Dehradun: People's interest in birdwatching is growing by leaps and bounds in India and Uttarakhand is being recognised as a birding haven. This became evident with the results of the recently held Great Backyard Bird Count - the largest synchronized bird count event in the world.
This year's event - held from 12-15 February - witnessed unprecedented participation of bird enthusiasts from India as more than 1100 people submitted over 7,800 bird checklists.
Raman Kumar, director , Nature's Science Initiative said, "India was at number one spot in terms of the number of species reported with 785 bird species. The country ranked third (behind US and Canada) in the number of checklists submitted. Within India, Uttarakhand led the way and recorded 402 bird species - the highest from any state."
Started in the US in 1998, the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) was a pioneering citizen-science project to collect data on birds. GBBC runs for 4 days every February, and encourages people to go birding anywhere, even their backyards, and record their observations on the eBird website. As popularity increased, GBBC was made global in 2013.
Gopi GV, scientist with Wildlife Institute of India (WII) said, "WII recorded maximum 147 bird species from its campus itself out of 100 odd campus across the country. It is mainly because WII has an ideal mosaic habitat which include grassland, woodland, marshy, swampy, wetland, lakh , vegetation which encourages good diversity of birds."
Dhananjay Mohan, chief conservator of forest too was of the opinion that the event, GBBC underscores the tremendous bird diversity present in Uttarakhand and augurs well for birdwatching in the state. It is noteworthy that this year's GBBC coincided with the Uttarakhand Bird Festival - an event to popularise birds among the public and showcase the state as an ideal birding destination," said.
According to Raman Kumar, there are simply too few scientists in this world to study the complex distribution and movement patterns of so many bird species. By taking part in such events and sharing related information using common platforms like eBird ( www.ebird.org ), bird scientists and enthusiasts perform the role of 'citizen scientists'. Data from such events are extremely useful in understanding where birds are located and what is happening to their populations on the broad scale which answer important questions like: How does climate change influence birds? How to birds move from year to year, and what can we learn from these patterns? Is the timing of their migration changing?
