On a wing and a prayer: Songbirds that compete in Suriname

Every Sunday just after dawn, while much of the city sleeps, a group of men gather on the overgrown lawn of a public park in a quiet neighbourhood in the capital of Suriname, South America’s smallest country. They huddle together, and hush.

They have bird cages, each carrying a songbird — a picolet, a twa-twa or a rowti, as the species are known here. Over the next few hours, the men will lean in, silent and focused, and listen to the birds as referees note the duration of each burst of singing, and rate each songster’s performance on a chalk board. The audience is engrossed, but wins and losses are greeted by handlers with the same quiet collegiality that has marked the morning. Birdsong competitions, a sort of a Battle of the Bands between trained tropical birds, are a national obsession in Suriname. It’s a pastime that is closer to meditation than to the adrenaline-fueled sports that galvanise other nations, but behind it lies years of training, thousands of dollars of investment, and a close-knit community quietly resisting the accelerating pace of the modern world. “Some people like football or basketball,” said Derick Watson, a police officer who, on his days off, helps organise the competitions with a cigar in his mouth. “This is our sport. It’s a way of life.”

Birds are the most popular pets in Suriname, a nation of 500,000 perched on South America’s Atlantic corner, where a pristine tropical forest boasts one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems. Cages with parrots and other tropical birds are a common sight in the country’s markets and cafes, and even on the boats and buses that make up public transportation. A few years ago, in 2016, the placid sport had a brief brush with international celebrity when Mike Tyson, the American boxer, made a surprise appearance in Suriname, bringing his own bird. He shadowboxed with the audience — but lost to a local bird keeper. The most accomplished birds, with renowned stamina, sell in Suriname for up to $15,000, a fortune in the poor former Dutch colony, which gained independence in 1975. But part of the sport’s appeal is that at entry level, it is accessible to anyone, with young untrained birds available for just a few dollars in pet shops.

“It’s a tradition,” said Arun Jalimsing, a Surinamese pet shop owner and one of champions of last year’s competition. “We grew up with it.” “When my father gave me money to buy a bicycle, I went and bought a bird,” Jalimsing said. He said that his family has about 200 songbirds at their homes, and that he finds their constant peeps, tweets and chirrups relaxing.

His wife doesn’t quite agree. Training a songbird requires expertise, but also immense patience and perseverance. To build the birds’ singing endurance, aficionados spend years stimulating them through interaction, regulating their diets and putting them in proximity with female or male partners, according to elaborate training strategies meant to elicit courtship or competitive behaviour from each songbird. “You constantly observe them at home, observe their behaviour,” Watson, the policeman, said. It is a painstaking, repetitive work, but also a long-term investment. Some of the birds can live up to 30 years, a career span surpassing that of most professional athletes.

Anatoly Kurmanaev is a journalist with NYT©2020

The New York Times