With its vibrant natural, cultural and architectural heritage, Pune is an explorer's delight. In this issue, MetroScan invites you to discover three tiny treasures, right in your backyard!

Pune's rich bird life has always been a source of much joy for bird watchers. With its hills, open maidans, gardens, parks, wooded areas, small lakes and the river; the city has provided a rich habitat for all kinds of birds.

Here are three birds we'd like you to meet. They're likely to be everyday visitors to your garden, even a green balcony. All of them are quite trusting and fearless, and luckily for us, inhabit even bustling city areas.

First, it's the Tailor Bird. This is a small olive-green bird, with a faintly rust-coloured head. Smaller than a sparrow, it is a restless little creature with a longish tail held jauntily at an angle to its body. You'll spot it hopping in and out of creepers and shrubs. And before you spot it, you're likely to hear its loud and cheerful call - tuwit-tuwit-tuwit, or as some people describe it: chup-baith, chup-baith chup-baith! The bird gets its name from the amazing nest that it builds. It literally stitches the edges of a large leaf (for instance, that of an almond tree) into a cone. For the 'thread' it uses a long thin reed or blade of grass. Once it chooses your garden to nest in, you'll see it come and go a hundred times a day, either to line the nest with soft fibres, or to feed two or three chicks that hatch.

The second little jewel that you could easily find flitting restlessly amongst your bougainvillea is the Ashy Wren Warbler, also called the Ashy Prinia. It is a light grey-blue bird, with a whitish underside, a long tail that it carries loosely, constantly flicking it from side to side. It often utters a sharp slightly nasal tee-tee-tee, or makes a sharp clicking sound exactly like a pair of garden shears going snip-snip. During the mating season, the male sings (warbles) several notes from a perch. Its nest is usually a longish 'purse' of woven fibres tacked and bound with cobweb to the leaves of a low bush.

The third jewel is the Purplerumped Sunbird. You'll see this busy bird anywhere that there are flowering shrubs and creepers. The female is a quiet yellow-green. The male's upper body appears blackish but when he catches the sunlight, you'll see the dark part is actually a brilliant, deep, metallic purple, with shiny blue streaks on the head. Its call is a loud chewit-chewit-chewit. Quite the acrobat, it will literally hang upside down to get its long curved beak into the funnel of a flower for a long sip of nectar. Its nest is an interesting hodge-podge of bits of dry leaves, fibres and cobwebs woven together, usually at the tip of a branch. The nest has a little protective overhang, like a porch, above the entrance.

All three little birds have really loud voices compared to their size, and it's likely that this is what you'll notice first!

G.D.