No blue skies, too few Neelkanths—another canary in India’s coal mine?

India, occupying only 2.4 per cent of the total global land area, supports an astounding 1,361 bird species, equivalent to over 13 per cent of the global bird diversity. To come up with the second State of Indian Birds report for a country that is as hugely diverse in all respects could have been no mean challenge.

As the report says by way of introducing itself: ‘The State of India’s Birds report is a periodic assessment of the distribution range, trends in abundance, and conservation status for most of the bird species that regularly occur in India… Birds are excellent indicators of the state of our natural world and are potent cultural symbols of nature. As a comprehensive, national-level assessment, the report points the way towards conservation needs of India’s birds.’

The first SOIB was released in 2020. This second one, published 25 August 2023, had help from 13 partner organisations and 50 bird experts to analyse a humungous 30 million observations, uploaded by over 30,000 birdwatchers on ebird.org—a platform that gathers observations from birdwatchers across the world and which has become extremely popular in India—and assessed 942 bird species.

While there have been other such reports, this is the first time that such a report has been prepared using ebird data, a first amongst countries of the global south! The 30 million observations also included Indian birders retrospectively digitising their past birding lists from yellowing notebooks.

The 942 species covered were selected based on their importance (for example, endemics — meaning the species found in a single defined geographic location) and on the availability of data (certain important groups of species, like the primarily nocturnal owls and nightjars, sadly could not be assessed well due to lack of adequate data).

Still, what we do have is a story that should give us twitchers ‘furiously to think’: Unfortunately, all is not well with our birds.