Till recently Sleep and I were pretty good friends. By that I certainly don’t mean we were so into each other we spent all our waking hours together. Errr, that sure is a funny sentence if I ever heard one. If sleep and I were at all to spend all our waking hours together, they’d no longer be ‘waking’ hours. Right? But I digress.

What I meant by ‘we were good friends’ was that we connected pretty well, met at the right times only, and also said our goodbyes at an early hour each day. There was no business of hanging out together during the day which meant I had plenty of time to do stuff that needed to be done. One little butterfly gland came unhinged, and changed everything, egging sleep on to meet meet me at odd hours, day/night no bar and at other times holding it captive, making me wait and wait, in vain.

In short what I am trying to say is today is one of those days when Sleep has been busy throughout the day trying to get me into bed (and I have already obliged during the day, but will it leave me alone now? No!). So I will leave you with these pictures (not great ones as they were taken through a window pane from inside a room) of three Yellow-billed Babblers that came seeking asylum after 48 hours of incessant rain.

Of course, I told them they could stay as long as they wished, but they flew away when the rain stopped for a while.

©Shail Mohan 2015