Chronicles of a honey hustler

One languorous afternoon, I sat on the front porch gazing at the brilliant blue yonder beyond our patch of grassland. Cotton clouds glided across the azure expanse of clear skies.

A silhouette of a largish brown bird shifted among the canopies of the towering Malabar neem trees (Melia dubia) by Navilu Kaadu’s eastern boundary. A magnified view through the binoculars revealed a majestic raptor with yellow eyes. It was a female oriental honey buzzard (Pernis ptilorhynchus). Raptors are birds of prey and are ace hunters. The bird soon took wing and even from a distance, the muffled flapping of its powerful wings travelled to my ears.

I spotted the bird during a later visit to the farm, on the same tree. The oriental honey buzzard, also known as Crested honey buzzard, Asiatic, and Eastern honey buzzard is a mid-sized raptor, around 23 inches. It gets its name from its unusual diet of larvae and pupae of social honeybees, wasps and hornets. They inhabit wetlands and forests intermingled with glades.

Ransacking beehives is par for the course for oriental honey buzzards, a feat that even the mighty elephants eschew — despite the allure of sweet honey — for fear of painful stings to their sensitive, hollow trunks.

How do these birds pull off this daring heist against an army of fierce killer bees, wasps and hornets?

Oriental honey buzzards have special adaptations to tackle their stinger-armed prey. A thick coat of scale-like feathers around their eyes, head and neck, shields them like a warrior’s helmet, from the dreadful stings of beleaguered bees and wasps battling for survival. The birds also have thin nostrils or nares to keep the raging insects out of their nasal cavities.

Unlike most raptors, oriental honey buzzards lack the brow ridge or the superciliary ridge above their eyes. This makes them look like pigeons above the neck, and hawks from the neck down. Their slick, long heads aid in rooting around for subterranean insect nests. Long powerful talons help break off chunks of bee and hornet nests on the wing. Sturdy hooked beaks come in handy when tearing apart honeycombs. They have designer tongues too, with a groove to pry out plump larvae snugly ensconced inside nest cells. Scientists reckon these raptors could have also evolved some sort of chemical defense to counter bee and wasp attacks, though the findings are inconclusive.

When bee and wasp supplies run low, they prey on reptiles, smaller birds, other insects and even snakes.

The males and the females of this species differ in appearance — a trait called sexual dimorphism. The male buzzard is smaller than the female. He sports a slate grey head and brown iris. The female is a brown-headed beauty with a chrome-yellow iris.

In the Indian subcontinent, the northern population of oriental honey buzzards migrate to Siberia and Japan in the summers for breeding, while the southern set is mostly resident. Male oriental honey buzzards put up an elaborate display of aerial acrobatics tracing loops in the sky, plunging, soaring and clapping their wings to woo females. Mated pairs build sturdy leaf-lined nests made from sticks on the higher branches of tall trees.

The female lays up to three cream or tan-coloured eggs. The chicks hatch in under five weeks. Like human babies, oriental honey buzzard chicks are altricial — they are born weak and helpless and need oodles of parental care till after they are fledged or become capable of flying. Both genders are devoted parents and take turns incubating eggs and nurturing the young.

Despite being categorised as a species of “Least Concern” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), scientists worry that wind turbines along their migratory routes and climate change-induced variations in atmospheric conditions and wind patterns could impede oriental honey buzzard migrations to their breeding grounds and back.

Reckless deforestation is also robbing these handsome birds of their arboreal habitats and unchecked use of pesticides on crops is endangering bee populations, their primary prey base.

Rooting for Nature is a monthly column on an off-kilter urban family’s trysts with nature on a natural farm.

(The author runs Green Goobé, a sustainable venture committed to a greener, cleaner planet. She posts as @ramyacoushik on Instagram. Reach her at [e-mail].)