The pied cuckoo, sometimes called the rain bird, is a migrant, and much like migrants across the world, is seen as having mystical qualities. Every year, in a wide curve, the pied cuckoo follows the south-westerly winds that blow in across the Indian Ocean, leaving Africa for the Indian subcontinent. If you believe folklore, the bird brings the rains.
Of course, we don’t care to any more, because, “We have systematically been educated out of our connections with nature,” says M D Madhusudan, Scientist and Co-founder at the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), a non-profit based out of Mysuru.
Madhusudan himself is a bit of a storyteller, who talks of Kalidas’ Meghdoota, which tells of the long wait for the rain by everyone from the black-and-white bird to the poet with a pitcher. The scientist combines this with a recent interest in how data can be represented visually to communicate complex concepts to the layperson. He says he’s simply following through on an effort first initiated by his colleague, Dr Suhel Quader, in 2011.
The human connect
Legends, songs, parables, have all told of the migration of the pied cuckoo, some from within south India, some from Africa. But tracking the movement of birds is not easy. “If a single scientist were to track a bird species like the pied cuckoo across hundreds of thousands of square kilometres and over many years, can you imagine the number of people that would have to be employed to gather such data,” he asks. Instead, scientists have partnered with thousands of enthusiastic birdwatchers across the country to form a citizen-science network. Not only does such collaboration yield insights into the distribution and abundance of birds, it also helps in understanding large-scale phenomena, such as patterns of bird migration. “It is only with the data collected by thousands of citizen birdwatchers over many years, that such a visualisation on a continental scale is even possible.”
- The answer lies in being curious. “Out of curiosity can come concern. It allows us to reflect on the choices we’re making, to ask questions that are a little more nuanced. Out of this can come a more deliberate and thoughtful way of conducting ourselves as a society. Many species have habitats that are being impacted, and the way we are changing the face of this planet, will ultimately tell on us,” he says.
- He suggests we begin to recognise nature’s alphabet, in this case the pied cuckoo, in order to “read nature’s messages, which well might be that one of them is in decline! The same goes for trees, or for that matter, butterflies. When enough numbers of people know and care about something, good things — like ensuring that winged wonders like the pied cuckoo don’t get wiped off the face of earth — can start to happen,” he says.
All you need to track birds is a pair of binoculars and a smartphone, with the eBird app. You get on a platform, provided in this case by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University, and start recording. This open-access global citizen-science project enables you to see your own data, plus country-wide and worldwide data, of all birds. You can look at hotspots and even donate to the cause. If you look for the pied cuckoo, you’ll see that its sightings in Delhi, for instance, peak in July and September. “When large numbers of people participate in such an effort regularly, it becomes possible even to track the timing and progress of bird migration,” he says.
The tech connect
Allison Lieber, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach says that “Many natural phenomena and events remain understood only to people in specific regions, but with the interactive map stories published in Earth’s Voyager feature, anyone around the world can learn about the implications of such events.” It can be used by anyone from armchair travellers to educators and students who want to learn more about the world, but it is also useful for NGOs and journalists.
Google Earth Engine is a planetary-scale remote-sensing analyses platform. In simple terms: “It is a huge archive of public data, co-located with powerful computing infrastructure, that can run complex algorithms efficiently on very large data sets just using the browser on your computer. Scientists today can access and analyse data without necessarily having to download a single file,” says Madhusudan. Put poetically, by Lieber, it is “a visualization and storytelling platform built to inspire curious minds to explore, learn and care about our vast, fragile planet.”
The data of interest for the pied cuckoo project used 37 years of rainfall data from the Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station (CHIRPS) dataset from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The data is represented as an image for each day of the year, with each pixel in the image storing a value for the amount of rainfall that has fallen on a certain region on earth on a given day. Google Earth Engine is then able to perform computations on these values. So, for a given place, you can analyse 37 years of daily rainfall data and boil it down to an average value for each day of the year.
Madhusudan analysed the two data sets — of the monsoon, and of the pied cuckoo distribution. “The resulting map has two layers: the ‘blue’ layer of the monsoon leverages satellite technology and the formidable computing capabilities of Google Earth Engine, whereas the ‘red’ layer, depicting the pied cuckoo distribution comes from far humbler sources — thousands of birdwatchers around the country,” he says.
So does the movement of the pied cuckoo coincide with the monsoon? The data speaks for itself. The answer is yes. What is it about the pied cuckoo though? Much like a migrant, it builds bridges — to a deeper understanding of life beyond ourselves, and yet, connected with us.
