Seeing Red

This is the bird the name was written for. The red-breasted flycatcher is barely the length of your finger, and in most of the ones you meet the red simply isn’t there — females and young males go about in plain buff and brown, and they are the great majority. Only the adult male carries the orange, worn high on the throat and spilling onto the breast, set against a soft grey hood and a bold white eye-ring.

He had crossed a continent to sit on that stem. The species breeds in eastern Europe and across central Asia and winters almost entirely on the Indian subcontinent — which makes a January morning in the Sahyadris an ordinary posting at the end of an extraordinary commute. He was working the scrub the way his kind do: a short sally after something invisible, back to a chosen perch, tail flicked up to show the white at its base. Half past eight, low sun, and he held still just long enough.