This article is a paean of love to the koel (cuckoo). I have survived the disappearance of the vulture which was an elegant, spare, bird that looked like a Roman patrician. I have survived the disappearance of the sparrow, which was the friendliest sweetest bird ever and a part of all the homes I have lived in. I have survived the disappearance of bees which came as a gift to the few flowers I grew in winter and whose steady drone always made me drowsy. But I think that if the koel disappeared, I would just give up the will to live. 

I have not seen the koel in my garden. She is very very shy and any attempt to seek her out would driver her away. But she wakes me up in the morning and her infrequent kuhu during the day keeps me alert. Hard at work on the computer or on the phone or meeting people, her call causes my heart to skip a beat and I ask everyone with the pride of a mother: did you hear that, did you hear that??? 

My house, which used to be a parking lot, has become Delhi’s only house-forest and it has all sorts of birds in it. During the monsoon, we rise to the dawn chorus and the evening is heralded by the crows cawing their way home. The koel is obviously here to find a nest for her eggs. The Asian Koel is the Eudynamys scolopacea. The first name comes from a nymph of the sea and Scolopacea means stripe-backed. 

The Indian name Koel comes from the Tamil kuyil. Three types of koels are found in this part of Asia. The scolopacea is found in Pakistan , India , Nepal , Sri Lanka , the Maldives and Laccadive Islands . Our koel is the smallest of all. The upper part of the female is black to blackish brown. It has little spots on the back and white bars on the wing and tail. Some of its feathers are reddish or light brown with whiter spots on the ends of feathers. Its underparts are dirty white to pale buff, throat and fore neck is a paler streaked blackish-brown with narrow blackish-brown bars on lower belly, thighs and flanks. The male is entirely black with dark metallic blue gloss, appearing purplish at times. It looks like a crow with a very long tail. When in moult, some old feathers fade to reddish-brown.. The nestlings are uniformly black at first but moult quickly to look like adult females, Young males are dull slate with buff tips on feathers of breast, belly and wing. The eye irises are bright red, bill dull yellowish-green, the inside of the mouth is red.

The koel is found in orchards and lightly wooded areas in parks and gardens in towns and villages. It is a shy bird and easily overlooked during the winter months when it remains silent and unobtrusive. It walks along tree branches. It is rarely found on the ground, and only briefly seen in the open, when furtively dashing from cover to cover. It can sometimes be seen sunning itself on top of a tree early in the morning. During the breeding season the koel becomes obvious. Its loud, melodious and penetrating call is usually the first to be heard at dawn, while it is still dark, late into the night. 

The koel eats the berries of the Neem tree (Azadirachta indica), Peepal or Sacred Fig (Ficus religiosa), Banyan (Ficus benghalensis), Camphor tree (Cinnamomum camphora), Ber or Indian Plum (Zizyphus mauritiana), Mulberry (Morus), nuts of the Fishtail Palm (Caryota urens), the poisonous fruit of the Yellow Oleander (Thevetia neriifolia) and nectar from Coral Tree (Erythrina indica), Guava (Psidium guajava), Brazilian cherry (Eugenia uniflora), Wild Caper (Capparis sepiaria), Tamarind (Tamarinda indica), Wild Jujube (Ziziphus oenoplia), Pepper (Piper nigrum), and nuts of Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis), Alexandra Palm (Archontophoenix alexandrae) and the fruit of the Bakul (Mimusops elengi) tree.It also eats caterpillars, snails, mantids, stick insects and other insects. The koel is an amazing strategist. She refuses to build her own nest. Instead, she lays eggs surreptitiously in the nests of several host species, the choice of victim varying from location to location. She usually chooses crows but other species like Common Mynas, Golden Orioles and Common Magpies. 

Her eggs are very much like those of the crow, but slightly smaller. They come in varying degrees of green, from pale greenish-yellow to greyish-green, profusely speckled and blotched with reddish-brown. Bird intelligence shows: The koel varies the colour of her eggs to match that of the hosts' eggs. Can a human mother manipulate the slightest thing in her unborn child? Not only does this show the magic in the koel but recent studies have shown that colonies of birds that find themselves the victims of koels do some magic as well. Dr. Claire Spottiswood from the University of Cambridge describes a continual evolutionary arms race between the host birds and koels: "As the cuckoo has become more proficient at tricking its hosts, hosts have evolved more and more sophisticated ways to fight back. One strategy of combating the brood parasite is for the females of the host species to each lay eggs of different colours and patterns. So from nest to nest, the eggs of the host birds look different. This means the cuckoo parasite is far less able to lay a counterfeit egg that matches the host eggs.” To enable the Koel to lay an egg within a crow's nest, the couple devise a clever plan: Firstly, the male Koel stations itself very close to the crow's nest, calling loudly and boldly to advertise his presence. The male and female crows promptly chase the intruder. The female Koel, lurking nearby under dense cover, quietly waits until the crows are far enough away, and then slips in to lay her egg into their nest. The female usually lays just after the host has laid her first egg. The Koel's breeding season usually corresponds with that of its usual host and, during a single season, the female lays one egg each in several nests. Does the koel destroy her host’s eggs? Sometimes, if there is no space for hers. But many observers have seen young crows and koels in the nest together. The nestling period is 19 to 28 days and newly fledged young cuckoo are fed by its foster parents for another two to three weeks. Birdwatchers used to insist that the host birds were so stupid that they did not know the difference between their own and the koel’s young. Now, it has been discovered that the females, after laying their eggs, stay in the vicinity and if the hosts do not feed her young, they get attacked by the koel pair. When the young koel is ready to leave the nest, they take charge of the youngster directly. In India , the koel is part of Kamadeva’s armoury of seduction along with the scented breeze, the mango, the jasmine flowers and dolphin. Here is a lovely haiku type poem - A koel and the spring,

I wait under a mango tree

For a promise to be fulfilled.

Maneka Gandhi
 
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In my garden we grow bhang, marijuana. The bees love it. I wonder if they are just taking the nectar from the flowers or whether they are there to get a feeling of well being. From reindeer to elephants, the animal kingdom is filled with animals who deliberately consume plants, bugs and other substances that offer hallucinogenic chemical highs A reindeer’s drug of choice is the Amanita muscaria mushroom, a psychoactive red with white spots fungus which is also known as the fly agaric. According to experts, they prance around gaily and feel a sensation of flying while they trip out in the forest. 

Locoweed is a group of about 20 types of weed in the western United States. It grows through the winter, making it an attractive food for free-ranging horses. After they've tasted it a few times, they come back again and again. It's addictive, and what's more, it's poisonous. Horses will literally eat themselves to death over the course of a few years. Locoweed makes them neigh and open and shut their mouths. Those that eat too much get diarrhoea and show signs of depression or paranoia. Owners detoxing horses are to keep the horse sedated to keep it from hurting itself or others. 

Bees and wasps drink alcohol from fermented fruit. Drunken bees are violence-prone, anti-social and less likely to fly. The more drunk ones lie down on their backs and put their legs up. According to Animal Planet, black lemurs will gnaw on the heads of giant millipedes, even though the millipedes are poisonous. The millipedes get their heads bitten and excrete a cocktail of defensive toxins, including cyanide. These will hurt the lemur if they ingest them, but will get them high if they just rub them on their bodies. The chemicals act as a narcotic, so whenever the lemurs are stressed or bored, it's time to get an insect buzz! 

Villagers in India are familiar with elephants that break into their illegal stashes of locally made brew and drink it noisily. In 2007, a squadron of nearly 40 drunken elephants uprooted telephone poles in a village in Assam after fuelling up on rice beer. In Africa , elephant groups will gather around the iboga plant, a powerful hallucinogenic. They all feed off of it and get spaced out. Since elephants are generally led by their oldest and most experienced members, they have a teaching society. The young ones will learn from the old, and in this case, they learn how to get high. 

A certain type of lichen is extremely rare and very slow growing, sometimes just found on a single mountain rock in the Rocky Mountains . Despite the fact that it is dangerous to get at and contains no nutritional value, the sheep will risk life and limb to get some. Once they reach the lichen, they will rub their teeth down to the gum line to scrape off every last bit of it. 

Poppy farmers started noticing strangely damaged crops. Their fields of poppies had circular crush marks in them. It was wallabies. They broke into the fields, ate a lot of poppies, and then got so high that they could only hop in circles. The drugged-out marsupials returned for the high again and again. The Australians who kill all non human species, of course shot them. Birds like jays, ravens, blackbirds, and parrots squash ants and push them into their plumage. After they've covered themselves with dead ants, they spin around for up to half an hour before shaking the ants off. 

Scientists once thought they used the formic acid that the ants secreted to clean off parasites - that is until they saw domesticated magpies roll their bugs in tobacco ash before placing them on their bodies, and guessed there was a little more to it than that. Birds as a species use a lot of different compounds, but scientists observe that individuals never change their compounds because the addiction has set in. 

When the marula fruits ripen in Africa, all of nature flocks to the trees. Not to eat the ripened fruit, but to let the fruit drop and ferment on the ground. Elephants, monkeys, and all kinds of mammals then feast on the fruits and fight, have sex, and then lie around drunkenly till the effect wears off. Goats enthusiastically eat coffee beans and pigeons space out after eating cannabis seeds. Jaguars hallucinate after eating a certain vine. The acacia tree has herds of ants that protect it. Why? Because it feeds them a sugary syrup. At first it was thought this syrup was just nutritional. Recently, researchers have found out that it is also severely addictive. The ants, needing to feed their addiction, will attack anything that threatens the tree, including large animals. 

Cats gets high eating a plant called catnip and then and running around crazily. Considering the kind of world they live in, I am not surprised that animals take their pleasures where they can get them. And if that means eating something to get an altered state of consciousness, so be it. The awful part however is when humans deliberately make animals drunk. 

Many monkeys (and previously bears) are forcibly fed alcohol till they become addicts. In that awful place run by Sahara, Aamby Valley in Maharashtra, they kept two chimpanzees for many years in a small dirty cage. When I got to know and started the procedure to have them removed, they quickly made a walled enclosure which was so stupidly made, like the rest of that ghastly place that the chimps kept jumping over it. While trying to get one back, they strangled him with the rope they tied round his neck. The female was then enticed with alcohol. They regularly fed her alcohol until she was removed to Mysore Zoo where they have had to detoxify her. Aamby Valley should have been shut down years ago and its managers jailed under the Wildlife Protection Act. Perhaps it will happen one day.

Maneka Gandhi
 
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Memory is something we all take for granted. Our ability to learn, retain information for short- or long-term periods, recognise individuals, objects, and to recall previous events or learning experiences, all depend on memory. It has been thought till recently that memory starts at birth and then develops as the individual matures. But it is now established that memory begins prenatally and the period of birth merely marks a transition from memory functioning in-utero to memory functioning ex-utero.  

Studies of classical conditioning of the foetus, date back to the 1930s. Auditory stimuli – the repeated playing of the same music, for instance gets a response from the human foetus. There are now trainers like Brent Logan director of Prenatal Institute in Seattle who teach you how to stimulate babies in the womb. ’Brave New Babies,' an hour-long documentary about Baby Plus, Learning Before Birth, the author's prenatal enrichment system has aired in many countries. 

When a human has problems dealing with his life and goes to a psychiatrist, one of the tools used is regression through hypnosis. The person, in a hypnotic state, relives his past till he finds the incidents and relationships that have caused him to be what he is today. Some hypnosis takes you back to the womb and people have been known to have dated their learning experiences from inside their mother’s bodies. Are humans the only ones that start their learning before being born? What humans can do, animals can probably do better. 

I have often wondered how an animal abandoned at birth by its parents, like a snake, turtle or worm for instance, knows what it knows without guidance. How does a butterfly know what to eat and what to avoid? Could it be that knowledge is passed on to them while in the womb? Now, finally, scientists are beginning to recognise that animals too have memories and learn even before they are born. In fact they are much sharper than humans. 

Kindergarten starts early for many animals. Researchers of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada report that frogs and salamanders can learn to be wary of enemies even before they are born. After all, learning from the safety of an egg is a huge survival advantage. Salamanders hatched from eggs that have been doused with predator-scented water showed reduced activity—a common defence mechanism—compared with those from eggs in odourless water. The biologists taught frog embryos to fear the fire-bellied newt, a potential predator, by exposing frog eggs to the newt’s scent combined with that of crushed tadpoles. Other unborn animals have shown similar intelligence in recent experiments. 

Zebra fish learn to recognize kin by scent six days after fertilization. Those not exposed to family during this period will never identify them. Foetal rats can detect the food scents that their mother has eaten and show a marked preference for this food shortly after birth. Obviously, for animals with a short life span, it is never too early to start learning. Animal embryos are known to able to pick up chemical and auditory cues - unborn gulls, for example, learn to recognise the alarm calls of their parents whilst still in the egg. But until now, no one has looked at whether unborn animals can also learn visual images. In a novel experiment Ludovic Dickel and his colleagues at the University of Caen Basse-Normandy, France studied embryos of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a mollusc closely related to squid and octopus. 

The scientists placed crabs alongside cuttlefish eggs in clear glass laboratory tanks so that the crabs were in plain view of the eggs. The embryos could not smell or hear the crabs. Once the cuttlefish embryos hatched, they were instantly moved, to ensure they could not glimpse the crabs, and were not exposed to any other prey until they were seven days old. They were then set free in a lab tank full of crabs and shrimp, another cuttlefish delicacy. Cuttlefish embryos not exposed to crabs preferred to hunt shrimp which are their traditional prey, once they were born. But those embryos exposed to crabs much preferred to hunt crabs after hatching. And the clearer the view of the crabs they were given, the greater their taste for it. Obviously the young embryos must be able to see through their translucent egg case and learn which animals are worth hunting even before they have hatched. 

Studies done in Japan on learning and memory in a chimpanzee foetus show that it has as good a foetal memory as human babies, reacting to sounds after birth that it had heard in the womb. What a magical world animals live in!

Maneka Gandhi

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