An annual international crowd-sourcing exercise, the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) is being conducted for the fifth consecutive year in India. The GBBC-India began the five-day exercise on Friday.
Besides offering a lot of fun, the GBBC has a serious side to it. These “annual snapshots” of bird populations gathered from all over India and the world help analysts answer important questions, including the distribution of birds across the country, how they are being affected by changes in habitat and weather, and how populations and distributions might change in future.
The event is an opportunity to get people involved in birding and even develop a local or regional project.
All it takes is to watch birds for a minimum of 15 minutes and count all the species one sees. It does not matter if one cannot identify every single species – what one can identify is sufficient. After the counting, all one needs to do is log on to www.ebird.org/india and submit the list of species spotted. The GBBC India is coordinated by the Bird Count India Collective, a coming together of groups and organisations interested in birds, nature and conservation. More than 1,100 bird watchers uploaded over 7,900 lists and reported 785 species in the 2016 edition of the GBBC.
Poor response
Birding enthusiast and GBBC volunteer Chandra Sekhar Bandi is one of the many who participates in the GBBC bird walks and talks. A Telugu based in Bengaluru, he has selected a school on the outskirts of Vijayawada to conduct a Bird Walk and Talk. The coastal districts are rich in avian fauna, but the response to the GBBC was very poor from here, Mr. Chandra Sekhar said.
Thousands of Rosy Starlings (also called Rose-Coloured Pastors) visit the city in February.
