When birds come home

It is mid March in Mumbai. It is supposed to be hot and humid. As it usually is all the year round with monsoon and December exceptions.

But it's cloudy today. To be fair, yesterday was also cloudy but today is dark. As dark as it usually is just before a downpour. It may rain and I don't have an umbrella with me. It's not that a change of weather is bad. I like rains. But the suddenness is rather strange.

I am not the only one confused with the weather change. The birds seem to be totally messed up by the onset of darkness. It was about 9 AM in the morning. The birds had just perched on the trees for their daily routine. The cloud came. They possibly understood that to be the beginning of the evening and end of day. Next thing I know, I see hundreds (yes, literally hundreds) of birds rushing back to their nests.

This is not a unique scene. I have seen this umpteen number of times in the monsoons. This is the first time I have noticed it in March (as far as I can remember) and that too while going to office.

I sometimes wonder what the birds do when they get home. It is not a philosophical question at all. My motives are existential. The birds gather food during the day and rest at night. Their biological clocks are tuned to such a schedule. Unlike humans, they keep to this schedule. So when the weather misbehaves and upsets this - they lose out on the most important thing they look for in the day.

Food.

That is what I am curious about. When it rains, do they keep stockpiles like rodents and humans do? Or do they go hungry?

The latter option is fatal in a city like Mumbai because rains often span for days on end. I intend to investigate this.

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