Tuntuni, the Tailorbird of Bengal's Village Gardens and Folk Tales

On 14 September 2023 the agriculture and nature section of Jagonews24 carried a feature by its feature writer Mamunur Rahman Hridoy on the tuntuni, the tiny and restless bird that sews its nest out of living leaves. The piece recalled the bird's place in the folk tales of rural Bengal, described its nest, its food and its habits, and voiced a worry: that the tuntuni, once seen everywhere in the villages, was no longer seen as often, as trees, bushes, canals, beels, rivers and streams were destroyed and the climate changed.

The feature gave the bird's scientific name as Orthotomus atrogularis and its English name as the dark-necked tailorbird. That name belongs to a different and much rarer species of the hill forests. The tuntuni of village gardens and homestead bushes is the common tailorbird, Orthotomus sutorius, which the Red List of Bangladesh calls Pati Tuntuni. This report keeps the feature's theme and its observations, corrects that detail, and adds what Banglapedia, the IUCN Bangladesh Red List of birds published in 2015, standard ornithological references and the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2012 said about the bird and its two relatives.

According to the feature, the tuntuni rolls leaves into a cone with its beak and stitches them together to build its nest, which is why it is also called the darji pakhi, the tailor bird. The writer described a bird of about 13 centimetres with a whitish breast and belly, an olive and reddish head and upper wings, and an upright tail with dark marks.

The feature listed the plants in which, the writer said, tailorbirds most often nest: bean, bottle gourd, jackfruit, sunflower, lemon, custard apple, fig and almond. Male and female, he wrote, build the nest together, and the workmanship sets it apart from the nests of other birds. It said the bird usually eats insects, and also earthworms, bees and the nectar of flowers, and that its diet includes the leaf insects of paddy, jute and wheat, caterpillars and their eggs. The tuntuni breeds throughout the year, the writer said, but mainly in the rainy season.

He described the tuntuni as a clever and restless bird that likes the bushes around homes, close to people, and never sits in one place for long: here one moment, gone the next. He ended with a plea to keep the natural balance and protect the bird's habitat, since, in his account, the loss of habitat was making it harder for the tuntuni to lay eggs and raise its young.

The feature opened with the line "Rajar ghore je dhon achhe, Tunir ghoreo se dhon achhe": whatever treasure is in the king's house, the same is in Tuni's house. The line comes from "Tuntuni ar Rajar Katha" (the tuntuni and the king), one of the stories in Tuntunir Boi, the collection of children's tales by Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury. In the text kept on Bengali Wikisource, taken from an edition published by Dev Sahitya Kutir in Calcutta, the tuntuni has its nest in a corner of the king's garden. The king's money has been put out in the sun to dry, and at dusk his men forget to take in one coin. The bird carries the shining coin to its nest and, believing itself rich, keeps singing the line. In the book the coin is simply a taka, a piece of money; the feature called it a gold coin.

The story goes on from there. The king hears the bird, has the coin taken back, and the tuntuni complains that the king, so hungry for wealth, has carried Tuni's treasure into his palace. Amused, the king returns it, and the bird sings that the king was frightened into giving it back. Angry now, the king orders the bird to be fried for his meal. The seven queens pass it from hand to hand to admire it, the bird slips away, and they fry a frog instead. Once the king has eaten, the tuntuni sings "Boro moja, boro moja, raja khelen byang bhaja": what fun, the king has eaten fried frog. The queens are punished, the king swallows the bird whole and it escapes with his belch, and at the second attempt a guard's sword meant for the bird strikes the king's nose. The tuntuni flies away from that country, and the king's men find only an empty nest.

Tuntunir Boi opens with three tuntuni stories: the tuntuni and the cat, the tuntuni and the barber, and the tuntuni and the king. Tales of tigers, jackals, crocodiles and foolish men follow, among them Bagh Mama ar Shiyal Bhagne and Panta Burir Katha. In each of the tuntuni stories the smallest creature wins by its wits, and that is the picture of the bird that generations of Bengali children have carried.

Upendrakishore was born on 12 May 1863 in Moshua village, then in Mymensingh district and now in Kishoreganj, and died in Calcutta on 20 December 1915. Besides writing for children he introduced modern halftone and colour block-making to South Asia, founded the block-making business that became U. Ray and Sons, and in 1913 started the children's magazine Sandesh. He was the father of the writer Sukumar Ray and the grandfather of the film-maker Satyajit Ray.

The same bird is known well beyond Bengal. In "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", one of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book stories, a tailorbird couple, Darzee and his wife, are among the main characters; darzee means tailor in Urdu and Hindi. Ornithological accounts note that Darzee's wife pretends to be injured in the story, a trick not known in the real species.

Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia of Bangladesh, describes the tailorbirds as tiny, insect-eating birds coloured olive-green to yellowish green, and recognises three in the country. The Red List of Bangladesh gives their local names: Pati Tuntuni for the common tailorbird, Orthotomus sutorius (Pennant, 1769); Kalagola Tuntuni for the dark-necked tailorbird, Orthotomus atrogularis (Temminck, 1836); and Pahari Tuntuni for the mountain tailorbird, Orthotomus cuculatus (Temminck, 1836).

The common tailorbird is the bird of the feature and of the folk tales. Banglapedia calls it a common resident of villages, bushes and open forests in every division, living at forest edges, in scrub, orchards and gardens, in the lowlands and in hills up to about 1,800 metres. The Red List says it is widely distributed throughout the country. The species was first described by Thomas Pennant in 1769, under the name Motacilla sutoria; nine subspecies are known across South and Southeast Asia, and the one that occurs in Bangladesh is Orthotomus sutorius patia.

The dark-necked tailorbird, the species named in the feature, is a bird of a different habitat. Banglapedia describes it as olive-green with a rufous crown and a yellowish bend of the wing; the male has a blackish throat and streaked neck, the female is a paler grey, and the eye is orange-brown. It lives in the dense scrub and bamboo thickets of the evergreen forests of Chittagong and Sylhet divisions, and Banglapedia calls it a rare resident. The Red List describes it as an uncommon resident of the hill forests of the north-east and south-east, whose global range is restricted to Southeast Asia; of its five subspecies, Orthotomus atrogularis nitidus occurs in Bangladesh.

The mountain tailorbird is the easiest of the three to tell apart, by its bright yellow belly, grey throat and breast and rufous forehead. Banglapedia describes it as a rare resident of the evergreen hill forests of Chittagong division, where it searches the undergrowth for tiny insects and often flies up to catch them in the air. Of its 13 subspecies, Orthotomus cuculatus coronatus occurs in Bangladesh. Genetic studies have since shown it to be closer to the Cettia bush warblers than to the true tailorbirds, and many bird lists now place it, as Phyllergates cucullatus, in a separate genus.

The feature said there are 15 species of tailorbird in the world. Counts differ between lists. The genus Orthotomus was set up by the naturalist Thomas Horsfield in 1821, and the IOC World Bird List, as summarised in standard references, places 13 species in it after the mountain tailorbird and its sister species were moved out. The name Orthotomus means straight-cutting; sutorius means cobbler rather than tailor. The Red List of Bangladesh placed the tailorbirds in the Old World warbler family, Sylviidae, while molecular studies place the common tailorbird in the family Cisticolidae, with the prinias and cisticolas.

The common tailorbird is 10 to 14 centimetres long and weighs 6 to 10 grams. Its upperparts are bright olive-green, its underparts creamy white, and its forehead and crown rufous. It has short rounded wings, strong legs and a sharp bill whose upper mandible curves at the tip. Its most familiar feature is the long tail, held upright and often flicked about, which gives it the look of a wren.

Males and females look alike, except that in the breeding season the male grows long central tail feathers. Young birds are duller. Both sexes have patches of dark, bare skin on the sides of the neck, which show when the bird calls and sometimes look like a dark band across the throat.

The tailorbird is shy and usually hidden in leaves, but its voice gives it away. Its song is a loud "cheeup-cheeup-cheeup", which varies from one population to another, and its two-note calls are repeated often. It is seen alone or in pairs, usually low in the undergrowth or in small trees, and sometimes hops on the ground. Outside the breeding season each bird roosts alone; in the breeding season a pair may roost side by side, sometimes with a newly fledged young bird between them, on thin twigs under cover, often close to houses and lights.

The bird's name, in Bengali and in English, comes from its nest. The edges of a large leaf, or of two leaves, are pierced and drawn together with plant fibre or spider silk to make a cradle, and inside it the bird builds the real nest, a deep cup lined with soft material. The leaves keep their upper surfaces outwards, and the punctures are so small that the leaves do not turn brown, so the nest stays green and hard to see.

Casey Wood, who studied tailorbird nests in Sri Lanka, sorted the bird's methods into sewing, riveting, lacing and matting. A stitch is made by piercing two leaves and drawing a fibre through them; the fibre fluffs out on the outside, so that in effect it works like a rivet. Sometimes the fibre from one rivet is carried on into the next hole and looks more like sewing. The naturalist Thomas Jerdon wrote that the bird tied knots, but later observers found that it uses none. One nest that Wood examined was lined with plant floss from Euphorbia, kapok and the silk-cotton tree, Bombax malabaricum, the shimul of Bengal.

Not every nest follows the pattern. Some are made from a single large leaf whose edges are riveted together, and some have no leaf cradle at all. The method is not unique to the tailorbird either: many prinias, its close relatives, build in a similar way.

Banglapedia gives the Bangladeshi picture. The common tailorbird builds a cone-shaped nest by stitching together the edges of one or two drooping leaves, in broad-leaved bushes and trees. The dark-necked tailorbird nests very close to the ground, sewing leaves with grass or rootlets and lining the nest with down, and the mountain tailorbird builds in bushes more than a metre above the ground. The plants the feature listed, from bean and gourd vines to jackfruit, lemon and fig, are the broad-leaved homestead plants that fit this description.

Like most warblers, the common tailorbird is an insect-eater. Standard accounts record it feeding on a range of beetles and bugs. It is drawn to insects at flowers and is especially fond of mango blossom. It also visits the flowers of the silk-cotton tree for nectar, and sometimes comes away dusted with pollen, so that its head looks golden. Banglapedia and the Red List of Bangladesh say it feeds on tiny insects and their larvae, foraging by day in pairs or family parties in villages, at forest edges, in scrub, orchards and gardens, and moving from branch to branch under the cover of leaves.

The feature's list of prey, from the leaf insects of paddy, jute and wheat to caterpillars and their eggs, is the writer's account; the references consulted for this report describe the diet in general terms as small insects, larvae, beetles and bugs, with nectar.

The feature said the tuntuni breeds all year but mainly in the rainy season, and the references agree. In India the breeding season runs from March to December and peaks from June to August, with the wet season. In Sri Lanka the main breeding periods are March to May and August to September, although the bird can breed throughout the year. Banglapedia gives the common tailorbird's breeding season in Bangladesh as May to July.

The usual clutch is three eggs. Incubation takes about 12 days, and the young leave the nest at about 14 days. Some sources say the female alone incubates and others that both sexes do, but both parents feed the chicks and keep the nest clean, and the male is said to feed the incubating female. Losses are heavy: rats and other rodents, cats, lizards and crow-pheasants, the greater coucal known in Bangladesh as boro kubo, take many eggs and chicks. The plaintive cuckoo, the koroon papia, sometimes lays its eggs in tailorbird nests and leaves the tailorbirds to raise its young.

The Red List of Bangladesh treats the homestead as a bird habitat in its own right. Traditionally, it says, every household in the villages had an orchard, a bamboo grove, a vegetable garden and a small pond, and villages had grassland and patches of jungle from which people gathered dead branches and fallen leaves for cooking. Such villages were good places for many birds, and the volume counts homestead vegetation as the ninth category of bird habitat in the country, after the forests, grasslands, rivers, haors, estuaries and the Bay of Bengal.

Among the passerines most commonly seen in the villages, the volume lists the tailorbird alongside the iora, shrikes, orioles, drongos, bulbuls, babblers, starlings, mynas, sunbirds, sparrows and weavers. It also notes the change the feature was worried about: with the growth of population and consumerism, many villages are turning into small townships or shanty towns, although some still keep their traditional look and remain friendly to birds.

The common tailorbird is also a familiar bird of town gardens: standard references describe it as a common resident of urban gardens, as well as of open farmland, scrub and forest edges.

IUCN Bangladesh's Red List of Bangladesh, Volume 3: Birds, published in 2015, assessed 566 bird species. It placed 10 in the Critically Endangered category, 12 in Endangered and 17 in Vulnerable, which together made 39 threatened species, nearly 7 percent of the birds assessed. Another 29 were Near Threatened and 55 were Data Deficient.

The common tailorbird was assessed on 10 May 2015 as Least Concern. The justification reads: "This common resident is widely distributed throughout Bangladesh. It is flexible and can survive in a wide variety of habitats." The assessment gave its extent of occurrence as 222,508 square kilometres and its area of occupancy as 139,771 square kilometres, recorded its total population and its trend as unknown, and noted that the previous national assessment, of 2000, had listed it as not threatened.

The two rarer tailorbirds were also assessed as Least Concern in 2015, after being listed as Data Deficient in 2000. The Red List said the dark-necked tailorbird can thrive in degraded forests and that a few of its habitats are protected, and that the mountain tailorbird can survive in degraded forests and that several of its habitats are protected. Worldwide, the common tailorbird is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List, in an assessment by BirdLife International in 2016.

The national assessment, then, did not class the tuntuni as threatened, and it did not have a population count or trend for it. The feature's sense that the bird is seen less often than before is the writer's observation of the countryside; the Red List itself recorded the transformation of villages that takes away the bushes and gardens the bird depends on.

At the time of the feature, wild birds in Bangladesh were protected by the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2012, Act No. 30 of 2012, dated 10 July 2012. Section 6(1) of the Act says that no person may hunt any wild animal without a licence or permit issued under it, and section 6(2) lets the government, by notification in the official gazette, ban the hunting of particular or all wild animals in a given forest or area, or in the whole country, for a set period.

Both of the Act's first two schedules are headed "Protected animal". The common tailorbird is listed in Schedule 2, and the dark-necked and mountain tailorbirds in Schedule 1.

Under section 38(1), a person who kills a bird or migratory bird named in Schedule 1 or 2 commits an offence punishable by imprisonment of up to one year, a fine of up to one lakh taka, or both; for a repeat offence the penalty rises to imprisonment of up to two years, a fine of up to two lakh taka, or both. Under section 38(2), collecting, keeping, buying, selling or transporting such a bird's trophy, meat or body parts is punishable by up to six months' imprisonment, a fine of up to 30,000 taka, or both, and on repetition by up to one year, a fine of up to 50,000 taka, or both.

Photo: Faisal Akram / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sources: Jagonews24 (14 September 2023), Banglapedia (Tailorbird), IUCN Bangladesh, Red List of Bangladesh Volume 3: Birds (2015), Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act 2012 and its schedules (bdlaws, Ministry of Law), Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, Tuntunir Boi (Bengali Wikisource), Wikipedia (Common tailorbird, Orthotomus, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury)