Technology is bringing about change in the way we look at nature and even our disposition to things natural. This note puts our challenges in learning about our avifauna into that perspective.
An interest is a prerequsite for preserving anything. Thus, one could safely say that the interest in the avifauna in India, apart from looking at birds as a resource, started off with the age of exploration, of surveys and new descriptions.
Much of the work on Indian avifauna during the British times involved specimen collections which were shipped to the museums in the west to be described and named. The Indian contribution to ornithology perhaps for the most part just involved trapping and collection of individuals and the preparation of museum skins. The bulk could have happened through employed labour which perhaps doubled as the cook and domestic help. At most, we might have had the role of suppliers of skins and specimens, and location data. The ‘science’ of ornithology was essentially western, being restricted in a large part to the description of skins, at major museums which held large comparative collections.
Then came this strange period in the twentieth century. This was a time when many of the other branches of science had progressed quite far and colleges and universities as we know today had come into being. The works of Ross and Raman done here in India, had even got Nobel Prizes. Quantitative forestry research was in place, as was the field of statistics, with both Indian individuals and institutions contributing to them. And it was Indian ornithology which was stuck, in a bygone explorer era, still involved in specimen collection trips and surveys, which neither had a sampling protocol nor design. The information generated was descriptive, with ‘natural history’ observations being documented, of course. Survey results did not go much beyond listing. Ecology as a subject was perhaps unkown here, and trying to see patterns in the data was rudimentary. Quantification was limited to the measurement of a few body parts like the tarsus, beak, wing and tail, and the eggs, which were more often than not, presented as ranges with the actual data lost into obscurity. Any kind of statistical treatment was essentially unpracticed, with the arithmetic mean just making a sporadic appearance. In short, the the gulf between other sciences and Indian ornithology was astounding.
The eighties saw the development of tourist interest in this region, with a number of field guides making their appearance. Like many other hobbies with leaning towards science, anything more than a superficial interest in the outdoors, requires some literature to start with. These field guides brought in the advantage of vastly improved illustrations, and maps. The distribution maps continued to be relicts of the bygone era. They presented the result of artistic indulgence more than presenting the locations where species had been recorded. This masked the highly sketchy data that we have of the Indian avifauna even today. Still, even by the eighties, the number of journals/serials/periodicals where observations could be published remained perhaps less than half a dozen. There was just no opportunity for casual observations and lists to get recorded somewhere on a mass level.
The real change has happened with the use of computers and the internet, and lately with the extensive use of digital cameras by hobbyists. The size of the community taking an interest in birds is increasing, with the urban centres taking the lead, since the urban areas have the single largest concentration of technical manpower. The interest in birds is perhaps driven more today due to the aesthetics and the recreation value that birds offer, and science, rather than exploiting their value as a natural resource. There are some who are driven by conservation concerns too.
Gone are those days when birds and ornithlogy were the domain of the professional or the full time ornithologist. Weekend involvement has increased substantially, and new reportings by the weekend travellers are today much more than by full time investigators. The advent of digital cameras with built in or easily available telephoto lenses has added a whole new dimension to reporting.
The following graph shows the number of mails which have been sent across on the larger email groups covering the Indian region or a part of it. The first to be started was bngbirds, which has been in existence from the end of 1998, which has the largest collection of over thirteen and a half thousand emails on its archives, searchable by keyword. Even assuming that just a small proportion of the emails contain information which could be used for monitoring, it still represents a quantum leap in reporting over the earlier print medium.
Yet we have many handicaps to overcome, and the first and formost would be the lack of monitoring data. We badly need monitoring data on as many taxa as possible for the country. It is not that we just require such data for protected areas, we require it to be countrywide too. Phenological data would also be required to go along with this, and would become very relevant with increased variability in weather.
Monitoring involves different aspects. We require not only the human resources and the field data coming in, but also a mechanism to pick it up, then a system to collate and organise it, and procedures to analyse the data. Here the internet would play a much greater role than the printed media has ever done in the past, for the simple reason that it is easier, faster and much more cost effective.
The biggest challenge would be to develop tools and means to make use of the relatively large amounts of reporting and sighting data getting accumulated on the internet. One of the greatest advantage email lists have provided is that they permit collection of stray observations which otherwise would have got lost. The very fact that journals had no place for non-collated observations which were not put into perspective meant that stray observations would always get lost. This included observations on what could have been rare species. There are monitoring systems in the west which involve observers to directly enter data into structured databases, but this is again very dependant on the attitude of the people to take time and input the data online.
Once survey and monitoring information is in place, much more sensitive conservation is possible. The mid winter waterbird counts in the Bangalore region were converted into full fledged wetland survey which served to draw media attention to the lakes in the early nineties. This led to interventions which were intended to save those habitats. There is of course the perpetual problem of ensuring that work happens at the ground level in the way it has been envisaged. If this can be assured, monitoring would fill a great gap and add a whole new dimension to conservation in India.
List mail data
The data for the graph has been taken from the following links, which are the respective home pages of these egroups.
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/bngbirds
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/birdsofbombay
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/delhibird
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/keralabirder
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/orientalbirding
[Written 22nd February 2008]
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