- Dwelling with Birds chronicles Asad Rahmani’s life, from his early fascination with wildlife to his impactful profession the place he has championed grassland and wetland hen conservation.
- Rahmani’s work displays his deep reference to grassroots communities, revolutionary analysis, and a lifelong ardour for preserving India’s avian biodiversity.
- Within the e-book, he provides credit score and talks warmly of the individuals from villages and forests who helped him spot the birds and shared their information.
- The views on this e-book overview are that of the creator.
Asad Rahmani’s autobiography, Dwelling with Birds, is fast-paced and readable and provides attention-grabbing insights into their struggles for survival. Rahmani traces his curiosity in wildlife and ecology from his early years to the massive assortment of books, newspapers, and periodicals his father supplied at house. He did his M.Sc. at Aligarh Muslim College (AMU), labored 12 years as a scientist on the Bombay Pure Historical past Society (BNHS), got here again to AMU’s Division of Wildlife Sciences, after which, on the pinnacle of his profession, he was the director of BNHS from 1997 until his retirement in 2015. His devotion to nature conservation, information, and love for the myriad birds that reside within the Indian subcontinent is unquestionable.
He provides credit score and talks warmly of the innumerable individuals from villages and forests who helped him spot the birds and shared their information on creatures massive and small. A global community of birders and organisations additionally gave wings to his endeavours. This overview will, nevertheless, focus extra on the birds he helped save, the nice Indian bustard (GIB) and the florican – each the lesser florican and the Bengal florican – and the vultures.
BNHS was a pioneer NGO, with Salim Ali, India’s biggest ornithologist, and J.C. Daniel steering scientific analysis on birds and ecology. Within the mid-Sixties, Rahmani discovered Salim Ali’s traditional The Ebook of Indian Birds in his college library, which helped him recognise and perceive birds. It was his first encounter with Salim Ali and BNHS, and little did he realise then that each would change his life. Others who influenced his want to turn out to be a wildlife biologist have been M Krishnan, E.P. Gee, and Jim Corbett.
On the lookout for bustards
Rahmani’s most important curiosity was grassland and wetland birds, specializing in lesser-known species and habitats. He elaborately paperwork the efforts to avoid wasting bustards. In 1980, within the aftermath of an Arab sheikh’s try to hunt the Houbara bustard within the Thar Desert, the place the GIB additionally lives, the Jaipur-based Tourism and Wildlife Society of India organised a world convention on the GIB. It projected the standing of the GIB in India, together with just a few present in Solapur, Maharashtra, in 1979, the place the forest division took over 100 hectares of barren, overgrazed land. Close to Nannaj village, a big hen was seen, however nobody may determine it. A college principal in Solapur, B. S. Kulkarni, recognized it as maldhok, the native identify for the GIB.
In April 1981, as part of the Endangered Species Challenge of BNHS, he went to Nannaj on the lookout for the GIB however had no luck. The next month, he went to Ajmer, and a forest officer put him in contact with Ranvir Singh Rathore, an area who knew rather a lot about bustards in that space. Together with Rathore and Goga, an area driver equally nicely knowledgeable concerning the GIB, he roamed the most effective habitat of the bustard and noticed his first bustard, a juvenile. Then it was a bonanza – 15 GIBs have been sighted in two hours.
He noticed three on the Karera Chook Sanctuary, 45 km from Jhansi. They have been massive birds, the male two metres tall and the feminine a bit of smaller however nonetheless conspicuous. Returning to Nannaj, he sighted eight bustards, together with two displaying males. He stayed there for 5 months and picked up good preliminary information on the hen. In the course of the 4 years of research, he noticed displaying males and bustards mating. Particulars of nesting, chick survival, and behavior have been collected at Nannaj and revealed in analysis papers and fashionable articles.
As he crisscrossed the nation on the lookout for the elusive hen, a discipline station was proposed for Karera. The GIB’s distribution vary within the eighties was from Punjab and Haryana within the north to Tamil Nadu and Karnataka within the south, Odisha within the east, and Rajasthan-Gujarat within the west. Breeding season diverse from area to area. A birdwatchers group counted 40 bustards within the Rollapadu grasslands of Andhra. In 1984, Rahmani and BNHS helped filmmakers Ashish Chandola and Joanna van Gruisen make a movie on the bustards in mating mode at Karera. Extra footage was from Rollapadu and Nannaj. Three many years previous, the movie continues to be the most effective on bustards.
Rahmani’s pleas to start out a bustard conservation breeding programme went unheard, and, regardless of the unfold of its inhabitants and innumerable sightings within the eighties, their numbers plummeted. It was unhappy to see the extinction of bustards in Sorsan in Rajasthan, Karera, and Ghatigaon in MP and a lower within the Naliya grasslands of Kutch, Rollapadu, Nannaj in Solapur, and plenty of areas within the Thar Desert. Due to a breeding programme began by the Rajasthan authorities and the Wildlife Institute of India in 2019, in July 2024, there have been (whereas Rahmani was writing the e-book) 43 bustards in two breeding centres in Sam and Devra and in-situ conservation in another areas, with a plan to reintroduce the birds of their previous habitats.
Saving vultures
An innocuous remark, “Ab toh gidh bhi kum ho rahe hain (now there are fewer vultures),” by an animal keeper of AMU in 1996, alerted Rahmani and led to one in all India’s largest hen rescue tasks. It was frequent to see tons of of vultures and canines feeding on cattle carcasses on roadsides, close to water our bodies, and railway strains. A go to and discuss with Vibhu Prakash, who had been learning raptors, together with vultures, in Bharatpur for 15 years, confirmed a giant drop within the vulture inhabitants.
In Could 1997, Rahmani joined BNHS as its director and requested Prakash to research whether or not the drop was restricted to Bharatpur-Aligarh-Meerut or extra widespread. The vulture decline was missed as a result of the Gyps species, significantly the white-backed and long-billed, have been so plentiful in North India as much as the mid-Nineties that even when 50% disappeared, 1000’s of them may nonetheless be seen. Since there was additionally no systematic monitoring, the declining pattern was missed.
The motion started with BNHS, Worldwide Fund-India, Wildlife Institute of India, and others coming collectively, vulture alerts being despatched out, and the Journal of BNHS publishing Prakash’s 15-year research on the standing of the vultures in Bharatpur, particularly the Gyps inhabitants. Prakash’s research confirmed a pointy decline within the vulture inhabitants over 10 years. It was adopted up by a Vulture Conservation Technique Planning assembly attended by 28 scientists and researchers from high organisations fascinated by birds and wildlife. BirdLife Worldwide and the Royal Society for Safety of Birds, UK, have been additionally within the loop. Postmortem investigation on the Hisar Veterinary Faculty confirmed that the vultures suffered from visceral gout.
Vultures have been dying in Pakistan and Nepal, too. The Peregrine Fund initiated an Asian Vulture Disaster mission. On the Phrase Convention on Birds of Prey in Budapest in 2003, the Peregrine Fund revealed that the painkiller diclofenac sodium was inflicting visceral gout in vultures that consumed livestock carcasses contaminated by the drug. Additional analysis by Peregrine Fund, Washington State College, and the Ornithological Society of Pakistan and information revealed within the journal Nature in January 2004 was a turning level in saving the vultures. 13 authors from six establishments confirmed a one hundred pc correlation between diclofenac and kidney failure in vultures. After that, half a dozen ministries and the Drug Controller in India banned the manufacture and use of veterinary diclofenac. Vultures obtained a second lease of life.
The floricans belong to the bustard household and stay in grasslands. From 2013 to 2017, Rahmani ran two tasks on the Bengal florican, funded by the Setting Ministry and the Stopping Extinction Programme of Birdlife Worldwide. The species continues to be surviving in protected areas of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. In line with Rahmani, conservation work on this critically endangered species of our grasslands must be continued. Since he continually highlighted uncared for species, the Ministry of Setting and Forests nicknamed him ‘father of the uncared for species.’
Preventing for flamingos
Rahmani writes nostalgically concerning the BNHS flamingo festivals, the place 15,000 of those resplendent birds may very well be sighted on the Sewri mud flats of Mumbai until virtually 2018 when building work began on the Trans-Harbour bridge; the centenary and A hundred and twenty fifth-year celebrations of BNHS; the battle to avoid wasting the Rani Bagh Botanical Backyard of Mumbai and the position of those that passionately fought, and proceed to battle, for crops, animals and the inexperienced lungs of Mumbai.
Rahmani writes with heat about Ali Hussain, the skillful, conventional hen trapper of the Mirshikari neighborhood from a Bihar village, and others employed by BNHS to lure birds for ringing. It was a fragile operation guaranteeing the security of birds. A whole bunch of birds have been caught between 1959 and 1973 as BNHS launched a significant research on hen migration.
The creator regrets not having the time to review the white-bellied Minivet, which lives in dry tropical thorn forests; the Kashmir Flycatcher, which breeds in a small space within the western Himalayas (Kashmir and elements of Pakistan) and winters within the southern Western Ghats and Sri Lanka and the Orange Bullfinch which too is confined to a small space of the western Himalayas. “India is an unlimited nation with such a wealthy biodiversity of birds that even when we work on them for tons of of years, we will be unable to review all species,” he says.
Since its independence, India has largely averted main species extinction, although there was a decline within the inhabitants of 180 hen species. Whereas the variety of mountain quail could have declined naturally, the pink-headed duck, he says, was hunted to extinction with nearly 80 museum specimens. There have been just a few rediscoveries, like that of the Jerdon Courser in 1986 by BNHS scientist Bharat Bhushan. Nonetheless, it has gone lacking once more for a decade. The forest owlet, too, although extinct for eight many years, was present in 1997 and now exists in a number of protected areas of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh.
Banner picture: A 1986 picture of Asad Rahmani watching birds in Madhya Pradesh. Picture by Ravi Sankaran.
