Babblers create a ruckus wherever they go, pecking, poking and turning things over on the ground and constantly chattering amongst themselves. Seen here are a group of yellow-billed babblers (Argya affinis) on the IMSc campus.
There are around sixteen species of babblers in India, of which jungle babblers and yellow-billed babblers are common in southern India. They are even seen in cities, moving around in noisy groups, hopping on the ground and lower branches of trees. They are greyish-brown in colour and scruffy, but what they lack in looks they make up in character.
Babblers create a ruckus wherever they go, pecking, poking and turning things over on the ground and constantly chattering amongst themselves. It is not surprising then that their genus name, Argya, is derived from the Latin word argutus, for noisy. Babblers hop from one spot to another looking for food, insects, plant material and food scraps, taking short, low flights from one tree to another. Usually, one of the birds in the group acts as a sentinel, looking out for predators, while the others are busy foraging. And when they spot an intruder, like a cat, owl or a snake, a frenzy follows. The birds gather together, giving a loud cacophony of alarm calls, beating their wings in short flaps, relentlessly mobbing the intruder till it retreats.
Among the many babbler species, one can easily get confused between the jungle babbler (Argya striata) and the yellow-billed babbler (Argya affinis), which overlap in their distribution in southern India. The yellow-billed babbler has a pale whitish cap on its head, pale blue eyes and a gradient of grey in its plumage, which darkens at the ends of its feathers. While the yellow-billed babbler prefers drier and open habitats and has a restricted range limited to southern India, jungle babblers occur in more wooded areas and are distributed across the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka. Both species may co-occur around areas with human habitation such as parks and gardens. They can also be told apart by their calls, and one often hears babblers before seeing them.
Research on jungle babbler calls from the Behavioural Ecology Lab at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali has found a wide repertoire of vocalizations, each produced in a specific context. Jungle babblers produce 15 distinct calls, about half of which are used while in distress or when responding to threats. Agonistic calls are more similar to each other in the notes they contain and their organization, and quite distinct from calls used in more cooperative social situations. Put simply, jungle babbler calls are context-specific, where the structure of a call appears to be closely associated with its function. The sophisticated vocal repertoire of jungle babblers resembles that of other cooperative breeders, where young are raised by a larger social group.
Looking into the social organization of jungle babblers, a study from the seventies by the English ecologist AJ Gaston found that roles and behaviours within a group are ordered based on age and dominance. However, unlike other social birds, jungle babblers don’t appear to use aggression to establish their status. Instead, social play is common, especially in birds less than a year old. Gaston suggests that these bouts of play in young birds may determine their social status later in life. He notes some delightful details about their frolic: “Rough and tumble behaviour consisted of two or more birds engaging in a mock fight in which some lay on the ground more or less passively, while others rolled on top of them, or pecked them deliberately but gently…Mad flights consisted of one or several birds flying rapidly and apparently aimlessly among the branches of a tree, twisting and turning in acrobatic manoeuvres.”
On the IMSc campus, I have often seen yellow-billed babblers near the Ramanujan auditorium, among the trees near the football ground, in bushes around the herb garden near the canteen, and shrubs and trees behind the flatlets. They occur in groups of six or more (jungle babblers are called "seven sisters") and are easy to spot because of their conspicuous calls and activity.
