The biggest high for a birder is coming upon a species hitherto unknown to science. When faced with a species that defies every description in a field guide, with a call unrecognized by mobile apps like Merlin, or online sound repositories such as Xeno-canto, what do birders do?
There is rising excitement (which they must fight lest they are being led on by a mischievously cloaked juvenile bird), as images and calls are shared with ornithological savants (often live from the field, over WhatsApp and other social media networks), then exultation, as the return messages indicate that they are on the precipice of a rare find, a new bird.
Alas, in India, where ornithologists, naturalists, collectors and hobbyist birdwatchers have criss-crossed the subcontinent's myriad habitats and landscapes for over two centuries, this moment does not arrive often. The British Raj was a period of enormous discoveries -there were new bird species to describe and information to collect on species seen for the first time. This resulted in the first-recorded baseline data for species distributions.
To date, this information is still being used in our field guides. Much of the credit for this goes to naturalists such as A.O. Hume, T.C. Jerdon, Edward Blyth, Brian Hodgson, Samuel Tickell and John Gould (who, surprisingly, never set foot in India) who were active between the mid-1800s and carly 1900s.
In fact, the early ornithologists did such a thorough job that just five new species have been described since India's Independence in 1947-the Mishmi Wren-Babbler (by Dillon Ripley in 1948), the Nicobar Scops Owl (Pamela C. Rasmussen, 1998), the Bugun Liocichla (Ramana Athreya, 2006), the Himalayan Forest Thrush (Per Alström et al, 2016) and the Ashambu Sholakili (V.V. Robin et al, 2017). But there is still plenty of excitement to be found in the pursuit of species that have been lost for decades. As James Eaton writes on his quest to find long-lost birds, '... that feeling of laying your binoculars on the prize is an addiction greater than what any narcotic could give you.'
In the last 40 years, there has been a surge in scientific ornithological studies as well as hobby birdwatching, both of which have fed off the availability of the tools of the trade. Before 1998, the most reliable source of information was Dr Salim Ali's and Sir Dillon Ripley's 10-volume Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, published between 1968 and 1974. One couldn't carry these tomes to the field, so identification became an exhausting process. Then came modern-day field guides by Grimmett, Inskipp and Inskipp (1998), Krys Kazmierczak (2000) and Pamela C. Rasmussen and John C. Anderton (2005, 2012), which made bird identification easier. All three were easy-to-use and included updated information. In addition to these, the creation of e-groups, such as bngbirds and birdsofbombay, allowed for the exchange of information over the Internet. Webpages such as www.kolkatabirds.com and www.orientalbirdimages.org served as extremely useful databases. Simultaneously, two developments in India in the early 2000s the IT boom and the arrival of digital cameras triggered a massive surge of interest in birding and bird photography. Over the past decade, birding has become even more digital in India, with the appearance of recording equipment, which had been an integral part of birding in Western countries since much earlier. Today, websites such as www.xeno-canto.org are extremely popular among birders, both for locating birds in the wild and for identifying them. Over the last 15 years, platforms such as Facebook have catalysed the creation of many birding and wildlife groups; examples include Indian Birds, with over half a million members, and Sanctuary Asia, with over 2,50,000 members. Today's birders also have recourse to powerful global platforms, such as eBird, to track and maintain records of species sightings.
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