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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.
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