What’s special for #birdNov this year? Meet birders who combine art and their love for Nature

Nov is a birder's fav. month, with enthusiasts sharing photos, write-ups, artwork & data

November is a birder’s favourite month. It heralds the visit of winter migratory birds to the Indian subcontinent, and is also the birth month of the late ornithologist Salim Ali. Social media has been abuzz with bird trivia under #birdNov and #birdNov2023, with enthusiasts sharing photos, write-ups, artwork and data on birding hotspots.

Among them is S Senthil Kumar, a school headmaster from Salem, who is posting crisp write-ups in Tamil every day, while K Selvaganesh, a birder from Valparai is creating informative posters. Surendhar Boobalan, a school teacher, is sharing Tamil riddles about birds on a WhatsApp group, and S Jayaraj, a Chennai artist is keeping with the theme and making watercolour paintings and sketches.

We talk to three people who are combining their love for birding, and art.

P Jeganathan, a scientist with the Nature Conservation Foundation, is an expert birder who participates in #birdNov with interest every year. This year, he is arranging jenga blocks to create shapes of commonly-spotted birds. “This is something I do at home to keep my seven-year-old son occupied,” says Jeganathan, who is based in Tiruppur. He posts a jenga bird a day, on Instagram. “Jenga blocks are supposed to be stacked,” he points out, adding that he decided to give this a spin and come up with something creative for #birdNov. “With jenga, I am limited to creating only a handful of birds, but my son and I find this practice soothing,” he says.

Jeganathan also collects stamps featuring birds, and is posting about them on social media as well. This includes stamps featuring the paradise flycatcher, wagtail, rosy pastor, and other birds.

Vidhya Sundar, a birder based in Texas, USA, manages to create complicated shapes of birds using the deceptively simple lines of the traditional pulli kolam. All it takes is one look, for someone to guess the bird from her kolams. She achieves the shape of the red-headed vulture and Asian bee-eater, for instance, to the T, and also does elaborate nelivu kolams.

“I draw kolams every day, and do elaborate ones for festive occasions such as Margazhi,” says Vidhya, adding that she experimented with bird rangoli earlier this year for Navaratri. She came to know of #birNov last year and has been hooked ever since. “I live in Austin where it gets quite cold during this time of the year, so I came up with small kolams of birds that I can do from home,” says the 47-year-old. Vidhya has been birding from 2012 when she lived in Bengaluru, and says that Bird Count India’s regular challenges and the eBird platform are among her motivators. “I have been birding every day from 2017 after Bird Count India announced the ‘Last Birder Standing’ challenge,” she says.