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Yet in the here and now of our own tumultuous century, in the high noon of the Anthropocene age, it is possible to discern a paradox emerging in our relationship to birds. Even as bird populations are declining rapidly in India—their habitats rapidly degraded by deforestation and urbanisation, their diets and reproductive systems disrupted by agrochemicals—the last 25 years have seen a great explosion in birdwatching in India.
Birding and “twitching” (the pursuit of rare bird sightings) are now mass pastimes, fuelled by the wide availability of information about birds and birdwatching hot spots on the internet, internet and social media platforms like eBird and Facebook birdwatching groups, and the democratisation of bird photography through mobile phones. The comprehensive, if troubling, State of India’s Birds report of 2023, for example, generates its insights from a repository of more than 30 million observations uploaded on the eBird website by over 30,000 birdwatchers.
In other words, the quality of our civilisational relationship with birds is changing: becoming more fragile among the general population, and more intense among a highly committed, rapidly expanding, and widely dispersed minority. These perceptions can be variously interpreted. But they are testament, I would like to think, of how easy it is to fall hopelessly in love with birds after the tiniest bit of prompting from the environment: a walk in a grove or forest with a parent or teacher, a picture shared on the family WhatsApp group, even a single flash of colourful plumage or the disembodied music emerging from the depths of a tree.
It has never been easier for a human being to become a birder of some distinction, or to infect a significant other with ornithophilia. And once a deep and durable inter-species relationship is established—not the narcissistic worldview of consumerism, but a viewpoint that can “twine beauty with science, and objectivity with empathy”, to quote Lyanda Lynn Haupt from her fine book on Darwin’s relationship with birds, Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent—so too must grow an awareness of our responsibility, as the stronger partner, to advocate for the gorgeous, charismatic, quirky feathered co-denizens of our world.
Works such as The Search for India’s Rarest Birds can be the building blocks to such awareness. Published by Indian Pitta Books, an imprint (itself perhaps an effect of the birding revolution in India) of the Juggernaut stable dedicated to books on birds and nature, the book is a compendium of thrilling first-person narratives by all manner of birders, ranging from world-renowned ornithologists (Aasheesh Pittie, Frank Rheindt, Pamela Rasmussen) to passionate amateurs with day jobs in other realms and compulsive twitchers.
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‘Black-hooded Oriole and Insect on Jackfruit Stump’, 1778, Sheikh Zain ud-Din, opaque colours and ink on paper. (getty images)
Every writer in this book is playing for very high stakes, and it is a pleasure to watch them set the scene. A bird can be “rare”, after all, for many reasons: not just because it is critically endangered by hunting or habitat loss, but because it can only be found in a very specific area or elevation, or because it is greatly reclusive. The Banasura Chilappan, the writer Pradeep J. tells us, can only be found in “a sliver of the Western Ghats”; the Nicobar Scops Owl is endemic to just two islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago; and the Mount Victoria Babax to only the Chin Hills range of Myanmar, edging into Manipur.
Encounters with such rare birds offer fine insights into many larger realities and long-historical processes: evolution, ecological niches, speciation. But equally, the visceral thrill of the search and the wonder and ecstasy, tinged with doubt and disbelief, of the discovery are also vividly documented here.
“I can remember each and every micro-moment of…those five to seven seconds, on that fateful morning of 15 January, 1986,” writes Bharat Bhushan of his sighting of the Jerdon’s Courser in the forests of Andhra Pradesh, nearly nine decades after its last recorded sighting (and in fact it has not been sighted again since 2008).
After three weeks of sweating it out along the coasts of Great Nicobar to sight a pair of Nicobar Megapodes—birds extraordinary not for their beauty, but their ability to use external heat from rotting vegetation to hatch their eggs by building enormous mounds which they work to keep temperature-controlled at 33 degrees Celsius—Radhika Raj finds one on her very last afternoon. But in that time, she has forged a relationship with the island itself. To love a bird is often to love a place.
By showing the reader how much ingenuity, study, patience, and luck goes into a single expedition in search of birdwatching gold, the authors collectively give us a picture of the giant superstructure of avian knowledge (collated, to a much greater degree than many other fields of science, by amateurs) from which their individual quests take shape and form.
For, as the editors Shashank Dalvi (himself a distinguished birdman) and Anita Mani tell us, only five new species of birds in India have come to light since 1947—a tribute to the thoroughness with which scores of ornithologists and naturalists combed the lush forests and wetlands of the Indian subcontinent during the golden, imperialism-inflected age of birding in the 19th century, collecting and classifying, writing up highly detailed field observations and commissioning gifted artists to paint realistic, rather than stylised, bird portraits. (My own favourite from this era is from 1778: the Bengali artist Sheikh Zain ud-Din’s painting of a black-hooded oriole on the branch of a jackfruit tree.)
As Sayam U. Chowdhury points out in his essay on bird scouting in the Sundarbans, if we are to keep the worlds of rare birds alive, birding must acknowledge “the delicate balance between conservation and livelihood”. Two heartening conclusions emerging from the book are the extent to which rare-bird sightings today are facilitated by local bird guides who were once hunters, and the burgeoning power of avitourism and community-run ecotourism in states like Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh.
Although the writing is somewhat uneven—the unavoidable effect of so many excitable individuals coming together between two covers—the book is overall a fine, infectious introduction to the pleasures of birding. It namechecks scores of birds alongside the rare ones to which it is devoted; offers short introductions to the life and work of fine birders from the past two centuries; does not shy away from some of the hard-science aspects of ornithology; and invites the lay reader to become a conduit (shall we say a human flyway) between individual birds and ornithology by showing how much fun can be had in recording and uploading observations, in poring over species maps and seasonality bar charts, all for free.
And it also dangles a carrot before the reader. As the ornithologist Frank Rheindt points out, despite the wealth of information on offer, “it is extremely unlikely that our current knowledge of India’s birds is complete.” Somewhere out there are the rare birds—both avian and human—of the next edition of such a book.
Chandrahas Choudhury is a novelist and usually watches birds from beside his mango tree in Bhubaneswar.
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