Paradise Found

The ribbons everyone photographs belong to the male — up to a foot of streaming tail, twice the length of the bird itself. This is the female, and finding her feels like the real discovery: the same jewel of a head, glossy blue-black and crested, set with a startling cobalt eye-ring, carried on a warm rufous body without the theatre of the tail.

The Indian paradise flycatcher is a restless insect-hunter of wooded country, sallying out from a perch to snap flies from the air and flicking back to watch again. The males come in two forms, rufous and white, and grow those extravagant central tail feathers to display; females and young males keep a shorter rufous tail, but both sexes wear the crest and the blue ring. It’s the female who does much of the choosing of the nest and shares the long sitting on it — and it’s her rufous plumage that a young male copies for his first year or two, before he moults into the famous white.

Overlooked beside the male’s ribbons, she is, to my eye, the finer portrait — held here on a broken stub in the winter light at Sinhagad, just long enough.