Stage 1What Birdwatching Is

Birdwatching is the practice of finding wild birds, working out what they are, and paying attention to what they do. That is the whole of it. Nothing is bought, nothing is taken home, and the birds are left exactly where they were found. What the birdwatcher keeps is a memory, a note, sometimes a photograph or a recording, and a list.

It is one of the few hobbies that can begin on a balcony. Birds are active by day, most of them are visible, many are loud, and they live everywhere people live. A flat in a large Indian city will usually have a dozen species within earshot of its windows before breakfast: crows, mynas, pigeons, bulbuls, a kite overhead, sunbirds in the neighbour's hibiscus. A beginner with no equipment at all can learn those in a week. A specialist with a telescope can spend thirty years on the gulls of one estuary and still be learning.

Birdwatching, birding and twitching

The words overlap and people argue about them, so here is how this guide uses them.

Birdwatching is the broad activity, from a relaxed walk to a serious survey. Birding is the word most active practitioners now prefer; it suggests going out on purpose to find birds rather than admiring whatever turns up. The two are used interchangeably here. Twitching is a narrower habit: travelling, often far and at short notice, to see a rare bird someone else has found. Ornithology is the scientific study of birds. The line between it and serious birding is blurred, because a great deal of what is now known about bird distribution and numbers comes from careful amateurs (see Stage 10).

Who this guide is for

It is written for four readers at once: the complete beginner, the practising birder who wants to get better, the specialist who wants specifications and identification detail, and the reader who simply likes a good story. The main text serves the beginner and the general reader. First Steps boxes say what to do now, cheaply; For the Birder boxes carry the numbers and finer detail; Sidebars tell a story or make an argument.

How the guide is arranged

Part I is birdwatching anywhere in the world: history and identification in Stages 2 to 5, optics and books in Stages 6 and 7, fieldcraft, habitats and migration in Stages 8 and 9, and lists, citizen science, photography, recording and ethics in Stages 10 to 12.

Then comes a band on care and preservation. Birders do not collect birds, but they own things that are expensive or irreplaceable: binoculars that fungus can ruin in a few Indian monsoons, and decades of notebooks, checklists, photographs and recordings. Stages 13 and 14 deal with keeping all of it safe. Stage 15 closes Part I with the path from beginner to specialist.

Part II is the Indian story: the country's birds, the people who studied them, the great sites, the winter migrants, the community counts and the law.

Stage 2From Gun to Glass: A Short History of Watching Birds

People have watched birds for as long as there have been people. Farmers timed sowing by the arrival of migrants, sailors read seabirds for signs of land, and hunters, falconers and priests all needed to know one bird from another. What is new is watching birds purely to know them, alive and undisturbed. That habit is only a little over a century old.

The age of the gun

For most of the nineteenth century, ornithology meant specimens. A bird was identified with certainty only once it was dead, skinned and laid in a museum tray beside others of its kind. Sight records were distrusted, often with good reason, since without optics most small birds were a blur. The great bird painters of the period worked largely from shot birds, sometimes wiring the bodies into lifelike poses before painting them.

There were exceptions. Gilbert White, a country parson in southern England, recorded the living birds of his parish for decades in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, published in 1789, and separated three very similar leaf warblers largely by their songs.

The backlash

Two things turned the tide. The first was fashion. In the late nineteenth century, bird feathers, and sometimes whole birds, were in enormous demand for women's hats. Egrets were shot at their breeding colonies for their fine breeding plumes, and the chicks were left to starve. The outrage this caused, much of it organised by women, led to the founding in Britain in 1889 of what became the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and from 1896 to the Audubon societies in the United States.

The second was a change of habit. In 1900 the American ornithologist Frank Chapman proposed counting birds on Christmas Day instead of competing to shoot the most of them, a count that still runs every winter. In 1901 the English writer Edmund Selous published a book titled Bird Watching, arguing for patient observation of living birds over collecting.

Glass takes over

Prism binoculars became available in the 1890s, and after the two world wars surplus military optics made good glass affordable. What was still missing was a way to put a name to a bird seen at a distance. In 1934 Roger Tory Peterson published A Field Guide to the Birds, which showed similar species side by side in the same pose, with small arrows pointing at the features that separated them. The idea of the field mark made sight identification a teachable skill, and the field guide became the birder's second essential tool.

Later decades added telescopes, tape recorders, digital cameras, online checklists and identification apps. Each made birding easier, and each brought arguments about disturbance and accuracy that later stages take up.

India had its own version of all this, with its own collectors, its own campaigners and a figure who shaped the whole hobby. That story begins in Stage 17.

Stage 3Identifying a Bird: Size, Shape and Behaviour

The beginner's instinct is to look at colour first. It is the least reliable place to start. Colour changes with light, age, season, wear and wet feathers, and a surprising number of birds are simply brown. Experienced birders work in a different order, and most of their identifications are made before they have properly seen a single colour.

The order runs roughly like this: how big is it, what shape is it, what is it doing, and where and when is it? Only then comes plumage (Stage 4) and sound (Stage 5). Each question narrows the possibilities, and by the time you reach the field guide you are choosing among a handful of species rather than a thousand.

Size, by comparison

Estimating size in centimetres is almost impossible in the field, especially against sky or water. Compare instead with birds you already know. Field guides give a length from bill tip to tail tip, and a small set of familiar reference birds lets you translate: smaller than a sparrow, bulbul-sized, between a myna and a pigeon, crow-sized, kite-sized.

Distance fools everyone, so judge size against something beside the bird when you can, and remember that a long tail inflates a length figure.

Shape

Shape carries more information than any other single feature, because it follows from how a bird lives.

Look at the bill first. A hooked bill tears meat. A short, thick, conical bill cracks seeds. A fine, pointed bill picks insects. A long, down-curved bill probes flowers or mud. A dagger bill spears fish or frogs. A broad, flat bill sieves water or snaps flying insects. Then the legs: long for wading, short for perching, strong for walking. Then the tail: long or short, square, forked, rounded, graduated. Then the wings: in flight, are they broad and fingered like a kite's, pointed like a falcon's, or rounded like a babbler's? Finally the overall posture: upright on a wire like a bee-eater, horizontal like a pipit, hunched like a heron.

Behaviour

Birds of similar appearance often behave quite differently, and behaviour can clinch an identification when plumage cannot.

• How it feeds. Bee-eaters and drongos fly out from a perch to catch an insect and return to the same perch. Flycatchers do the same at shorter range. Pipits walk; larks walk too, but many sparrows hop.
• How it moves on a tree. Woodpeckers work up a trunk using the tail as a prop. Nuthatches can move down it head first.
• How it flies. Many woodpeckers and finches bound up and down in flight. Vultures, storks and many eagles soar on thermals with barely a wingbeat. Kestrels and pied kingfishers hover in one place.
• Tics and habits. Wagtails pump their tails constantly, and many shrikes perch prominently on a bush top or a wire.
• Company. Some species are nearly always in flocks, some in pairs, some alone.

Where and when

A field guide's range map and its habitat notes are identification tools, not background. A bird that looks like a species found only in the Himalaya, seen on a wetland in Tamil Nadu, is almost certainly something else. The season matters just as much, since many species are present only in winter or only during the rains (see Stage 9). Rarities do happen, but the first rule is that common birds are common. The unusual bird is usually a common bird looking unusual.

Stage 4Plumage and the Topography of a Bird

Once shape and behaviour have narrowed things down, plumage decides between the close candidates. To use plumage well you need to name the parts of a bird precisely, because "a white stripe on the head" could mean any of four different features, and field guides describe birds in exactly these terms. The map of a bird's external parts is called its topography.

The head

The crown is the top of the head, and the forehead is its front. A pale line above the eye is the supercilium, the eyebrow. A dark line through the eye is the eyestripe. The small area between the eye and the bill is the lores. A ring of bare skin or feathers round the eye is an eye-ring. The patch behind and below the eye is the ear-coverts. A stripe running down from the base of the bill, like a moustache, is a moustachial stripe, and one lower down, bordering the throat, is a malar stripe. Below the bill come the chin and the throat, and at the back of the head the nape.

Upperparts and wing

Behind the nape lies the mantle, then the back, the rump and the uppertail coverts, which cover the base of the tail. The scapulars are a group of feathers on the shoulder that cover the join between wing and body.

The closed wing is layered like roof tiles. Rows of coverts cover the bases of the flight feathers. When the tips of the greater or median coverts are pale, they form a wing bar, and whether a small warbler has none, one or two wing bars is often decisive. The long outer flight feathers are the primaries; the inner ones are the secondaries; and the innermost, often boldly patterned, are the tertials. The distance the primaries stick out beyond the tertials on a closed wing is the primary projection, a detail specialists measure by eye. Many ducks show a bright, often glossy patch on the secondaries called the speculum.

Underparts, tail and bare parts

Below the throat come the breast, the belly, the flanks along the sides, the vent and the undertail coverts. Note where streaks, spots or colour stop and start. On the tail, look at the pattern of the outer feathers, which often flash white in flight. And do not ignore the bare parts: the colour of the bill, the legs and the iris can separate species that are otherwise nearly identical.

Age, sex and season

Plumage is not fixed. In many species males and females differ, which is called sexual dimorphism. Young birds often look different from adults, and large gulls and eagles pass through several years of intermediate plumages. All birds replace their feathers in a regular moult, and many look quite different in the breeding season. The cattle egret, plain white for much of the year, takes on orange-buff plumes on the head and back when breeding.

Some birds even have a dull plumage between breeding seasons, called eclipse plumage. The males of many ducks do this. So does the male purple sunbird, a common garden bird across much of India: glossy purple-black when breeding, and outside that season much duller, with a dark stripe running down the centre of a pale breast.

Feathers also wear and fade, so the same bird can look quite different in fresh and in worn plumage.

Light and other traps

Light changes everything. A backlit bird looks dark, low sun warms every colour, forest shade greys greens and yellows, and wet or dusty feathers change tone. Before relying on a colour, ask what light you saw it in, and whether the feature could be a shadow.

Stage 5Calls and Song

In a forest, most birds are heard long before they are seen, and many are never seen at all. A birder who knows sounds finds several times as many species as one who does not, and finds them faster. Learning bird sounds is harder than learning plumage, and it is also the single skill that most separates competent birders from beginners.

Song and call

Birds make sounds with the syrinx, an organ at the base of the windpipe that can, in some species, produce two notes at once. Birders divide the sounds into two broad kinds.

Song is usually longer and more complex, and is used to defend a territory and attract a mate. In many northern species it is mainly the males that sing, and mainly in the breeding season. That rule is weaker than older books suggest: female song turns out to be common, particularly in the tropics, and many Indian birds sing at times tied to the monsoon rather than to spring.

Calls are shorter and serve many purposes: keeping in contact, warning of danger, begging, and keeping a flock together in flight. Calls are often more useful for identification than song, because they are given all year.

How to learn sounds

Learn one sound at a time, and start with the common birds around you, not a recording of two hundred species. Four habits help.

1. Track the sound to the bird. When you hear something you do not know, find the singer and watch it make the sound. A sound linked to a sight is remembered; a sound heard only on a recording rarely is.
2. Describe it. Is it high or low? Is it one note repeated, a phrase, or a jumble? Is it pure and whistled, harsh, buzzy, liquid or metallic? Does it rise, fall or stay level? Writing a short description forces you to actually listen.
3. Use a phrase to remember it, such as the "did he do it" often used for the red-wattled lapwing. Such phrases are memory aids, not transcriptions.
4. Review recordings after the walk, not instead of it. Compare what you heard with reference recordings of the likely candidates.

Some Indian sounds to begin with

The Asian koel is heard across most of India, especially in the hot months: the male gives a loud, rising, repeated two-note call, and the female a quite different bubbling, rapid series. The common hawk-cuckoo repeats a three-note phrase, climbing in pitch and urgency, which gives it the old name of brainfever bird. The coppersmith barbet repeats a single hollow "tuk" for long periods, like a metalworker tapping. The greater coucal gives a deep, resonant series of hoots. The white-throated kingfisher has a loud, descending whinnying rattle, often from a wire or rooftop.

Reading a spectrogram

A spectrogram, also called a sonogram, turns a sound into a picture: time runs left to right, pitch runs bottom to top, and loudness shows as darkness or colour. A whistle appears as a thin line; a harsh call as a broad smudge; a trill as a row of repeated marks. Spectrograms make patterns visible that the ear misses, and they help people whose hearing of high notes has faded, which happens to most people with age.

Traps

Some birds are skilled mimics: drongos, the greater racket-tailed drongo above all, copy other species, and a forest can seem full of birds that turn out to be one drongo. People imitate koels too. Sound identification apps are useful for suggesting what to look for, but they make mistakes with distant, overlapping or unusual sounds, so treat a suggestion as a lead, never a record. And do not play recordings to call birds in; Stage 12 explains why.

Stage 6Binoculars

Binoculars are the one piece of equipment that nearly every birder uses on nearly every outing, and the one where spending wisely makes the biggest difference. A good pair lasts decades. A poor pair gives eyestrain, misses birds in dim light and, in India, may be ruined by fungus within a few years. This stage explains what the numbers mean so that you can buy with confidence.

What 8x42 means

Every binocular carries two numbers. In 8x42, the first number is the magnification: the bird appears eight times closer. The second is the diameter, in millimetres, of each objective lens, the large lenses at the front. Bigger objectives gather more light, which gives a brighter image in poor light, but they also add weight and bulk.

Magnification. More is not simply better. Higher magnification shows more detail but also magnifies every tremor of your hands, darkens the image and narrows the view. Most birders find 7x or 8x the easiest to use, especially in forest, where birds are close and move fast. 10x suits open country, wetlands and raptors. Above 10x, most people cannot hold the image steady without support.

Objective size. A 42 mm objective is the common compromise between brightness and weight. 32 mm models are lighter and handier, and are excellent in good light. 50 mm models are brighter still, and heavy.

Exit pupil

Hold binoculars at arm's length, pointed at a bright sky, and you will see a small bright disc in each eyepiece. That is the exit pupil, and its diameter in millimetres is the objective size divided by the magnification. An 8x42 has an exit pupil of about 5.25 mm; a 10x42, 4.2 mm; an 8x32, 4 mm; a compact 10x25, just 2.5 mm.

The number matters because your own pupil changes size. In bright daylight it is only a few millimetres across, so almost any binocular is bright enough; at dawn, at dusk and in dark forest it opens wider, and a small exit pupil looks dim. Pupils open less with age. For Indian birding, where the best hours are early and forests are dark, an exit pupil of 4 mm or more is a sensible minimum.

Field of view, close focus and eye relief

Field of view is the width of the scene you see, given either in metres at 1,000 metres or in degrees. One degree is about 17.5 metres at 1,000 metres. A wide field makes it easier to find a bird and to follow one in flight.

Close focus is the nearest distance at which the binocular can focus sharply. Birds in undergrowth, at a water's edge or at a feeder are often only a few metres away, and many birders also watch butterflies and dragonflies. A close focus of 2 metres or less is very useful.

Eye relief is the distance behind the eyepiece at which the full image is visible. Spectacle wearers need long eye relief, roughly 15 mm or more, and eyecups that twist down.

Prisms, glass and coatings

Binoculars use prisms to turn the image the right way up. Porro prism binoculars have the familiar offset, wide-bodied shape and good optics for the price, but are harder to waterproof. Roof prism binoculars are straight-barrelled and compact, and most modern birding binoculars are of this type. ED or HD glass reduces colour fringing, and fully multi-coated optics, with anti-reflection layers on every glass surface, are what to look for.

For India, insist on binoculars that are waterproof and fogproof: sealed with O-rings and filled with dry nitrogen or argon, so that moisture cannot get inside and fog or grow fungus on the internal surfaces. Stage 13 explains why this matters so much here.

Stage 7Telescopes, Field Guides and Apps

After binoculars, a birder's kit grows in three directions: more reach, in the form of a telescope; more knowledge, in books; and, increasingly, a phone full of tools. None of these is essential on day one. All of them become useful, and each has traps.

The spotting scope

A spotting scope is a single-barrelled telescope used on a tripod. It is indispensable on wetlands, estuaries and coasts, where ducks and waders sit hundreds of metres away, and at watchpoints for raptors and migrants. It is much less useful in forest, where birds are close and brief.

Scopes are described like binoculars. The objective is usually 60–65 mm in lighter models and 77–85 mm in larger ones, which give a brighter, more detailed image at the cost of weight. Most use a zoom eyepiece, commonly ranging from about 20x to 60x. The highest magnifications are rarely usable in practice. The image dims as magnification rises, and on the Indian plains, from mid-morning onwards, rising heat makes the air shimmer so badly that 30x often shows more than 60x.

The body is either angled, with the eyepiece at 45 degrees, or straight. Angled scopes are easier to share among people of different heights and kinder to the neck when looking up; straight scopes are quicker for beginners to aim, and easier to use from a car window.

A scope is only as good as what holds it. A flimsy tripod that shakes in a breeze wastes an expensive scope. Look for sturdy legs and a smooth fluid head that pans without jerking. Many birders also use a clamp or bean bag on a car window, which doubles the vehicle as a hide.

Digiscoping, photographing through a scope with a phone held to the eyepiece by an adapter, rarely matches a camera with a long lens, but it records a distant bird well enough for a checklist (see Stage 11).

Field guides

A field guide is a book designed to identify birds in the field: compact, arranged so that similar species appear together, with range maps and short texts focused on identification.

Guides come in two main forms. Illustrated guides show each species in a standard pose, painted to show the typical bird with its key features clear, and are usually better for learning what separates similar species. Photographic guides show real birds, but each photograph is one individual, in one light, in one pose, and can mislead as easily as help. Many birders own one of each.

To get the most from a guide, read its introduction, learn roughly where each family sits in the book, leaf through the species for your region before a trip, and check the edition, because names, ranges and species limits change.

Apps and digital tools

Phones now carry digital field guides, apps that suggest identifications from a photograph or recording, and checklist apps (see Stage 10). Download offline packs before leaving, since signal is often absent where the birds are best. Suggestions are only as good as the image or sound, and are sometimes confidently wrong. And reaching for an app before looking properly at the bird is the fastest way never to learn identification.

Stage 8Fieldcraft

Fieldcraft is the set of habits that lets you see more birds, closer, without disturbing them. It costs nothing and no equipment replaces it. Two birders walking the same path at the same time can come back with very different lists, and the difference is usually fieldcraft.

When to go

Birds are most active in the first two or three hours after sunrise. In most of India, activity falls sharply by late morning as heat builds and picks up again in the late afternoon, while owls and nightjars are best at dusk. The hours after rain are often busy, strong wind keeps small birds hidden, and winter fog in north India can delay activity for hours.

How to move

• Walk slowly, and stop often. A useful rhythm is to walk twenty or thirty paces, stop, look and listen for a minute, and move on.
• Keep the sun behind you where you can, so that birds are lit from your side and their colours show.
• Stay off the skyline. A human silhouette against the sky is alarming to birds. Use the edges of paths, trees and banks.
• Approach at an angle, not straight towards a bird, and stop before it shows signs of unease: stretching up, calling, flicking its tail, or turning to face away.
• Stay in the vehicle where birds are used to vehicles. A car or jeep is often a better hide than anything you could build.
• Wear muted colours. Olive, brown and grey disturb birds less than white or bright colours. Quiet fabrics help too.

Where to wait

Sometimes the best fieldcraft is to stop walking altogether. A fruiting fig tree draws barbets, hornbills, pigeons, orioles and many more. In the dry season, any water becomes a magnet. Sit quietly nearby, in shade and partial cover, and let the birds come. Many reserves have hides, screened shelters beside a waterhole or wetland, and a good one repays a morning spent in it.

Reading the forest

In woodland and forest, small insect-eating birds often travel together in mixed flocks, which Indian birders call a bird wave. The forest can seem empty for half an hour, and then suddenly be full of birds for five minutes. When a wave arrives, stand still and let it pass around you, working through the birds rather than chasing one.

Learn alarm calls. A harsh, continuous scolding from several small birds at once often means they have found an owl, a snake or a cat, and are mobbing it. Following the noise carefully, and staying back, can lead to a roosting owl.

Safety

Birding is gentle, but it takes place outdoors, often early, and sometimes in wild places. Be conservative.

• Heat. Carry more water than you think you need, and oral rehydration salts in summer. Stop in shade if you feel dizzy, sick or headachy. Confusion, or hot skin that has stopped sweating, is a medical emergency: cool the person and get help immediately.
• Sun. Hat, long sleeves and sunscreen, especially on open wetlands and in the desert.
• Ticks and leeches. Long trousers tucked into socks help against ticks in grassland and scrub. In wet forests during the monsoon, leech socks are worth having. Check yourself after the walk.
• Snakes. Watch where you step and put your hands, and carry a torch after dark. If someone is bitten, keep them still and calm and get them to a hospital that can give antivenom as quickly as possible. Do not cut, suck or tie off the bite.
• Large animals. In forests with elephants, gaur or bears, follow forest department rules, go with a local guide, and never walk alone.
• People and places. Go with others where you are unfamiliar, tell someone your route, respect private land, and be careful at soft wetland margins, on railway lines and beside roads.

Stage 9Habitats, Seasons and Migration

Where a bird is, and when, are clues as strong as any feather. Most species are tied to a habitat, and many are present only for part of the year. Learning habitats and seasons tells you what to expect, which makes the unexpected stand out.

Habitats

• Wetlands hold the most visible birds. Open water has ducks, grebes and cormorants; shallow margins and mud have herons, storks, ibises and waders; reedbeds hide warblers, crakes and bitterns.
• Grasslands carry larks, pipits, quails and, in India, bustards and floricans, with harriers quartering low over them in winter. They are among the most overlooked and threatened habitats.
• Scrub and dry forest hold shrikes, babblers, sandgrouse, coursers and many raptors.
• Wet forests are the richest and the hardest: hornbills, barbets, trogons, flycatchers, and the mixed flocks of Stage 8.
• Coasts and mangroves hold gulls, terns, waders and specialist kingfishers.
• Mountains change with altitude, so that a single road climbing through the Himalaya passes through several quite different bird communities.
• Farmland and cities have their own birds, some of them thriving alongside people.

The richest places are often edges, where two habitats meet: a forest beside a grassland, a reedbed beside open water. Birds of both, and some that need both, gather there.

The birding year

Birds are sorted by how they use the year. Residents stay all year. Winter visitors breed elsewhere and arrive for the cooler months. Summer visitors, or breeding migrants, arrive to breed. Passage migrants pass through on their way somewhere else. Altitudinal migrants move up mountains to breed and down for the winter. Vagrants are lost birds, far outside their normal range.

In India the year does not follow the northern pattern of spring and autumn. Winter, roughly October to March, brings huge numbers of ducks, waders, raptors and small birds from the north (see Stage 20). Many resident birds breed in the hot weather before the rains or during the monsoon itself, and large colonies of storks, herons and cormorants often nest in the wet season and after it, when food is plentiful.

Migration

Birds migrate to exploit food that is seasonal: the long summer days and insect abundance of the far north for breeding, and milder places with food for the rest of the year. The journeys are prepared for. Many birds nearly double their weight in fat before leaving, and many small songbirds travel mainly at night, resting and feeding by day at stopover sites. Large soaring birds, such as eagles, storks and cranes, travel by day, riding rising warm air and avoiding long sea crossings where they can, which funnels them through narrow bottlenecks.

How they navigate is still being worked out, but the evidence points to several cues used together: the position of the sun, the pattern of stars, the Earth's magnetic field, and landmarks such as coastlines and mountain ranges. Young birds of many species make their first migration alone, guided by inherited direction and timing.

The broad routes birds share between breeding and wintering grounds are called flyways. They are not narrow roads in the sky but wide corridors, and they matter for conservation because a bird depends on every wetland along its route, not just the two ends.

How we know

Much of this knowledge came from ringing, also called banding: fitting a bird with a numbered metal ring so that it can be identified if found again. Scientific ringing began in Denmark in 1899, and recoveries of ringed birds far from where they were ringed built the first maps of migration. Ringing is done only by trained, licensed people. Colour rings readable through a telescope came later, followed by tiny loggers and satellite transmitters that record whole journeys.

Those tracking devices produced some extraordinary numbers. Bar-tailed godwits have been tracked flying from Alaska to New Zealand, more than 11,000 kilometres, without stopping. Amur falcons that breed in north-east Asia pass through north-east India in autumn and then cross the Arabian Sea on their way to southern Africa.

Stage 10Lists, Field Notes and Citizen Science

Birders are compulsive record-keepers. Some of that is simple pleasure: a list is a diary of places and mornings. But careful records have also become one of the most valuable sources of information about birds anywhere, and they are only valuable if they are honest.

Lists

A life list records every species you have seen. A year list starts again each January. A patch list records a single place you visit often, and is where most birders learn the most. There are state lists, country lists, garden lists and lists for a single day.

The rules are personal, but the common ones are sensible: the bird should be wild, alive and identified with certainty, and many birders count birds identified by sound alone, marked as heard only. Claiming a bird you did not properly identify is called stringing, and everyone's records are worse for it.

Field notes

A field notebook written at the time is worth more than any memory. For each outing, record:

• date, start time and end time
• place, as precisely as possible, with coordinates if you have them
• weather and habitat
• who was with you
• every species, with a count or an honest estimate
• behaviour, breeding evidence and anything unusual
• for any bird you could not identify, a description and a sketch, made before you open a book

Write in the field or immediately afterwards. If you later change your mind about an identification, add a dated note beside the original rather than rubbing it out. The original observation, and the fact that you revised it, are both part of the record. Stage 14 covers how to keep notebooks safe for decades.

Citizen science

One birder's notes describe one morning. Many thousands of birders' notes, collected in a consistent way, show where species live, when they move, and whether they are increasing or declining. This is citizen science: the public collecting data that scientists and conservationists can use.

The key idea is the complete checklist. If you record every species you were able to identify during a set period, then the species you did not record become informative too: they were probably absent, or at least not detected. A list of only the interesting birds cannot tell anyone that. Checklists also need effort information: how long you looked, how far you walked, how many people were looking, and whether you stood still or moved. That allows a ten-minute list and a four-hour list to be compared fairly.

The best-known platform is eBird, run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Birders anywhere submit checklists through a website or phone app, using standard protocols such as stationary, travelling or incidental. Volunteer reviewers check unusual records against regional filters and may ask for notes or photographs. The pooled data are made available for research and conservation, and each birder gets personal lists, maps and seasonal charts in return. Other schemes run waterbird counts, atlases and standardised surveys; Stage 21 describes the Indian ones.

Stage 11Photography and Sound Recording

Cameras and recorders have changed birding more in twenty years than binoculars did in a century. A photograph or a recording can confirm a difficult identification, prove a rare record to a reviewer, and carry a morning home. The same tools, used carelessly, disturb birds and replace looking with shooting. The best bird photographers and recordists are birders first.

Cameras

There are three broad routes, in rising order of cost and weight.

Phone through optics. A phone held to a binocular or scope eyepiece, ideally with an adapter, gets an identifiable record of a bird that is too far away for the phone alone. It costs almost nothing extra.

Bridge cameras. These have a fixed zoom lens reaching very long focal lengths, in a body little bigger than a conventional camera. Their small sensors struggle in poor light, but in good light they produce excellent record shots and many birders carry nothing else.

Interchangeable-lens cameras with a telephoto lens, usually of 400–600 mm or thereabouts, give the best image quality and fastest focusing, at a real cost in money and weight. Carrying several kilograms through a hot forest is a consideration, not a detail.

Starting settings

Birds move and hands shake, so the most common failure is blur. Use a fast shutter speed, let the camera raise the sensitivity automatically, and use continuous autofocus aimed at the bird's eye. White birds in sunlight, such as egrets, lose all feather detail if overexposed, so dial the exposure down. Before anything else, set the camera's clock to the correct date, time and time zone. A photograph with a wrong timestamp is a much weaker record, as Stage 14 explains.

Sound recording

A phone can record a call well enough to identify many species, and its recording is worth keeping. But phones usually save compressed audio, which discards detail, and their microphones pick up everything around them.

A dedicated handheld recorder saves uncompressed WAV files. A shotgun microphone is long and directional, favouring sound from where it points. A parabolic reflector, a dish with a microphone at its focus, collects distant sound strongly from one direction. Whatever you use, fit a furry windshield, wear closed headphones so that you hear what is actually being recorded, and set the recording level so that the loudest calls do not overload and distort.

Record for longer than seems necessary, and never edit the original file; work on copies. At the end of each recording, speak the species if known, the place, the date, the time and what the bird was doing. That spoken note travels with the sound for ever.

Stage 12Ethics

Every serious code of conduct for birders, whichever country's birding organisation wrote it, starts from the same principle: the welfare of the bird comes first. Before the photograph, before the list, before the rare sighting. Most of the rules follow from that, and most of the hard cases are about what "welfare" means in practice.

Nests

A breeding bird is at its most vulnerable. Approaching a nest can make the parents leave it, leaving eggs or chicks to chill or overheat, and in Indian heat that can take minutes. Your visit can lead predators such as crows, monkeys and snakes to a nest they had not found. Cutting away leaves to get a clearer view, a practice sometimes called gardening, removes shade and cover permanently.

The safe practice is simple. Watch nests from a distance at which the birds carry on normally, do not linger, and do not photograph at nests. In India, disturbing the nests or eggs of protected birds is also against the law (see Stage 22).

Playback

Playback means playing a recording of a bird's song or call to draw it out. It works because the bird hears a rival in its territory. It then spends energy it needs for feeding and breeding on chasing a speaker, may leave its nest unguarded, and may, if it fails to find the intruder, lose standing with its mate and its neighbours. At popular sites the same individual can be subjected to playback dozens of times a day by different groups.

Many reserves prohibit it, and many birders avoid it entirely. If it is used at all, it should be brief and rare, and never with breeding birds, rare or threatened species, or birds at heavily visited sites.

Baiting

Putting out live food to draw a bird to a camera, such as mealworms for flycatchers or live mice for owls, is increasingly common and increasingly criticised. It changes behaviour, draws birds towards people and roads, can spread disease, and often offers the wrong food. Responsible garden feeding, with clean water and clean feeders, is a different thing.

Crowding rare birds

A rare vagrant is often a tired, hungry bird far from where it should be. When news spreads, dozens or hundreds of people may arrive. Crowds push the bird away from the only place it can feed, trample habitat, block roads, stray onto private land and annoy the people who live there. Keep back, stay on paths, follow the instructions of whoever is managing the site, and leave while the bird is still settled.

Sharing locations

Some birds are hunted, trapped or traded. Owls are trapped for illegal trade in India, and nesting raptors, bustards and several songbirds are targets too. A precise location posted online, or a photograph with location data still attached, can lead a trapper straight to a bird. Share sensitive locations only with reviewers and researchers who need them, delay posting where it matters, and strip location data from images you publish. eBird itself hides the exact locations of certain species it treats as sensitive.

Care and Preservation

Stage 13Care of Optics, Cameras and Recorders

Birders collect nothing from the field, but they own things worth protecting. A good pair of binoculars may cost as much as a used motorcycle, a camera and lens several times that, and both are expected to last for decades. In much of India, the thing most likely to end their working life is not a drop or a theft. It is a fungus, growing silently inside a cupboard during the monsoon.

The enemies, one by one

Humidity and fungus. Fungal spores are everywhere in the air and settle on every surface, including glass. They germinate when relative humidity stays high for long periods, with the threshold commonly given as somewhere above 60–70%, and they grow best in warm, dark, still air. A film of fingerprint grease or dust gives them something to feed on. The fungus spreads across a lens as fine branching threads, and its by-products can etch the anti-reflection coatings and eventually the glass itself. Early growth can often be cleaned off by a service technician. Etching is permanent.

Temperature swings and condensation. Cold equipment carried into warm, humid air fogs instantly, as a cold glass does. The outside clears in minutes; the harm is moisture working into any poorly sealed gap, again and again over months.

Heat. A car parked in the Indian sun becomes far hotter than the air outside, ageing rubber armour, loosening adhesives and damaging batteries.

Salt air and dust. Coastal salt is corrosive and draws in moisture. Fine dust gets into focus wheels, and a dusty lens wiped dry is a scratched lens.

Chemicals. Insect repellents containing DEET dissolve some plastics, rubbers and coatings. Apply repellent and sunscreen, then wash your hands before handling optics.

Well-meant harm. Opening a sealed binocular, which destroys its seal. Wiping lenses with a shirt tail or household glass cleaner. Storing gear in uncooked rice, which is dusty and far weaker than proper desiccant. Pointing a lens at the sun to "dry out fungus", which can focus enough heat to burn.

Dry cabinets and desiccant boxes

The answer to fungus is dry, still, clean air, maintained all year.

A dry cabinet is a sealed, glass-fronted cabinet with an electronic module that holds the humidity inside at a level you set. Sizes suitable for a birder's kit cost roughly ₹7,000–25,000 (2026), and they use little electricity. A setting of about 40–50% relative humidity suits optics and cameras. Much drier is not better: some makers advise against keeping gear very dry for long periods, which can age lubricants and rubber. During a power cut, keep the door closed and the inside will stay dry for some time.

A desiccant box is the affordable alternative and works well when maintained. Use a rigid airtight plastic box with a rubber gasket in the lid, a generous quantity of silica gel in a breathable pouch or open tray, and a small digital hygrometer so that you can see the humidity inside rather than guess. When the reading climbs past about 50%, dry the gel.

A hygrometer is the cheapest and most useful instrument in this stage. Inexpensive ones are often several percentage points out, so check yours: seal it in a bag or small box with a saucer of table salt dampened to a thick slush, leave it overnight, and it should read close to 75%. Note the difference and allow for it.

Cleaning lenses without scratching the coatings

Most damage to coatings comes from cleaning, not from use. The order matters.

1. Blow loose grit away with a rubber hand blower. Do not use canned air, which can spray propellant onto the glass.
2. Brush away what remains with a soft lens brush kept capped and clean.
3. Clean only if smears remain. Put a drop of lens cleaning fluid on a clean microfibre cloth or lens tissue, never directly onto the glass, and wipe gently in a spiral from the centre outwards.
4. Stop when it is clean enough. A few specks of dust do not affect the view, and every wipe carries some risk.

Wash microfibre cloths regularly and keep them in a sealed pouch. A cloth that has collected grit in a pocket becomes sandpaper.

Waterproofing and O-rings

Waterproof binoculars and scopes are sealed at the factory with rubber O-rings and filled with dry nitrogen or argon. Those seals are not user-serviceable. If fog appears inside and does not clear, or you see growth on internal surfaces, send the instrument to an authorised service centre; do not open it.

Some equipment has seals you do look after: battery doors on recorders, housings for cameras and phones, and screw-on caps. Inspect these O-rings for cracks, flattening, hair and grit. Wipe them clean, apply a very thin film of the silicone grease the maker recommends if the instructions call for it, and replace any that are damaged. Note that "weather-sealed" cameras are resistant to rain, not waterproof.

Cameras, batteries, cards and recorders

Treat camera lenses as binocular lenses, and clean the sensor only with a blower or at a service centre unless you have been shown how. Store lithium-ion batteries at about half charge in a cool place, never in a hot car, and stop using any battery that swells. Memory cards carry files; they do not keep them, so copy them off the same day. Take batteries out of stored recorders, since leaking cells corrode contacts. Store microphones with desiccant, and rinse tripod legs with fresh water after salt or sand and dry them fully extended.

The Indian climate

India combines several climates with a long wet season, and asks a great deal of its birders' equipment.

The monsoon keeps relative humidity above 80% for weeks across much of the country, and in Kerala and the Northeast damp air lasts much of the year. Coastal cities such as Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata add salt. North Indian summers bring temperatures above 45 °C and pre-monsoon dust storms, and turn cars and top-floor rooms into ovens. Winter fog in the north means condensation when gear comes indoors. Hill stations stay damp and cool, ideal for fungus. Power cuts stop dehumidifiers and air-conditioners, and humidity in a closed room can climb within hours. Termites attack wooden cupboards, especially on ground floors and against outer walls.

Air-conditioned rooms are drier only while the air-conditioner runs. A room cooled by day and left to warm at night swings widely, so a stable interior cupboard is better than a room that is sometimes ideal.

Store equipment in an interior room, away from bathrooms, kitchens and outer walls, and off the floor. Never keep it in the padded camera bag it travels in; foam and fabric hold moisture. Leather cases grow mould in the monsoon, so nylon is the better choice. After a wet outing, open the bag, dry every surface with a clean cloth, and leave the gear out in a dry room for a few hours before closing it in its box. Before walking from an air-conditioned room into humid heat, seal your gear in a zip-lock bag and let it warm up inside the bag, so that moisture condenses on the bag and not on the lens.

Stage 14Preserving the Record: Notebooks, Data, Libraries and Books

Binoculars can be replaced. A notebook from a wetland that has since been drained, a checklist from the year a species was last seen on your patch, a recording of a bird that no longer sings there, cannot. The records a birder builds over a lifetime are the one part of the hobby that has value beyond the birder, and they are also the part most often lost: to termites, to damp, to a dead hard drive, or to heirs who do not know what they are looking at.

Field notebooks: paper and ink

Paper. Cheap notebooks use acidic paper that yellows and turns brittle within decades. For notebooks you mean to keep, choose acid-free paper and a sewn or strong glued binding. Spiral bindings snag and tear out pages in a bag.

Ink. Pencil is the field birder's best friend: graphite does not fade, does not run when wet, and writes on damp paper. A soft pencil, around HB to 2B, smudges less than you might fear if the notebook is closed flat. For ink, choose a pigment-ink pen sold as archival and waterproof. Avoid dye-based felt tips, highlighters and gel pens of unknown ink, which can fade in light or run at the first drop of rain.

Waterproof notebooks. All-weather notebooks use synthetic or specially coated paper that survives rain and even immersion. They are excellent for monsoon fieldwork and wet coasts. Most take pencil well; many ordinary pens skip or smear on them, so test a pen before trusting it.

Label every notebook on the cover and spine with its date range and main places. Number them. A shelf of notebooks nobody can navigate is only slightly better than none.

Storing notebooks

Keep finished notebooks upright, or flat in a box, in an interior room, off the floor and away from outer walls. An archival box, or a polypropylene box with silica gel and a hygrometer, keeps out damp, dust and insects. Dry damp notebooks open, in a well-aired room out of sun, before boxing them. Silverfish, cockroaches and booklice are discouraged by a dry, regularly opened box, and steel shelving defeats termites.

Digitising old notes

Every notebook should have a digital copy, both as a backup and to make its records usable. Photograph or scan each page in good, even light, at a resolution around 300–600 dots per inch, and keep those images as the master copy, with a combined PDF for easy reading. Name files so that they sort by date.

Then transcribe the records. A spreadsheet with one row per species per outing is simple and lasts. Many birders also enter old notes into eBird as historical checklists. Be scrupulous: enter only what the notebook actually supports. If you did not record counts, times or a precise place, do not reconstruct them from memory, and never upgrade an old "warbler sp." into a species. Keep the paper notebooks after scanning. The original is the evidence.

Checklists, photographs and sound: backups

Digital records fail in quieter ways than paper. Drives die without warning, phones are lost, cloud accounts are closed or forgotten, and file formats fall out of use. The standard protection is the 3-2-1 rule: keep three copies of everything that matters, on at least two different kinds of storage, with one copy kept somewhere else, such as a drive at a relative's home or a cloud service.

Records held on an online platform also need a copy you control. eBird, for example, lets you download your own data as a file; do it once a year and keep that file with your other backups. Check your backup drives every year, and copy everything onto new media every few years, before old drives fail rather than after.

Metadata

A photograph or recording without information about it is a pretty picture, not a record. Metadata is that information, stored inside the file or beside it.

Cameras write EXIF data automatically: date, time, settings and, if enabled, location, which is why the camera clock must be right (see Stage 11). You add IPTC fields such as caption and keywords, and many photo programs keep edits in small XMP sidecar files that must stay with the originals. For each keeper, record the species with English and scientific names, the checklist the names follow, the place and the behaviour. Names change (see Stage 7), and scientific names let a future reader translate.

Keep original photographs, including raw files in a camera maker's own format, and export your best as TIFF or high-quality JPEG, which will still open in decades. Keep sound as uncompressed WAV masters, or lossless FLAC; MP3 is for sharing only. Media attached to eBird checklists is archived by the Cornell Lab's Macaulay Library, and xeno-canto archives bird sound recordings; depositing important files in such archives adds an off-site copy with scientific value.

Books and field guides in humidity

Old field guides, regional avifaunas and runs of society journals are hard to replace. Humidity makes paper cockle, grow mould and develop foxing, the brown spotting of old paper. Glossy photographic guides have a hidden weakness: their coated pages can fuse into a solid block if they get wet.

Shelve books upright and loosely, a few centimetres from the wall, on steel or raised shelves with some air movement. Keep a separate field copy of your main guide so that the library copy stays dry, and air books through the monsoon.

If a book gets wet, act the same day. Stand it upright with pages fanned in moving air, out of sun and direct heat, with absorbent paper between every few pages, and separate coated pages before they dry. A soaked valuable volume can be sealed in a bag and frozen, which halts mould, until a book conservator sees it. Clean mouldy books outdoors wearing a close-fitting mask, and leave it to someone else if you have asthma. Naphthalene balls are a toxic fumigant with no place in a living space, and termites need professional treatment.

Disaster planning

Decide now what you would save first in a flood or fire. For most birders the answer is the backup drive and the notebooks, before the binoculars. Keep them together, in a box you can pick up. Photograph your equipment, record serial numbers, and keep receipts with your backups: they matter for insurance, which for expensive optics and cameras usually needs a specific add-on to a household policy, and for reporting a theft.

A monsoon routine

The main southwest monsoon covers most of India from about June to September, but Tamil Nadu and neighbouring coasts get much of their rain from October to December, and the Northeast and the Western Ghats stay wet for longer. Adjust the timing to where you live.

Stage 15From Beginner to Specialist

Most birders pass through the same phases. First, every bird is new and the list climbs fast. Then comes a plateau, when the common birds are known and new species arrive only with travel. What happens next decides whether birding stays a pleasant pastime or becomes a lifelong craft.

Ways to go deeper

• Adopt a patch. Visit one place regularly for years. You will learn its birds by individual territory, notice arrivals and declines, and build a record nobody else has.
• Take on a difficult group. Raptors, waders, larks and pipits, and the small leaf warblers all reward years of study, and each has its own specialist literature.
• Learn sound properly. Recording and reading spectrograms opens up forest birds and night birds, and slows the effect of age on hearing.
• Join surveys. Waterbird counts, atlases and standardised surveys turn a skill into data (see Stage 21).
• Train as a ringer. Ringing is learned under licensed schemes from experienced ringers, over months of supervised practice, never alone from a book or video.
• Write it up. An unusual record, a breeding observation or a behaviour nobody has described can be published as a short note in a regional or national journal.

Pitfalls

The dangers at this level are mostly in the head. Stringing (see Stage 10) often starts from wanting a rare bird so badly that a brief view becomes certain, and confirmation bias means noticing only the features that fit. Leaning on apps stops learning just when it should accelerate, and chasing list totals pulls birders towards the crowding and playback that Stage 12 warns against. The antidote is the same for all: take notes before deciding, and be willing to leave a bird unidentified.

Stage 16India's Birds: Many Worlds in One Country

India has one of the richest bird faunas of any country. Its checklist stands at roughly 1,300 to 1,400 species, depending on whose list you use and which taxonomy it follows, and the figure keeps changing as species are split and new records are added. That is more than a tenth of the world's bird species, in a country with a little under 2.5% of the world's land. Several dozen species are found nowhere else on Earth, with the count again depending on taxonomy.

Why so many

India sits where major zoogeographic regions meet: northern birds cross the Himalaya, tropical Asian birds dominate its forests, and the arid west shares species with the Middle East and Africa. It also spans sea level to the highest mountains on Earth, and rainfall from the Thar Desert to the hills of Meghalaya, among the wettest places anywhere. Parts of four global biodiversity hotspots fall within it: the Himalaya, Indo-Burma, the Western Ghats with Sri Lanka, and Sundaland, which reaches the Nicobar Islands.

A tour in brief

The table in this stage sketches the main regions. Two cranes mark the range: the black-necked crane, which breeds in the high, cold desert of Ladakh, and the sarus crane of the Indo-Gangetic plains, the tallest flying bird in the world. The Western Ghats and the Northeast are the richest forest regions, the coasts and the mangroves of the Sundarbans add their own specialities, and Stages 18 and 19 visit the best-known sites.

The birds most Indians know are the adaptable ones: house crows, common mynas, rose-ringed parakeets, black kites, rock pigeons and, increasingly common in many areas, the Indian peafowl, the national bird since 1963.

Stage 17Salim Ali, the BNHS and the Naturalists Before Them

Before binoculars

Birds run through Indian culture from its earliest texts. The Ramayana traditionally begins with Valmiki's grief at a hunter killing one of a pair of krauncha birds, variously identified as cranes or other waterbirds, and birds fill Sanskrit and Tamil poetry, temple carving and folk calendars.

Some Mughal rulers were serious observers. Babur's memoir describes the birds of Hindustan with real curiosity, and the emperor Jahangir's memoirs include careful notes on sarus cranes breeding in captivity. His court painter Ustad Mansur painted birds with striking accuracy, including a dodo in a painting generally attributed to him.

The collectors

Colonial ornithology in India followed the European model of the gun and the museum tray. T. C. Jerdon, an army surgeon, published The Birds of India in the 1860s. Allan Octavian Hume, a senior civil servant better remembered as a founder of the Indian National Congress, assembled a vast collection of bird skins, ran the ornithological journal Stray Feathers, and eventually gave his collection of tens of thousands of specimens to the British Museum. Much of the field work behind such collections was done by Indian hunters, skinners and assistants whose names were rarely recorded. Hugh Whistler's Popular Handbook of Indian Birds, first published in 1928, was one of the first books aimed at the ordinary observer rather than the collector.

In 1883 a small group of naturalists in Bombay founded the Bombay Natural History Society, the BNHS. It began publishing its journal in 1886, built a large research collection, and became the centre of natural history in India. It still is one of the country's leading conservation and research bodies, and publishes the popular magazine Hornbill alongside its scientific journal.

Salim Ali

Salim Ali was born in Bombay on 12 November 1896, and was orphaned young and brought up by his uncle. As a boy he shot a sparrow with a yellow patch on its throat and, unable to name it, was taken to the BNHS. Its honorary secretary, W. S. Millard, identified the bird as a yellow-throated sparrow and showed the boy the Society's collections. Ali later described that visit as the beginning of everything.

The path was not smooth. He spent years in Burma in a family business, and without a university degree he was turned down for a post as ornithologist with the Zoological Survey of India. He went to Berlin to train under the ornithologist Erwin Stresemann, came home, and made his name through careful field study, including a pioneering account of the breeding behaviour of the baya weaver.

Through the 1930s and 1940s he carried out bird surveys of princely states, including Hyderabad, Travancore and Cochin, often funded by the states themselves, which laid the foundations of knowledge of Indian bird distribution. In 1941 he published The Book of Indian Birds, which introduced generations of Indians to birds and remains in print. With the American ornithologist S. Dillon Ripley he wrote the ten-volume Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, published between 1968 and 1974, the standard reference for decades.

He lent his authority to conservation, notably for the protection of Bharatpur and the campaign against a dam in Kerala's Silent Valley. He received the Padma Bhushan in 1958 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1976, and his autobiography, The Fall of a Sparrow, appeared in 1985. He died in 1987. The Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History, near Coimbatore, carries his name, and his birthday is widely marked by Indian birders with walks and counts.

He belonged to a generation for whom collecting specimens was normal science, and his surveys added many skins to the BNHS trays. He saw no contradiction between that and conservation, and the collection he helped build is still used by researchers.

After Salim Ali

Birding in India has since widened from scientists and the elite to a broad public. Zafar Futehally's Newsletter for Birdwatchers, started in 1959, connected amateurs across the country for decades. City bird groups and online communities followed, Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide reset the standard for identification in 2005, and today tens of thousands of Indians submit bird checklists.

Stage 18Wetlands, Deserts and Grasslands

India's most famous birding sites are mostly its wetlands, where birds gather in thousands and can be watched in the open. Its most threatened birds, on the other hand, live in grasslands and deserts that were long written off as wasteland.

Keoladeo National Park, Bharatpur

Keoladeo, at Bharatpur in eastern Rajasthan, covers only about 29 square kilometres, yet it became one of the most celebrated bird reserves in the world. The wetland was shaped by embankments and managed for generations as a duck-shooting preserve of the Maharajas of Bharatpur, where viceroys and visiting dignitaries took part in enormous shoots. Stone inscriptions in the park still record day bags running into thousands of birds.

After independence, protection gradually replaced shooting. Keoladeo became a national park in 1982 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985. In good monsoon years its trees fill with nesting painted storks, openbills, egrets, cormorants, spoonbills and herons, and in winter the water holds ducks, geese and a notable gathering of raptors. It was also the best-known wintering site of the western population of Siberian cranes, a tiny group whose last few birds were seen there around the start of the 2000s.

Keoladeo depends on water arriving from outside the park, and in drought years it has suffered badly. Paths and tracks are walked or cycled, and the park is known for its cycle-rickshaw drivers, many of whom are skilled bird guides.

The Rann of Kutch

The Great Rann of Kutch in Gujarat is a vast salt flat that floods in the monsoon and dries to a white crust. In good years, greater and lesser flamingos breed there in huge colonies far out on the flats, well away from people. The Little Rann, protected as a wild ass sanctuary, is a winter birding classic: common and demoiselle cranes, MacQueen's bustards, sandgrouse, harriers, and a variety of larks. The Banni grasslands to the north are good for raptors and owls, though they have been heavily invaded by an introduced thorny shrub, Prosopis juliflora.

Deserts and grasslands

The great Indian bustard, a heavy, upright grassland bird, is critically endangered, with no more than about 150 believed to survive, mostly in the Thar Desert around Jaisalmer. Collisions with overhead power lines are a major cause of death, and the question of routing lines has reached the courts. The lesser florican breeds in monsoon grasslands in western India, where displaying males leap high above the grass. The Bengal florican survives in the grasslands of the Terai and the Brahmaputra floodplains. Tal Chhapar in Rajasthan is known for large gatherings of wintering harriers.

Other great wetlands

Chilika Lake in Odisha, a huge brackish lagoon, holds very large numbers of winter waterbirds. Point Calimere in Tamil Nadu and Pulicat Lake, on the Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh border, are important for flamingos and waders. Harike in Punjab and the Pong reservoir in Himachal Pradesh draw ducks and geese, and Nal Sarovar in Gujarat and Sultanpur near Delhi are popular with city birders.

Stage 19Forests and Mountains: the Ghats, the Northeast, the Himalaya and the Islands

The Western Ghats

The Western Ghats run for roughly 1,600 kilometres down India's west coast, catching the southwest monsoon on their slopes. Their wet forests and high-altitude sholas, patches of stunted evergreen forest set in grassland on the highest ranges, hold a set of birds found nowhere else. Several of the endemic laughingthrushes, known in Malayalam and Tamil as sholakili, live only on particular mountain ranges, isolated from each other like birds on islands in the sky.

Thattekad Bird Sanctuary in Kerala, which bears Salim Ali's name, is famous for the Sri Lanka frogmouth and for forest birds of the lowlands. Munnar and the high ranges around it, the Nilgiris above Ooty, and the forests of Ganeshgudi and Dandeli in Karnataka, where hornbills are the draw, are all well-established birding areas. The shola grasslands are under pressure from plantations and from invasive trees such as wattle, pine and eucalyptus.

The Northeast

The hills and plains of the Northeast are among the richest birding areas in Asia. Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary in western Arunachal Pradesh became world-famous with the description of a new species, the Bugun liocichla. The Mishmi Hills and Namdapha hold wren-babblers, laughingthrushes and many birds at the edge of their ranges. In Assam, the grasslands of Kaziranga and Manas support Bengal floricans and other grassland specialists, and the riverine forests and grasslands of Dibru-Saikhowa hold birds rarely seen elsewhere in India. Several states require permits for entry; see Stage 22.

The Himalaya

A road climbing into the Himalaya passes from subtropical forest through oak and rhododendron to conifers and alpine meadow, each with its own birds. Pheasants are the great prize: the Himalayan monal, the state bird of Uttarakhand; the western tragopan, state bird of Himachal Pradesh; and the blood pheasant, state bird of Sikkim. Sattal, Pangot and Chopta in Uttarakhand, the Great Himalayan National Park in Himachal Pradesh, and much of Sikkim are established birding areas. In winter, many Himalayan birds move down the slopes, and some reach the plains.

At high altitude, be conservative. Above about 2,500–3,000 metres, climb gradually and allow days to acclimatise. A headache with nausea, unusual tiredness or breathlessness at rest is a warning of altitude sickness: stop climbing, and descend if it does not improve. Confusion or difficulty walking is an emergency.

The islands

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands hold many birds found nowhere else, including the Andaman woodpecker, the Andaman crake and the Nicobar megapode. The Narcondam hornbill lives only on one small volcanic island. Much of the islands' forest is protected tribal reserve or otherwise restricted, and entry rules for many areas must be checked with the island administration before planning a trip.

Stage 20Winter Visitors and the Central Asian Flyway

Every winter, India receives a vast influx of birds that breed across northern and central Asia. Ducks, geese and cranes arrive on wetlands, waders on coasts and mudflats, harriers over grasslands, and warblers, wagtails and shrikes in almost every garden and field. For most Indian birders, winter is the high season.

The flyway

These birds travel along the Central Asian Flyway, one of the world's major migration systems, linking breeding grounds between the Arctic and Central Asia with wintering grounds around the Indian Ocean. India lies at its heart, and its wetlands, from the Himalaya to the southern coasts, carry a large share of the flyway's birds.

The timetable runs roughly like this. Some waders arrive as early as August. Ducks build up through October and November, numbers peak in December and January, and most birds leave in February and March. Rosy starlings arrive in western India in late summer in huge noisy flocks, and leave in spring.

Some journeys cross the Himalaya directly. Bar-headed geese, which breed on high Central Asian lakes including those of Ladakh, cross the range in a few hours of powerful flight. Demoiselle cranes cross it too, and in winter gather in thousands in Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Threats and protection

Migrants depend on every stop on their route. Wetlands across India have been drained, built on, polluted and choked by invasive plants. Birds are still trapped and shot in places. Power lines kill cranes, bustards and raptors. Disease can strike too: in 2019, many thousands of birds died at Sambhar Lake in Rajasthan in an outbreak attributed to avian botulism.

In 2020, India hosted the thirteenth meeting of the parties to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, in Gandhinagar, and the government has published a national action plan for migratory birds along the flyway. Many of India's wetlands are designated as Ramsar sites, wetlands of international importance, though designation alone does not guarantee protection.

Stage 21Counting Together: Community Counts and Villages that Protect Birds

Much of what is known about the state of India's birds comes from volunteers counting together, and some of the most successful protection of birds in India has come not from reserves but from villages.

The counts

The Asian Waterbird Census began in the Indian subcontinent in 1987 and forms part of the International Waterbird Census coordinated by Wetlands International; in India it is run with the BNHS. Each January, volunteers count the waterbirds on wetlands they adopt, from city lakes to coastal lagoons. The data feed estimates of waterbird populations along the flyways and help identify wetlands that matter most.

The Great Backyard Bird Count is a global count held over four days each February, in which anyone can take part by submitting checklists from anywhere, even a balcony. In India, participation is organised by Bird Count India, a partnership of organisations and birding groups formed in the 2010s, which also runs a Campus Bird Count for colleges, schools and other institutions.

Bird atlases go further, dividing a region into a grid and surveying every cell in a standard way in set seasons. The Kerala Bird Atlas, carried out by volunteers across the state in the second half of the 2010s, was one of the largest such efforts in Asia, and similar atlases have followed for several cities and districts.

All this data came together in the State of India's Birds reports of 2020 and 2023, prepared by a partnership of research and conservation organisations and drawing on millions of observations contributed by birders, mostly through eBird. They found that many species had declined over the long term, with birds of prey, specialists of grasslands and wetlands, and migratory shorebirds among the worst affected, while some adaptable species, the Indian peafowl among them, had increased.

Villages that protect birds

At Kokkare Bellur in Karnataka, painted storks and spot-billed pelicans nest in the trees among the village's houses, and villagers have tolerated and protected them for generations. At Khichan in Rajasthan, villagers feed the demoiselle cranes that arrive each winter, and the flocks have grown to thousands. At Mangalajodi, on the edge of Chilika Lake in Odisha, a community that once trapped waterbirds turned to protecting them, and many former trappers became guides and boatmen for birders.

In Assam, the biologist Purnima Devi Barman built a movement of village women, known as the Hargila Army, to protect the nesting colonies of the endangered greater adjutant stork, and received the United Nations Environment Programme's Champions of the Earth award in 2022. In Arunachal Pradesh, a hornbill nest adoption programme around Pakke Tiger Reserve has paid members of the Nyishi community to guard hornbill nests.

Stage 22The Birder and the Law in India

This stage is a summary for birders, not legal advice. Laws are amended, notifications change, and rules differ between states and between protected areas. Before any trip that involves permits, rescue or photography in a reserve, check the current rules with the state forest department, and for anything serious, consult a lawyer.

The Wild Life (Protection) Act 1972

The main law is the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, amended several times since, most recently in a substantial way in 2022. The Act protects wild animals listed in its schedules, and most wild birds in India fall within them. The 2022 amendment reorganised the schedules, so older books and websites that place a bird in a particular schedule may be out of date.

For a birder, three consequences matter most.

No capture. The Act defines hunting broadly, to include capturing, trapping, snaring and injuring an animal, not only killing it. Catching a wild bird, keeping one as a pet, or handling birds for ringing without the necessary authorisation all fall on the wrong side of it.

No nest disturbance. The definition of hunting expressly includes, for wild birds, damaging eggs and disturbing eggs or nests. Pushing close to a nest for a photograph, moving branches or handling eggs is not only unethical (see Stage 12); it can be an offence.

No keeping feathers, eggs or other parts. The Act regulates trophies and articles derived from protected animals. Keeping a feather, egg, nest or bone of a protected species can be treated as unlawful possession, however innocently it was picked up. Shed peacock tail feathers, sold openly across India, have long been treated as an exception in some provisions, but that exception is narrow and does not extend to other birds. Photograph what you find and leave it.

Penalties include fines and imprisonment, and are heavier for offences involving the most protected species.

Protected areas and photography

Entry to national parks and wildlife sanctuaries is by permit, with fixed timings and routes; walking off them is often prohibited, and many parks charge camera fees. Commercial filming needs specific permission, and flying a drone needs permission under civil aviation rules and, in or near protected areas, from the forest authorities. The Act does not mention playback by name, but park rules against disturbing wildlife may cover it. Guides who break park rules risk their livelihoods, so do not pressure them.

Trade and rescue

Native wild birds may not be captured or traded. Parakeets, munias, mynas and owls still turn up in markets and roadside cages, often trapped from the wild. Do not buy them, even to set them free, since buying funds the next capture. Report such trade to the state forest department or the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau.

If you find an injured wild bird, take it promptly to a recognised rescue centre or veterinarian, or call the forest department, rather than keeping it. During kite-flying festivals, especially Uttarayan in Gujarat, glass-coated and synthetic kite string injures large numbers of birds; courts and state governments have restricted such string, and rescue camps run in several cities.

Permits to travel

Indian citizens need an Inner Line Permit to enter Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur. Foreign nationals need special permits for certain border and island areas, including parts of the Northeast and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Rules change, so check before booking.

Glossary

A

• Asian Waterbird Census — a count of waterbirds held each January across Asia, begun in the Indian subcontinent in 1987. [Stage 21]

B

• Baiting — putting out food, often live, to draw a wild bird close for viewing or photography. [Stage 12]
• Bird wave — the Indian birders' name for a mixed flock of small forest birds moving together. [Stage 8]
• Bottleneck — a narrow point on a migration route, such as a mountain pass or strait, where birds concentrate. [Stage 9]

C

• Central Asian Flyway — the migration system linking breeding grounds in northern and central Asia with wintering grounds around the Indian Ocean. [Stage 20]
• Citizen science — the collection of scientific data by members of the public. [Stage 10]
• Close focus — the nearest distance at which binoculars can focus sharply. [Stage 6]
• Complete checklist — a list recording every species the observer could identify during a set period. [Stage 10]
• Coverts — rows of small feathers covering the bases of the flight feathers. [Stage 4]

D

• Digiscoping — photographing through a telescope, usually with a phone or small camera. [Stage 7]
• Dry cabinet — a sealed cabinet that electronically holds the humidity inside at a set level. [Stage 13]

E

• Eclipse plumage — a dull plumage worn by some males between breeding seasons. [Stage 4]
• Endemic — found naturally in one region and nowhere else. [Stage 16]
• Exit pupil — the disc of light leaving a binocular eyepiece; objective diameter divided by magnification. [Stage 6]
• Eye relief — the distance behind the eyepiece at which the whole image is visible. [Stage 6]

F

• Field mark — a visible feature that separates one species from similar ones. [Stage 2]
• Field of view — the width of the scene seen through optics, in metres at 1,000 metres or in degrees. [Stage 6]
• Flyway — a broad corridor shared by many migrating birds between breeding and wintering grounds. [Stage 9]
• Foxing — brown spotting on old paper, linked to damp and mould. [Stage 14]

H

• Hide — a screened shelter from which birds can be watched without disturbing them. [Stage 8]
• Hygrometer — an instrument that measures relative humidity. [Stage 13]

I

• Inner Line Permit — a permit Indian citizens need to enter certain north-eastern states. [Stage 22]
• IPTC and XMP — caption, keyword and edit information added to image files or kept in sidecar files. [Stage 14]

J

• Jizz — the overall impression of a bird's shape, posture and movement. [Stage 3]

M

• Metadata — information stored in or beside a file that describes its contents. [Stage 14]
• Mobbing — small birds scolding and harassing a predator such as an owl or snake. [Stage 8]
• Moult — the regular replacement of a bird's feathers. [Stage 4]

O

• O-ring — a rubber ring that seals a joint against water and dust. [Stage 13]

P

• Patch — a single place a birder visits regularly over a long period. [Stage 10]
• Playback — playing a recording of a bird's voice to draw it out. [Stage 12]
• Porro prism — a prism design giving binoculars their offset, wide-bodied shape. [Stage 6]
• Primaries — the long outer flight feathers of the wing. [Stage 4]

R

• Relative humidity — the amount of water vapour in air as a percentage of the most it could hold at that temperature. [Stage 13]
• Ringing — marking a bird with a numbered ring so that it can be identified if found again; also called banding. [Stage 9]
• Roof prism — a compact prism design giving binoculars straight barrels. [Stage 6]

S

• Scapulars — shoulder feathers covering the join between wing and body. [Stage 4]
• Shola — a patch of stunted evergreen forest among grassland on the high ranges of the Western Ghats. [Stage 19]
• Silica gel — a reusable desiccant, often sold with a colour indicator. [Stage 13]
• sp. — short for species; used when a bird is identified only to a group, as in "warbler sp.". [Stage 10]
• Spectrogram — a picture of a sound, with time across and pitch upwards; also sonogram. [Stage 5]
• Speculum — a bright patch on the secondary feathers of many ducks. [Stage 4]
• Stopover — a site where migrating birds rest and feed on their journey. [Stage 9]
• Stringing — claiming a bird that was not properly identified. [Stage 10]
• Supercilium — a pale stripe above a bird's eye. [Stage 4]
• Syrinx — the vocal organ of birds, at the base of the windpipe. [Stage 5]

T

• Tertials — the innermost flight feathers, lying over the closed wing. [Stage 4]
• Three-two-one rule — three copies of important data, on two kinds of storage, with one kept elsewhere. [Stage 14]
• Topography — the named external parts of a bird. [Stage 4]
• Twitching — travelling to see a rare bird found by someone else. [Stage 1]

V

• Vagrant — a bird far outside its normal range. [Stage 9]

W

• WAV — an uncompressed audio file format suited to archiving recordings. [Stage 14]
• Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 — India's main law protecting wild animals, including most wild birds. [Stage 22]
• Wing bar — a pale line across the closed wing formed by pale tips to the coverts. [Stage 4]

Further Reading and Organisations

Field guides and handbooks

• Birds of the Indian Subcontinent, by Richard Grimmett, Carol Inskipp and Tim Inskipp. The most widely used illustrated field guide to the region.
• Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide, by Pamela C. Rasmussen and John C. Anderton. A detailed two-volume reference on identification and species limits.
• The Book of Indian Birds, by Salim Ali. The classic introduction, published by the Bombay Natural History Society.
• Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, by Salim Ali and S. Dillon Ripley. The ten-volume standard work of the late twentieth century.
• A Field Guide to the Birds, by Roger Tory Peterson. The book that established the field-mark method.

History and lives

• The Fall of a Sparrow, by Salim Ali. His autobiography.
• The Natural History of Selborne, by Gilbert White. An early classic of watching living birds.
• The Birds of India, by T. C. Jerdon, and Popular Handbook of Indian Birds, by Hugh Whistler. Historical works, useful for how Indian birds were once seen and recorded.

Journals, magazines and reports

• Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, and the Society's magazine Hornbill.
• Indian Birds, a journal publishing records and notes on South Asian birds.
• The State of India's Birds reports of 2020 and 2023.

Organisations and resources

• Bombay Natural History Society, Mumbai. Research, conservation, publications and nature education; the BirdLife International partner in India.
• Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History, Coimbatore. Research and training in ornithology.
• Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysuru. A partner in Bird Count India and the State of India's Birds reports, and publisher of Early Bird materials for children.
• Bird Count India. Coordinates Indian participation in public bird counts and atlases.
• Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun. Wildlife research and training.
• Wetlands International, with a South Asia office in New Delhi. Coordinates the International Waterbird Census.
• Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Runs eBird, the Macaulay Library of photographs and sound, and the Merlin identification app.
• xeno-canto. A public archive of bird sound recordings.
• Wildlife Crime Control Bureau and state forest departments. For reporting wildlife trade and for permits and rules.
• INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage). Its conservation laboratories can advise on valuable books and papers.
• Authorised service centres of optics and camera makers. For fogged, fungused or misaligned equipment.

Image Sourcing Sheet