While even bird guides list jungle crows and black kites as common across the State, preliminary results from Kerala’s citizen science-based Bird Atlas project provide some finer details.
“Our preliminary results show interesting patterns,” says P.O. Nameer, head of the Department of Wildlife Science at Thrissur’s College of Forestry, who coordinates the project. “The jungle crow, for instance, is infrequent in central Kerala and more abundant in the Travancore and Malabar belts. Black kites are mostly found near towns and cities and are not found in most villages.”
While Red-whiskered bulbuls ( irattathalachi in Malayalam) are the most common species in Kannur and Wayanad, they are the rarest in Thiruvananthapuram. The Indian peafowl, though purported to be found all across Kerala, is common only in Palakkad and during dry seasons, in Thrissur.
Such finer distribution details are precisely what the Kerala Bird Atlas project — a first-of-its-kind initiative that engages citizens to collect bird distribution and abundance data for an entire State —hopes to catalogue for conservation purpose. Teams conduct surveys during wet and dry seasons every year. Scientists collate these results and scale them up across larger landscapes to obtain species distribution maps and State-level abundance data. This can also be used to predict future bird distributions when current land use patterns change, such as paddy fields being replaced by urban spaces.
Ambitious project
In just two years, half of the ambitious five-year project has been accomplished. So far, nearly 1,000 volunteers from many birding groups and non-governmental organisations have surveyed hundreds of 1.1 x 1.1 kilometre squares or ‘sub-cells’ (which facilitates comparisons across the State) in forests, towns, and cities across nine districts for bird presence and numbers.
This year, surveys in Kannur are complete and the district’s book will be released during the World Wildlife Week in October.
“The goal is insanely ambitious: to survey one out of every nine kilometre squares over five years, not once but twice. That’s over 4,000 squares [sub-cells],” says Suhel Quader of the Nature Conservation Foundation, a partner of Bird Count India that aids the project.
That half the project is already complete is remarkable, he adds. “It provides an example for other States to emulate.”
This year’s two-month-long wet season survey will begin on July 15.