Aasheesh Pittie says birdwatching is not very unlike hunting, except that nothing is killed. “You track… you want to follow the bird… see it,” he says about this activity that he has pursued for nearly fifty years. Pittie, the editor of the ornithological journal Indian Birds, author of many classic reference books about birds and most recently, a collection of bird essays titled The Living Air: Pleasures of Birds and Birdwatching, was speaking atan event organised by the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS).
At the lecture, titled A Century of Watching Indian Birds, Pittie, who was in conversation with ecologist Suhel Quader, delved into various aspects of birding: the history of ornithology in India, some key figures who played a role in the evolution of the field such as Sálim Ali, Jamal Ara and Zafar Futehally, how social media influences birdwatching and the role of citizen science in conservation. He also offered insights into his own birding journey.
Sálim Ali | Photo Credit: Karthik J@Coimbatore
Pioneers of early 1900s
While the British were the first to document and collect Indian birds, by the first quarter of the 1900s, the focus had shifted to Sálim Ali. Ali’s collections of bird specimens, which went to the royal families in various erstwhile princely states in India and also the British Museum in London, were also often studied by Hugh Whistler, a British police officer and ornithologist who served in India between 1909 and 1926. “Sálim Ali’s behavioural notes and Hugh Whistler’s very detailed taxonomic notes comprised the literature of that period,” says Pittie.
Whistler was also involved in another important event in the history of Indian ornithology: the Vernay Scientific Survey of Eastern Ghats. A report based on the survey was published in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society (JBNHS), in 1932.“Ornithology wasn’t the popular birding, photography thing that it is today,” he says. “It was individual-based, institution-based. It was based on the passion of a person who couldn’t be in the field but had the money to support some activity that people did.”
The Vernay survey too was the outcome of a generous endowment of an English gentleman called A.S. Vernay. “The collection was sent to the British Museum,” he says, adding that the BNHS paper, though technical, is eminently readable for what it has to say about “the art of observation, the art of writing, the art of synthesis of knowledge that comes and how new knowledge is married to that.”
Quader and Pittie also spoke about how, through much of the early history of ornithology, the information gathered was typically from a dead specimen. “They didn’t have field guides which were good enough, optics that were good enough and they didn’t have identification skills which had developed enough to identify a bird from far away,” says Pittie, adding that multiple birds were shot to create collections and garner information about a species. “Most of the birds that they spoke about, wrote about were birds in the hand that were shot in the field. That was how birding was studied at that time.”
Purple Sunbird | Photo Credit: Saswat Mishra
Birding in the 1980s
Pittie’s own journey as a birder began in the 1970s and 1980s when he was still in school. Two incidents appear to have catalysed his initiation into birding. A friend’s father, who also happened to be related to Ali, came to Pittie’s school, spoke to the students about birds, and offered to take them birding with him. “I said, yes, let’s go and I liked it,” he says, admitting that he was mostly into big mammals back then and used to collect the World Wildlife Fund’s large posters of animals like leopard cubs and lion cubs. The back of these posters, he recalls, had a little blurb explaining what the organisation was about. “I wrote to them and subscribed to their newsletter, where I read about Salim Ali and the Newsletter for Birdwatchers,” says Pittie. who went on to become a member of the BNHS.
Another incident that played a role in developing this lifelong interest in birds was when Futehally took the trouble to respond to a letter that Pittie had sent him. “The fact that this boy had written to someone in the pantheon of bird watchers in India and this man had taken the trouble to reply,” he says. “I just wanted to go ahead.”
Once he was bitten by the birding bug, Pittie spent his spare time lugging around his father’s old heavy binoculars and birding at a small pond in Banjara Hills, a stone’s throw away from where he then lived. “The Dakhni landscape is full of boulders which had hollow pits where water collected, a little patch of green,” he says. One of his most vivid memories of the time spent birdwatching there was the sight of the red munia also known as the strawberry finch. Seeing that was almost like crossing a rubicon in your life, he says, with a laugh.
But when Pittie got into birding, information about birds was still fairly scant. “All we had was Sálim Ali’s The Book of Indian Birds which we all had a copy of. And those whoever could afford it had his handbook, a huge 10-volume work.” There was also the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society and the Newsletter for Birdwatchers, started by Futehally. “Besides this, there wasn’t any other literature available to us. Also, there was no internet or birdwatchers close to us who we could relate to, talk to or exchange notes with.”
Greater Coucal | Photo Credit: Albin Jacob
Power of citizen science
Interest in birding has grown considerably since then. In 2004, a journal called Indian Birds came into existence. “We decided we needed a new journal in India. Explaining the rationale behind starting the bi-monthly journal.” Pittie says that science should be brought to a reader who is a non-scientist in a language that the person can understand. He adds that Futehally and ornithologist V. Santharam played a vital role in its creation. The journal, now also available online, has grown over the years and played a significant role in creating a community of birders.
Pittie and Quader also discuss amateur birders’ role in surveying and documenting various species of birds. Ornithology, especially in the subcontinent, is still the domain of amateurs, points out Pittie.“Academic ornithology came very late, most of the people who’ve written the major books that we still refer to were not ornithologists,” he says. “I don’t think ornithologists have made a dent into what the amateurs have contributed over 100 years.”
He also highlights the role of the internet, particularly social media, in the rapid growth of birding as a hobby. “Social media has been a game changer in birding,” says Pittie. “The whole world is on your phone… people can buy cameras… travel is more accessible, easier, cheaper. It is a good thing for ornithology and birding,” he says.
Fiery Throated Hummin bird | Photo Credit: M N Jaykumar
Road ahead
While Pittie is happy with the increase in the number of people interested in birding, he feels that for the field of ornithology to progress, amateur birders and citizen scientists should be taught how to record natural history in a proper form. “I think institutions should be using amateur groups of people to direct the way natural history is recorded in India, so that it can be used for the future.”
Red billed Leiothrix | Photo Credit: Subhadra Devi
