Winged Wonders Amidst Urban Sprawl

Despite its urban sprawl, Delhi remains a sanctuary for a surprising variety of bird species, from local dwellers to transient visitors tracing ancient migratory paths. In “The Birds of the Delhi Area,” Sudhir Vyas offers a comprehensive look into the avian life enriching India’s bustling capital.

Ornithology is not just an interesting branch of scientific knowledge for anyone to pursue easily; it is also a knowledge sphere that has been constantly evolving over the decades. What is tragic about it, however, is that while more and more greenhorns are entering this area (including a birder like me) and the veterans are writing more about birds and their habitats, many bird species are nearing extinction and their habitats are shrinking fast across the globe. This dichotomy is a bit difficult to explain for me. How do we deal with this tragedy that has befallen the environment around us? How can we save natural habitats from fragmenting? How can we care for nature more meaningfully? There are many questions that have tough answers.

I bought this expensive book for my personal library in Bhopal after reading about it in the ‘Hornbill’ magazine of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) recently. Dr Asad Rahmani, the celebrated Indian ornithologist and former director of the BNHS, has praised the book and its author—a reason why I picked this up.

India’s national capital is often blamed for all its negative aspects—mainly the extreme weather conditions and the air pollution. And yet, Delhi is home to 470–471 species of birds in and around different habitats and landscapes of the vast city area, as the new book informs us. Author Sudhir Vyas and photographers Amit Sharma, Vijay Kumar Sethi, and others like Vijay Dhasmana and Anita Mani have documented the birds beautifully and have included the detailed checklist that is normally found in such books by other authors. But Vyas, a former career diplomat, has also given something more interesting to his readers. He has included historical and expunged records and has written about at least 22 such species that had been reported in the past, but since 1975 (about 50 years), they have not been found around Delhi.

Books on birds around cities are increasingly written about. Recent mentionable additions have been Birds of Indore by Ajay Gadikar and Padma Shri Bhalu Mondhe and Birds of Lucknow by Sanjay Kumar, an IAS officer in the Government of Uttar Pradesh, among other publications. In the Delhi book, Sudhir Vyas says species like Tundra Swan, Common Golden-eye, Pin-tailed Sandgrouse, Slaty-breasted Rail, Great Indian Bustard, Siberain Crane, Cinereous Vulture, etc. have not been recorded from the area since 1975. The vulture, he asserts, was a common sight on the refuse dumps, but since 1969, they have eluded our national capital.

In the expunged records chapter—normally not found in a treatise on birds—the author appreciably informs the readers that one Lav Kumar Khachar had withdrawn his own records from the 1950s, referred to in Ganguli’s “Guide to the Birds of Delhi”. Usha Ganguli’s guide was published in 1975 and was well received in those days when bird watching or birding was not so popular in urban India. Needless to say, books on birds were also very limited in number. Salim Ali’s famous book The Book of Indian Birds came later, in 1979, for the first time.

So the author, a 1977 batch officer of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) who retired in 2015, has, after extensive research and updating his own monograph of 2019, published this riveting book while providing interesting features of urban sprawl. He has indicated the bird habitats and the landscapes around the otherwise wooded, historic city. Elsewhere, he talks about the changing geography of New Delhi, its habitats, and how different species of birds have been coming in and going out in search of food and shelter.

‘’Birdlife in any given area is in a constant state of flux, evolving with and adapting to the changing environment, exploiting new opportunities as they appear, and in this context, the apparent range expansions reflected in Delhi’s birdlife are of interest. The Yamuna and Ganga rivers, and their irrigation canal systems have probably facilitated the speed of some sedentary species of wet Indo-Gangetic habitats, such as the White-tailed Stonechat Saxicola leucura, Yellow-bellied Prinia Prinia, and Bengal Bushlark Mirafa assamica, into the Delhi area in the 1970s, as well as the Sind Sparrows Passer pyrrhonotus of the Indus floodplains from the West,” he describes.

About the non-breeding visitors, Vyas says, “There are 190 species classified as non-breeding visitors to the Delhi area, most being winter migrants from the Himalayas and beyond, but these also include some 40-odd species that are ‘mainly’ passage migrants and a few, such as the Greater Flamingo Phoenicopterus roseus, whose movements tend to be irregular over the seasons and are thus classified as Causal Visitors.” Migrants adopt various strategies to complete their migrations. Some species move gradually through the landscape, halting to rest and feed as they go, while others travel rapidly, either on a broad front or along well-defined, regular paths. Some are long-distance travellers, migrating non-stop to and from their winter quarters or between one or more staging posts en route to replenish their fuel reserves. Migration, for a lay reader, is quite interesting but is a technical sub-section of a vast subject of ornithology. A lot of research is still going on, and many research papers and books have already been exclusively written on the migration issue, covering why they migrate, when they do it, the importance of their flyways, energy storage, route selection, timings, how to avoid enemies, and so on.

The definition of flyways, says the author, is helpful from a broader perspective to understand migration patterns. Initially conceived for waders and waterfowl, the concept proves useful for migratory species from other families as well.

Delhi is the wintering ground for many bird species that breed in Siberia and Central Eurasia and follow the Central Asian Flyway to winter in the Indian subcontinent. They face a major obstacle in the high ranges of the Karakoram and the Himalayas, and many—especially raptors—are forced to funnel their migration routes through the deep river gorges that cut through this range.

Birds in Delhi are found in vast stretches and a few birding hotspots in the megacity, including floodplains. Normally, birding hotspots and breeding sites are not disclosed by professional birders, but Sudhir Vyas has given a general list for understanding, and that includes Delhi Zoological Park, Old Delhi Ridge, New Delhi Ridge behind Rashtrapati Bhavan, Kamla Nehru Biodiversity Park, Buddha Jayanti and Mahvir Jayanti Parks, Humayun Tomb’s area, Sundar Nursery, Yamuna Biodiversity Park, Lodhi Gardens, Hauz Khas, Sanjay Van, and so on. In fact, Rashtrapati Bhavan itself is a great bird habitat. When Pranab Mukherjee was the President of India, a beautifully produced book, Winged Wonders of Rashtrapati Bhavan, was published about the birds of Rashtrapati Bhawan, the sprawling house of India’s President. Its author was Dr Thomas Mathew, who recorded 111 species of the hollowed prescient over a decade ago.