Book Review: The Highs And Lows Of Looking For India’s Rare Birds

• Filled with fascinating stories of elusive birds, The Search For India’s Rarest Birds is an ode to some of India’s extinct and endangered bird life, and the birders who studied them.
• Edited by Shashank Dalvi and Anita Mani, the book narrates the tales of birds such as the mythical pink-headed duck, extinct since the 1950s, the re-discovered Jerdon’s courser and the Nicobar megapode once found in droves on its home island.
• India’s ornithological records have grown in recent years thanks to a widespread love and fascination of birds among Indians, aiding the rediscovery of missing birds.

“The biggest high for a birder is coming across a species hitherto unknown to science,” says the introduction to the book The Search for India’s Rarest Birds. It’s a sentiment extremely familiar to any birder who has searched for new birds or rediscovered a bird presumed to have gone extinct.

A lot of the credit for providing the baseline data on the distribution of birds in India goes to the British ornithologists and naturalists such as A.O. Hume, T.C. Jerdon, Edward Blyth, Brian Hodgson, Samuel Tickell and John Gould. Since India’s Independence in 1947, just five new species have been described — the Mishmi wren-babbler (by Dhillon Ripley in 1948), the Nicobar scops owl (by Pamela C Rasmussen in 1998), the Bugun liocichla (by Ramana Athreya in 2006), the Himalayan forest thrush (by Per Alstrom and team in 2016) and the Ashambu Sholakili (by V.V. Robin and team in 2017).

In the last 40 years, there has been a surge in scientific ornithological studies and amateur bird watching due to an increase in travel ease, availability of tools like digital cameras, equipment to record bird songs as well as modern field guides and websites for locating and identifying birds in the wild. This supportive environment has helped in the rediscovery of bird species missing for decades.

The editors, Shashank Dalvi and Anita Mani, both avid birders themselves, have done a splendid job along with other writers of enabling readers to participate and enjoy each discovery. The book begins with a chapter on the pink-headed duck, which went extinct in India in the 20th century. The author, Aasheesh Pittee, a birder and bibliographer, traces the existence of the bird from its painting done between 1777 and 1792 by Bhawani Das of Bihar. Das had been commissioned to make the painting by Sir Elijah Impey, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Bengal and his wife, Lady Mary. The bird was in a large aviary, a part of their private zoo. Using natural colours, Das painted a perfect image of the carnation and chocolate coloured duck with a tuft of deep pink on its crown. It was titled “Redhead” in Persian and became one of the most enigmatic birds found in South Asia. The painting travelled to England with the Impeys and then to the British Museum. In those days, hunting of birds and animals was a sport, as well as a source of protein in meals, says Pittee.

Bharat Bhushan’s rediscovery of the Jerdon’s or double-banded courser in 1986 captures the joy of rediscovering a bird, unseen for decades from the mid-nineteenth century. Its appearance, however, was short-lived as the bird has not been seen again since 2008. Birders, scientists and protectors have all failed to sustain the population of the species, says Bhushan, who was a field scientist and conservation officer at the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) from 1982 to 1992.

On January 12, 1986, Bhushan visited the Forest Guest House in Vontimitta in Andhra Pradesh to look for the Jerdon’s courser in Lankamalai hills, near Siddavatam, north of the Pennar river. It was raining relentlessly when the range forest officer informed him that a bird trapper called Aitanna had been given permission to enter the Lankamalai forests to search for birds indicated by Bhushan. On January 15, Bhushan drove to Aitanna’s house to look at a bird he had trapped and kept in a chicken coop. The bird was seated in the trapper’s closed palms with its fleshy pale yellow legs dangling out. Only the top of its head could be seen. Waiting for Aitanna to open his hands, Bhushan could see the bird’s low neck, the blackish crown and grey upper plumage.

Then the bird raised its head and stretched its neck and presto! It was a Jerdon’s courser!

Trappers like Aitanna and small game shikaris (hunters) living in villages have helped scientists and birders reach rare birds based on photographs shown to them. Bhushan concludes that the species is known only from the Lankamalai, Velikonda and Palakonda hills of the Eastern Ghats. A systematic search of these habitats and other suitable areas is needed to make contact with this enigmatic species again.

Pamela C. Rasmussen’s Tale of an Absconding Owl is the story of the rediscovery of the forest owlet in 1997 in the Tansa Wildlife Sanctuary in Mumbai’s backyard. It’s a brilliant example of fieldwork and painstaking study of museum specimens from across the world to find a near-mythical species. The sanctuary’s eBird charts now show it is seen frequently. After its rediscovery, BNHS sponsored several projects on the forest owlet and today, it can be found in several protected areas — the Purna Wildlife Sanctuary, Vansda National Park in Gujarat, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Tansa Wildlife Sanctuary and Melghat Tiger Reserve. Unlike the rediscovered Jerdon’s courser, the forest owlet is unlikely to disappear again soon, assures Rasmussen.

Dhillon Ripley and Salim Ali, interested in the mysterious forest owlet, and had searched for it along with S.A. Hussain in Melghat, Maharashtra and Mandvi, Gujarat without luck, beginning to doubt its survival. When Rasmussen began studying specimens of The Natural History Museum in U.K. and read Meinertzhagen’s Indian subcontinent bird records of the forest owlet sighting in October 1914 at Mandvi on the river Tapti, she decided to find out more about the bird. Along with Ben King and David Abbot, both with “owling” experience, she began the search for the forest owlet in the plain forests of India. In November 1997, the team moved to the forested lower hills of the Shahada region of Maharashtra. Early in the morning on November 27, King spotted a bird and whispered, “Look at that owlet.” Rasmussen and Abbot grabbed their binoculars and focused on the bird. “It didn’t have spotting on the crown and mantle, features that distinguish the forest and spotted owlets” and they knew it was the elusive forest owlet. Creeping up, Rasmussen was able to make a video as proof of the rediscovery of the owlet after 113 years. Abbot used digiscoping to photograph the owlet, obtaining better results than Rasmussen. The rediscovery was published in the Washington Post on December 28, 1997.

Though every chapter in the book gives you wonderful insights into the state of our forests and wild fauna, I found Radhika Raj’s In Search of the Last Megapodes gut-wrenching. The deputy editor at RoundGlass Sustain, she writes and edits on India’s biodiversity. The Nicobar Megapode is an iconic species found only within parts of the Nicobar, making it highly vulnerable to disasters like the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami that killed 70% of its population.

Named after its monstrous feet, the word megapode means ‘big foot.’ There are 22 megapode species on the islands of the Australasian region. The birds are not much to look at. Most resemble large chicken or stocky turkeys. The Nicobar megapode looks like a big brown chicken with a blood red head. What distinguishes the megapodes is they don’t use their bodies to incubate eggs but harness external heat to hatch them. They use their large feet to build enormous mounds near the coast with sand, coral, shells and rotting vegetation. In the heart of the mound, in a burrow lined with dry leaves, they lay salmon pink eggs. As the vegetation rots, it produces enough heat to incubate them. Built and rebuilt by multiple pairs, year after year, their nests can tower over a standing human and run as wide as tennis courts, says Raj.

British civil servant and ornithologist A.O. Hume had made a month-long trip to the island in 1874 and wrote about spotting several megapodes and mounds, especially in Galathea Bay, along the island’s east coast. They were in pairs and flocks of 30 to 50, running rapidly and even flying just like jungle hens. What astonished him was the giant size of the nests of these moderate sized birds. In 1994, when another noted ornithologist, Sivakumar, visited the island, he saw 35 active mounds along Galathea Bay. But in the 2004 tsunami, most of them were washed away, as were 70% of the megapodes. When Raj visited the island in 2021, all she could see were fleeting flashes of the megapode. On the last day of her trip at Navidera, a coast north of Campbell Bay, she and her team walked into a littoral forest and spotted a mound that towered over her. At 5 a.m., they settled into a hide and at about 4.30 p.m., they heard their clattering song and saw a blood red head, a brown torso and the famous thick foot approach a burrow. After a casual swipe here and there, the pair disappeared. There were squeals of joy all around at finally sighting the megapode that A.O. Hume once saw in droves.

“The megapode and the Nicobar group of islands exist on the margins — ignored and dispensable.” The islands have been used for testing army ammunition and when the Indian Navy wanted to use it as a missile testing range there were protests by tribals and ecologists. For the Nicobarese, the island is sacred — an abode for the spirits of their ancestors. Plans are afoot for building an airport, a township and a power plant on Great Nicobar. The hacking of eight lakh trees has been approved and the Galathea Bay Wildlife Sanctuary has been denotified. The “mitigation measures seem perfunctory and insincere,” says Radhika Raj. The compensatory afforestation is to be done 2,400 km away in Haryana. Also proposed are three new sanctuaries in the archipelago, including a megapode sanctuary on the 1.29 sq. km Menchal island overrun by coconut plantations.

Equally fascinating is the story of Mrs. Hume’s pheasant, written by Anita Mani and Shashank Dalvi. The bird is known locally by the people of Manipur and Mizoram as Nong-in or the bird that tracks the rain. Despite being the state bird of Manipur and Mizoram and having captive breeding programmes at zoos, this beautiful pheasant remained unseen in the wild till an intrepid birdwatcher from Manipur, Harmenn Huidrom, changed the status quo. With the help of local hunters he found that the bird, invisible in the daytime, can be spotted roosting at night.

Jessami, a village on the Manipur-Nagaland border, has now become the destination of birdwatchers keen to see this pheasant, first described in 1880 by A.O. Hume. The male is spectacular — about a metre long with red facial skin around the eyes and metallic blue on its throat, neck and upper breast. Its flanks are chestnut coloured, white bars on its wings and black and chestnut bars on a silvery tail.

Thanks to the state’s captive breeding programme and huge fines for killing it, the pheasant can now be easily spotted at night at Jessami and Razai Khullen on the Naga Hills. The story of this pheasant’s survival is heartening, with hunters turned guides helping in sightings. They fan out across forests after 6 p.m. while visiting bird watchers wait at a convenient spot till summoned with a phone call. The flapping of the pheasant’s wings and its droppings give away their locations at night. In January 2024, the local village community set up the Jessami Mrs. Hume’s Pheasant Community Reserve.

There are equally fascinating stories about the elusive masked finfoot, a wader that has now disappeared from most of its range. In its last breeding stronghold, the Bangladesh Sundarbans, the population was down to less than a 100. Like the finfoot fighting a losing battle to climate change, the Banasura laughingthrush is restricted to a few patches of forests on the high peaks of the Western Ghats in Wayanad District, Kerala.

It is after reading the book that you understand the travails of India’s rare birds and the desperate attempts of scientists and birders to keep them alive.

(Published under Creative Commons from Mongabay India. Read the original article here)