A green-crowned warbler, a species found in the woodlands of the Himalayas and on the east coast of India, was sighted in Kutch district of Gujarat by three local birdwatchers during their routine birding trip on December 12 with experts saying that the individual could be a vagrant escaping some extreme weather events in its present range.
Birdwatchers Manoj Tank, Mahendra Tank and Mahesh Parmar were out on a birding trip on the outskirts of Bhuj on December 10 when Manoj sighted an unusual bird in the upper canopy of a local forest.
“It was constantly moving, flying from one branch to another swiftly… We tried desperately to click it and with great effort, I could manage one good frame,” said 54-year-old Manoj who has been bird-watching since 2010.
Manoj and Mahendra live in Madhapar village on the outskirts of Bhuj while Parmar, a retired draughtsman of the state irrigation department lives in Kukma village, also on the outskirts of Bhuj. While Manoj works in the accounts department of a private chemical company in Kutch, Mahendra is a retired employee of the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited.
“The small bird was perching at a height of at least 30 feet and moving constantly… But we knew that it was a bird not usually found in Kutch. Therefore, we shared the the bird’s photo clicked by Manoj in a local birdwatchers’ group and Manoj Ganpule, an expert of birds, confirmed that it was a green-crowned warbler,” said Mahendra, 54, who has been bird-watching for 10 years.
Ganpule, who is the editor of Flamingo, a journal published quarterly by the Bird Conservation Society of Gujarat (BCSG), said that the sighting in Kutch was the first record of green-crowned warbler in Gujarat.
“This is a Himalayan bird… It migrates towards terai (the foothills of the Himalaya) during winter but there are no records of it regularly migrating to far away places like Gujarat. In fact, besides the Himalaya, this species is sighted more often in the Eastern Ghats on the east coast of India,” Ganpule said.
Green-crowned warblers hide in the canopy of woodlands and feed largely on insects, said Ashok Mashru, an experienced birdwatcher from Gujarat.
“Gujarat is not its range state… one possible reason for its appearance in Kutch could be some extreme weather event in the Himalayas,” he said. With this, the number of species of birds sighted in Gujarat has gone up to 615, the Flamingo editor said.
Red-breasted goose was recorded for the first time in Gujarat in 2021. Marbled teal was also sighted in Banni in Kutch in 2021, a first record since its sighting in Porbandar in 2009.
