India Embraces The Great Backyard Bird Count

Ever since the Great Backyard Bird Count went global in 2013, India has embraced it like no other country in the world.

Indian birders submitted more than 3,300 checklists for last year’s count. Only the United States and Canada posted higher numbers. Even more impressively, they documented 823 species, more than any other country in the world.

In fact, of the 10 states and provinces with the highest species counts, six were in India—the other four were Puntarenas, Costa Rica; Queensland, Australia; California; and Texas.

“India is quite diverse in birds,” said Praveen J of Bird Count India, an active promoter of this year’s count, which ran from February 14 to February 17.

“The Eastern Himalayas and Western Ghats are two of the hottest of the hotspots with endemic species,” Praveen J said. “We get palearctic and Tibetan species in Ladakh, desert species in the Rann of Kutch and Thar Desert, montane species all along the Himalayas, waders all along the coasts, several Southeast Asian species in Northeast India, several island endemics in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, littoral forest species in pockets on East Indian coasts, and a decent collection of seabirds off the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal.”

A collaboration between Audubon and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Great Backyard Bird Count got its start in 1998. At first confined to North America, it expanded worldwide in 2013, gaining particular traction in Europe, India, Australia, and Latin America.

Participants, running the gamut from beginning birders to experts, are asked to spend at least 15 minutes identifying the birds in their neighborhoods. Last year, participants in 111 countries tallied more than 35 million birds, representing more than 4,000 species. That’s nearly half of all avian species on Earth.

Scientists then use this information to determine how bird populations are doing and what can be done to better protect them. In New Delhi, for example, birders participating in a separate citizen science project recently reported a decline in migratory water birds. With more birders, the more data there will be for researchers to tell whether dips like the one seen in the country’s capital is just a year-over-year blip or the beginning of a big problem.

Bird-watching isn’t yet a popular hobby in the subcontinent, according to Suhel Quader of the Nature Conservation Foundation, based in Mysore, India. “But it's certainly growing very rapidly,” he said, adding that the “global nature of the GBBC makes it a great opportunity to motivate birders to get together, and to generate some 'buzz' among non-birders.”