India, Through a Birder's Eyes.

IT began with parakeets, the brash, busybody rose-ringed parakeets of Delhi, with their lipstick red beaks and their irrepressible chatter, gossiping in the crevices of 15th-century tombs. Then one morning while I drank coffee, a shimmering blue-black sunbird came to drink nectar in my garden. At twilight one day, I looked up to see a hornbill perched on a neighbor's tree. An interview with the prime minister of India was repeatedly interrupted by the calls of a cantankerous peacock in his garden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]