try to tempt a mate.
The nest itself, while a little messy, is essentially ovoid, with an entrance in one end, and made of grasses and straws interwoven to form a more or less globular, hollow structure. They sometimes place it within the base of a large stick nest of a bird of prey, as if seeking the protection of the predator. They often nest amid thorns or spiny vegetation, as protection against nest predators. They may take over the nests formerly built and used by weaver-birds, taking advantage of the weavers’ superior nest-building skills. Either way, the nest tends to look “used”—and since the babies, black in color, remain silent while in the nest, they may be overlooked by potential predators, or assumed to be last year’s abandoned structure.
They normally lay from three to eight white eggs, oval in shape, although as many as 25 eggs were once found in a single nest. These little birds can have as many as four families per year. Their main food is weed and grass seed, but they also eat small insects, and even the nectar of the coral tree. So far as I know, the species has not been recorded as hybridizing in the wild, but there are numerous examples of it interbreeding with other related species in captivity.
Their songs, like their appearances, are modest: mostly a short trill, the intricacies of the briefly uttered notes only apparent to the human ear when greatly slowed down, or apparent visually when printed on a spectrograph.
They are easily captive-bred, and there is no conservation concern. Amid the numerous other small finch-like birds sold in pet stores, they are easily overlooked. But, they are, in their own right, charming little sociable birds who belong in flocks in the tropical fields of southern Asia, and not in cages.