Hyderabad’s birding enthusiasts are ecstatic. The city team has again won the Big Bird Day this year, after previously winning it in 2015 and standing second in 2016! It was a close call as this year’s runners up team, Delhi had found 268 species and the winning team found 270. Bird-watchers and environmentalists from across the state took to the outdoors to observe and count the number of bird species in a day-long event on February 5. They made notes and took photographs.
Big Bird Day is an annual event which is dedicated to the fun of bird-watching. This event is conducted throughout the country where birdwatchers enumerate the list of birds seen at a specified location of a specific date from dawn to dusk. In Telangana, this event has been taken up by an experienced birding group Hyderabad Birding Pals who have been documenting and reporting several bird sightings in the state. This year, 11 teams of experts visited places such as Ananthagiri hills, Nallamalla forests, Osmansagar, Kawal Tiger reserve, and HCU campus among others.
Black Breasted Weaver shot by Fareed Mohmed
“It feels fantastic to report the highest number of bird species in BBD 2017! It shows how serious the bird-watchers are in our group and all this data paves way for scientific documentation and will be helpful in many other ways. All the hard work done by all the 11 teams from HBP (Telangana state) from dawn to dusk paid off! We will continue this kind of benchmark next year as well. We will have many more events in future on the same lines to promote awareness about birds and joys of bird-watching,” says Rajeev Khandelwal, a member of the group. Talking about his bird-watching experience, he adds, “It was a great day and we were able to record good number of species. My team was at the Osmansagar and Himayatsagar and we walked around 20 km. However, the urbanisation and encroachment has affected the habitat of these birds and hence the number of birds has decreased. The lakes are decreasing and the birds are losing their habitat.”
Gopalakrishna Iyer, another bird-watching enthusiast says, “My team visited several locations in and around Kawal Tiger Reserve, and Jannaram. Bird-watching in this region is always full of surprises. We saw rare birds from the region like the River lapwing, Black bellied tern, Bonelii’s eagle, and Alexandrine parakeet. Several birds were seen at the core region of the reserve Kalpakunta, the Kadem dam and at the safari trail.”
