Cupid at work in Guwahati
Nilanjana Parashar, a law student in Guwahati, and Ankit Dutta, a civil services aspirant, have lived 20 minutes away from each other almost their entire lives. They’ve walked the same streets, gone to the same stores and dined at the same restaurants, but it took a match on Okcupid for their paths to cross.
And even then, a real meeting would have to wait, because three days after they matched, the lockdown was announced.
They spent the next couple of months on the phone, sharing random thoughts and long-held dreams. “It was around mid-april, during the Assamese festival of Bihu, that we decided to video call for the first time,” says Parashar. “I made the first move by suggesting it.”
What followed was the familiarity of a routine they built for themselves: Calls after breakfast, after lunch, before bed.
While they waited to have their first date, Parashar and Dutta decided to have a virtual one. They dressed up, made themselves some noodles, and sat down, ready to present their best selves to each other. “It didn’t go as planned,” says Parashar. “It was awkward because until then we had just showed up in our pyjamas, lolled in bed. There had been no pretence. We realised this was not who we were.”
That was their only virtual date.
But their feelings grew over the lockdown and they did both wonder what it would be like to go on a conventional movie-and-dinner date.
When they finally met in May, it was splendid, says Parashar, even though there was nothing conventional about the outing. “We went grocery shopping at the local market. I thought it was going to be a little awkward to bargain in front of him…”
“So that’s why you didn’t bargain that day!” Dutta says.
“I had never had so much fun buying groceries,” says Parashar.
With roots in the same region of Assam, Parashar and Dutta found they had many shared experiences growing up. “We understood the inside jokes, etc,” Dutta says. They’re both foodies and have found ways to cook together, even though they both live with their parents. “Our sense of humour matches,” says Parashar. “He finds me funny and I find him funny.”
Dutta turned out to be a calming presence in Parashar’s life, while Parashar brought the fun and games during a stressful time.
“I think the lockdown would have been horrible, it would have been much worse if we hadn’t had each other,” says Parashar. “We were worried about what was happening around us, but amidst it all, we shared something that was unique.”
The common rosefinch winters almost entirely on the Indian subcontinent. It spends the rest of the year spread across Asia and Europe, but from November to February, hunkers down here, waiting for the weather to improve before it sets off on its travels again. An animated map put together by Bird Count India (BCI), using data collected globally and from numerous bird counts in the country, shows the massive journeys undertaken by this little bird.
Such maps, for a range of species, are now available on the revamped website birdcount.in, as part of BCI’S efforts to collect, consolidate and represent data from across the country. In interactive and accessible ways, BCI aims to show how many of which species are found where and when, and how species react to changes in habitat.
The Bengaluru-based initiative was founded in 2013 and draws on millions of observations from over 70 organisations and citizen science groups in India that conduct sighting and counting excursions through the year. “We work with them to increase collective knowledge about bird distributions and populations,” says coordinator Mittal Gala (above right), who works alongside conservation scientist Suhel Quader and research associate Ashwin Vishwanathan.
BCI also conducts the Great Backyard Bird Count in India every February, a fourday event in which birders spend 15 minutes per day recording on a checklist the birds they see and hear. The 2021 edition concludes on February 15.
BCI collaborated on the first global GBBC, launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in 2013. Two hundred birders from India took part that year, 438 checklists were submitted and 537 species recorded. For a sense of how interest in birding is growing in India, GBBC 2020 had over 2,000 birders from 309 districts who uploaded 24,966 checklists and recorded a total of 924 species, accounting for about 70% of all bird species known to occur in India.
Cornell’s popular ebird website and app are used to record this data. BCI manages the ebird platform in India, coordinating the collection of data from India, interpreting it (as with the common rosefinch map), and spreading awareness through its websites and social media pages.
One challenge BCI still struggles with is finding birders in regions of data deficiency. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Haryana usually see the least representation.
But even through 2020, Bird Count India was busy. “Birdwatchers who generally like being outdoors, some who even travel to watch migrants and rare birds, spent a lot of time listing in their balconies, on rooftops, in gardens and backyard or local patches of green,” says Gala. “And they made some cool sightings.”
Highlights from last year included a few firsts for the ebird portal: a willow warbler in Kerala; a Japanese thrush and a Sichuan leaf warbler in Arunachal Pradesh; a Pallas’s rosefinch in Jammu & Kashmir; and a Eurasian oystercatcher in Uttar Pradesh.