An Aural Journey through Kabini: The Beginnings

A short while later you find yourself on a safari through the tree-lined roads that snake through the forests of Kakanakote without hiss or rattle. The only sounds are from the vehicle itself, as the engine clatters and the springs hunch and heave as you cleave the air. But from amid this clamour of gurgle and squeaks, you hear a sound of Nature that you find at once hard to place. It’s not so much a song as a statement.

Your naturalist stops the car and kills the engine to let you hear it better. And you find that the sound is neither a melody nor a cacophony; only sheer music to the ears.

From the understory beneath a column of skyward trees, where the sun is hiding still before floating up to the sea of air, it comes in clearly articulated five-syllable utterances with considered interludes, as if egging on the sun to rise.

“Kuh-kaah-kuh-ruh-kow!” it asserts throatily, sometimes slipping into a six-syllable

‘Kuh-kaah-kuh-ruh-kaah-kow’, as if adding some information.

The tone is that of an adjutant issuing the stirring order in the barracks, demanding instant readiness for action from everyone within a mile’s radius. You get the sense that whoever’s making this sound is choosing their words carefully; only, you’re not wise enough to understand.

There is a lull, and for several seconds, a suspicious silence. Then the leaf litter chatters. A rustle is followed by a scratch, and then a sweep and a step. You wonder what is afoot, and what great mammal might break out of the thicket, until you see him.

A male grey junglefowl, less popularly Gallus sonneratii (after French explorer, Pierre Sonnerat) and more popularly an ancestor of the domestic chicken, walks out like a sovereign, his flamboyant tail-plumes in tow – a cocktail party of one.

Once hunted for sport, the pot, and feathers to be made into artificial flies, today, however, he wasn’t calling in alarm at a predator – human or otherwise – for that is an incontinent burst of low background clucks punctuated by sharp and nasal inhaled crows, which, like the handiwork of a virtuoso piano player, makes you wonder if the same player was making both the sounds concurrently.

Such a dexterous capacity for pantomime is not the only sterling quality of this thespian. He is colourful, light, and diminutive, but he couldn’t be more ‘down-to-earth’ despite being able to fly.

Make no mistake: this reluctance to flight has nothing to do with his fitness, though: he has none of the domestic chicken’s flab in either body or voice, giving up both the plump thighs and the drawling call of his unprotected cousin for a form that’s more befitting of the forest.

So befitting, that as your naturalist cranks the engine back to life and you move on, little do you know that a few more safaris later, the call would epitomise for you the pleasures of being in a southern Indian deciduous tiger forest, and remind you every time you’re in Kabini that two earsare too few and two years never enough.