Why amateur birders matter to ornithology Premium

Aasheesh Pittie says birdwatching is not very unlike hunting, except that nothing is killed. “You track… you want to follow the bird… see it,” he says about this activity that he has pursued for nearly fifty years. Pittie, the editor of the ornithological journal Indian Birds, author of many classic reference books about birds and most recently, a collection of bird essays titled The Living Air: Pleasures of Birds and Birdwatching, was speaking at an event organised by the Archives of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS). 

Aasheesh Pittie says birdwatching is not very unlike hunting, except that nothing is killed. “You track… you want to follow the bird… see it,” he says about this activity that he has pursued for nearly fifty years. Pittie, the editor of the ornithological journal Indian Birds, author of many classic reference books about birds and most recently, a collection of bird essays titled The Living Air: Pleasures of Birds and Birdwatching, was speaking atan event organised by the Archives of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS). 

At the event titled A Century of Watching Indian Birds, Pittie, who was in conversation with ecologist Suhel Quader, delved into various aspects of birding: the history of ornithology in India, some key figures who played a role in the evolution of the field such as Sálim Ali, Jamal Ara and Zafar Futehally, how social media influences birdwatching and the role of citizen science in conservation. He also offered insights into his own birding journey. 

While the British were the first to document and collect Indian birds, by the first quarter of the 1900s, the focus had shifted to Sálim Ali. Ali’s collections of bird specimens, which went to the royal families in various erstwhile princely states in India and also the British Museum in London, were also often studied by Hugh Whistler, a British police officer and ornithologist who served in India between 1909 and 1926. “Sálim Ali’s behavioural notes and Hugh Whistler’s very detailed taxonomic notes comprised the literature of that period,” says Pittie.

Whistler was also involved in another important event in the history of Indian ornithology: the Vernay Scientific Survey of Eastern Ghats. A report based on the survey was published in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society (JBNHS), in 1932.“Ornithology wasn’t the popular birding, photography thing that it is today,” he says. “It was individual-based, institution-based. It was based on the passion of a person who couldn’t be in the field but had the money to support some activity that people did.” 

The Vernay survey too was the outcome of a generous endowment of an English gentleman called A.S. Vernay. “The collection was sent to the British Museum,” he says, adding that the BNHS paper, though technical, is eminently readable for what it has to say about “the art of observation, the art of writing, the art of synthesis of knowledge that comes and how new knowledge is married to that.”

Quader and Pittie also spoke about how, through much of the early history of ornithology, the information gathered was typically from a dead specimen. “They didn’t have field guides which were good enough, optics that were good enough and they didn’t have identification skills which had developed enough to identify a bird from far away,” says Pittie, adding that multiple birds were shot to create collections and garner information about a species. “Most of the birds that they spoke about, wrote about were birds in the hand that were shot in the field. That was how birding was studied at that time.”

Pittie’s own journey as a birder began in the 1970s and 1980s  when he was still in school. Two incidents appear to have catalysed his initiation into birding. A friend’s father, who also happened to be related to Ali, came to Pittie’s school, spoke to the students about birds, and offered to take them birding with him. “I said, yes, let’s go and I liked it,” he says, admitting that he was mostly into big mammals back then and used to collect the World Wildlife Fund’s large posters of animals like leopard cubs and lion cubs. The back of these posters, he recalls, had a little blurb explaining what the organisation was about. “I wrote to them and subscribed to their newsletter, where I read about Salim Ali and the Newsletter for Birdwatchers,” says Pittie. who went on to become a member of the BNHS.