A Nest in My Heart | anemone.ink

I am someone who finds joy in taking photographs, capturing moments of my life whenever I see the opportunity. The ever-changing skies, flushed cheeks of people, or simply a daisy flower, capturing the beauty of life around in a photograph feels soothing to my soul. It’s like pausing time and recording that memory inside a piece of paper or a still image. Like capturing a butterfly in my fist forever. Through photographs, I feel like I can relive that moment by entering inside.

In my usual routine, I would take my DSLR camera out and click pictures of simple things as anything can be captured in a beautiful way. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as cliché as it is, it still holds true. During the coronavirus pandemic, I was stuck in my small house with no unique objects to capture through my lens. Overwhelmed by the constant intake of negativity around me, the presence of a subject was necessary. My first-floor apartment was plain boring. Surrounded by high brick walls of buildings, the same trees growing old as the seasons pass by, and a breeze filled with dust and pollen. Or it was the same old park that I was used to seeing daily since I was 5. The park used to be green but now it was just muddy brown and aged. Time does that.

Bored and dying to be creative in some way, I picked up my camera and went to my balcony. The white marble floor was never fully white as there were always leaves and sticks from plants lying around. I never sat down on the dirty chair that was always there observing the world, was too lazy to risk inhaling the dust and spending all my day full of sneezes. One time a cat had climbed onto our balcony to get some sleep and I was in awe of her soft purrs. I captured that moment in my mobile phone which does capture the memory but somehow doesn’t feel as raw and photographic. I leaned against the railing that was once like the bars of prison to my 5-year-old self, challenging myself to find something new to capture in the bland environment.

My eyes wandered around observing things until my ears heard the chirping sounds of birds. There were high-pitched chirps, the cooing of pigeons, some whistling, and a crow’s caw. Several different sounds yet they had been mute to my perfectly functional ears. They were filtered to hear only chaos these days. The birds with beautiful throats and coats were singing and flying everywhere but somehow, I had never noticed them. They were camouflaged deep within the blandness and living their lives. Bird watching never made sense to me before but as my eyes followed their tiny scattered steps and flapping wings, it filled me with joy.

I adjusted my telephoto lens to different settings and tried to capture a myna and I was delighted. Such a simple creature yet I had never noticed her details. The bright yellow beak and feet were saturated in the image. Slowly listening to the different sounds, I realized for the first time how many unique species of birds stopped by in my area and I never even knew! Every new chirp made me spot a new species. I didn’t even know green pigeons existed or that old world flycatchers were of so many types. The purple sunbird was the most mesmerizing bird I had ever laid my eyes on and the hardest to capture. Finally, I had found my subject, and that too in many varieties.

The more unique the birds, the more different ways to capture them. If the shutter speed was not dialled just right all you would see was a blur but even that was aesthetic in its own way. Their constant movements were hard to catch still. I studied their distinctive behaviours that were once blind to my eyes. Gazing at the winged beings searching for food, building nests for their little ones, and playing in puddles with their tiny steps was such a tranquil moment of observation. It was a whole new area of exploration that was absent from my life. It satisfied my lack of creative fun and the will to live in this messed-up world. With that, I also gained new skills to better adjust my shutter speed and my aperture to perfectly capture the essence of these birds in movement. It was surely not an easy challenge. I learned about their funky names like laughing dove, jungle babblers (or “the angry birds” is what I named them), red-vented bulbuls, lineated barbet, etc, and their mesmerizing colourful bodies.

It was fascinating every time a new bird appeared and I could capture it. Then I had the challenge of identifying them, sometimes I would just give up and assign them my own made-up names. At times, I would stand there for ages trying to get the perfect shot but even if I didn’t get it, the whole experience was fun and creative. It made me realize how sometimes our brilliant eyes can completely miss the little things present in the natural world. When the people were stuck in their homes, I noticed the free-flying birds and felt how innocently happy they were probably because of the decrease in air and noise pollution. Later on, I set up bird feeders to attract them in an even closer vicinity. It didn’t work as well as I thought it would but was still worth trying. Through this experience, these birds made a nest in my heart and helped me survive the harshest of times.

While I had fallen in love with the birds, I would also capture some stray cats that were always roaming around hiding from everyone. There are a lot of little things that go unnoticed in this whole big world that we don’t appreciate enough. Humans can be so occupied with life sometimes that we forget to pause and just look around us. Observing these birds and learning about them made me fall in love with the enchanting beauty of nature and animals even more than before.