An Oriental dollarbird ‘stops by’ Chembarambakkam lake

The previous documented sighting of a dollarbird in Chennai was at Guindy National Park in 2016; as far as the city goes, this species is among the rarest of rare passage migrants

The birding community’s relationship with any rare passage migrant is best outlined by the connection with an estranged, implacably bitter friend. If a meeting happens, it would be unplanned and fleeting. Often, the chasm would have grown wider than a hippo’s fully extended maw, the last interaction would be as removed from memory as the star Earendel from earth, that when a chance encounter does materialise, the person might go unrecognised at first sight.

On the morning of December 15, 2024, at the Chembarambakkam lake, an Oriental dollarbird (Eurystomus orientalis), at first clap of a pair of eyes, did not cause a sharp intake of breath. Instead, it caused the viewer’s brow to be knitted in mystified concentration.

Two brothers, S. Sathyakumar and S. Sivakumar and their common friend Saravanan Manian had been poking around (as only birders can) in a moderately wooded section caressing the outer perimeter of the Chembarambakkam lake.

That is when this dollarbird fell on Sathyakumar’s eyes, magnified by his binoculars. He saw the bird perched on a tree, but did not “see” it for what it was. He dismissed it as a parakeet explaining the bluish-green tint as a filter effect engineered by the early morning light. A doubt creeping closely on the heels of this judgement, he asked himself if he was missing something.

He sidestepped the idea of raising this question with the other two birders, fearing they would mock him with friendly laughter for failing to call a parakeet a parakeet. Derisive laughter gift-wrapped in friendliness can sometimes have the effect of friendly fire, unintended but still deadly.

“I came around to asking Saravanan to look at the bird through his camera viewfinder. He clicked it. It turned out to be a dollarbird,” says Sathyakumar with a half-suppressed laugh.

Birds generally get identified much before they are fully seen. A cursory look at a part of the bird — a diagnostic feature in ornithology speak — is all it takes to realise what the rest of it looks like. And out pops the bird’s name. They call it GISS. With rare passage migrants, GIFF hardly works, especially when the bird has not showed up for extended periods of time. These birders travel far to bird, and they have seen the dollarbird in its wintering ground in Kerala. Else, the identification would have been much delayed.