Munias and Avadavats

Eleven species, all of them small, thick-billed seed-eaters that live in grass. They move in tight flocks, they feed by landing directly on a seeding stem and riding it down until the head is within reach, and they are gone the moment one bird decides to go. Everything about photographing them follows from that: forget the individual, find the seeding patch, and let the flock work toward you while you sit still on the ground beside it.

They are also the reason to say something about the cage-bird trade. Munias and avadavats are exactly what the trade wants — small, hardy, sociable, easy to keep alive in numbers — and they have been trapped out of the wild in enormous quantities for a very long time. The Green Avadavat, which occurs nowhere but India, has been pushed hard by it. A flock of munias in a field is an ordinary sight that has been made scarcer than it should be by an entirely avoidable pressure.

For a group this uniform, the identification traps are mostly young birds. Adult munias are strongly marked and separate cleanly; juveniles are plain warm buff with no pattern at all, look near-identical across several species, and turn up in mixed flocks with their parents. A featureless buff munia is usually not a puzzle worth solving from a photograph.