Deepali Watve, an engineer in Pune, had been chook watching since her childhood and when she turned a mom of two, she shared her interest along with her youngsters. “Both my children are unschooled, i.e. they do not attend a formal school and are self-learners. I was fascinated that the boys decided to choose the hobby of birding as their learning subject,” she says.
During the lockdown interval, the Watve household would pack meals and spend on daily basis at Mahatma Tekdi, ARAI hills and different hotspots to be with nature. After sighting birds such because the Eurasian Wryneck, Indian Paradise Flycatcher and Asian Blue Flycatcher, they might return home smiling.
Taking wing
What helped the household get nearer to birds was a bunch that got here up in 2020 in Pune, referred to as the Pune Bird Atlas (PBA). Watve was launched to it by a good friend of a good friend, Siddharth Biniwale, who’s a naturalist and a core member of PBA with Pankaj Koparde, Kedar Champhekar, Pooja Pawar and Madhur Rathi. “At PBA, I came to know that even in the vicinity of an urban space, we could find a wide variety of bird species within a periphery of 10-12 km. We feel that carrying out scientific study and analysis of birds in Pune city through PBA has been our contribution to Pune’s biodiversity heritage,” she says.
In October, Watve’s eldest, Ayan, was chosen, on scholarship, for a prestigious and rigorous IISER-IIT Ornithology programme for skilled birders between 14 and 18 years of age.
Enthusiasts similar to Watve make up the fascinating world of PBA. A primary-of-its-kind mission in Maharashtra, PBA seeks to know the distribution and abundance of birds in Pune. It entails the general public— which incorporates skilled birders and amateurs— in systematic bird-watching efforts to doc how chook numbers and their distribution change in Pune over a time frame.
“Pune city is changing at a fast pace in terms of concretisation and habitat change that is the result of encroachments and land reclamation. It is interesting to note how the richness of a species changes with varying levels of urbanisation across the city,” says Pawar, a wildlife biologist whose analysis is in panorama ecology, focussed across the majestic hornbill.
A fledgling initiative
In 2019, Pawar got here throughout experiences of the Kerala and Mysuru chook atlases that confirmed how birds had been responding to altering habitats. “We thought that starting PBA would be a good idea since the city has so many birders but no baseline information about birds. There had been an attempt made before to have a Pune Bird Atlas. This time around, too, the initiative came upon a roadblock in the form of COVID, which kept bird watchers home and confined them to reporting sightings only from their balconies. It was only in 2021 that PBA’s energies were properly freed,” says Pawar.
There is a protocol concerned for bird-watching with PBA. Members, individually or in teams, survey a grid for quarter-hour on weekend mornings. “We have demarcated the city into 198 grids of 1.1 km × 1.1 km. Volunteers observe and report the birds they see and document it on the global bird citizen science platform eBird,” says Champhekar.
When a uncommon chook is noticed — Temminck’s Stint, European Roller, Black-Naped Monarch, White-bellied Drongo, Crested Serpent-Eagle, White-bellied Minivet, Desert Wheatear, Vernal hanging parrot — the PBA’s WhatsApp group is all aflutter.
The functioning of PBA is an instance of citizen science, an method that depends on participation by lovers and never solely consultants. Members have a guidelines to fill out throughout each session. The Fatima Nagar grid as soon as reported 33 species in only one hour of birding. New hobbyists are educated by way of a number of classes in birding in addition to within the expertise used to add checklists and different information, which is reviewed by consultants. “PBA is a part of Bird Count India, a consortium of organisations, whose aim includes encouraging bird watching in the country. The platform used by PBA to document the information is Ebird, which is online and supports citizen science. Observers from around the world can record their bird observations,” says Chaphekar.
Nestling within the metropolis
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Pawar, herself, was stunned when she discovered that the congested space of Swargate was home to 42 species. So far, she has reported sightings of the Indian gray hornbill, Indian golden oriole, chestnut-tailed starling, drongos, crows and pigeons. Wetland birds like widespread sandpipers, kingfishers, Indian pond herons, cormorants, and egrets had been additionally seen close to canals.
“Pune has a large mix of grassland and wetland birds. Some birds migrate here from Eurasia and other cold places and those for whom the city is a passage to another place. Mohammadwadi grid, for instance, is home to 74 species, from grassland birds such as Grey Francolin, pipits and larks, common woodshrike and hoopoe, to wetland birds, migrant species of flycatchers and other commonly seen birds. The Taljai grids have registered 77 species so far because its mix of woodland and shrubland patches provide habitats for many bird species,” says Pawar.
The info is all open-access however PBA’s fast goal is to publish the data in a month or so within the type of a report or a paper. “We would also like to submit this report to the Pune Municipal Corporation,” says Pawar.
