Dr Joseph George: a brief note

Dr Joseph George was a person of extraordinary humility and intellect, who started the first birdwatching group in Bangalore in 1972.

For all of us birdwatchers who came in contact with him, he inspired us with his knowledge and humility, and had a way of making people learn about birds. He encouraged us to make our own observations, always emphasising that contributions to our knowledge of birds could be done by anyone and not just scientists. Though an organic chemist himself, he had many research papers on birds to his credit, and encouraged us to publish as well. Even the first ever publication of Dr Ramachandra Guha, the author, cricket fan and historian, written when Dr Guha was eleven, was because of Dr George! And it was, of course, on birds.

Dr George was meticulous in his observations and his work on bamboo bird nest boxes is a classic, merging his professional interests in wood science with his hobby interest in birds. The use of dyed feathers dispersed from a hillside so that swifts could pick it up for nest building, and the subsequent detection of those dyed feathers in the nests at the Forest Research Institute, was innovative. His counts of migrating Grey Drongos to determine timing of migration, and his mapping technique by using pre-dawn counts of stationary singing males to estimate territory densities were way ahead of his time. The latter possibly the earliest use of that technique anywhere in the world. And strangely, at a time when Indian ornithology did not even know the existence of an average, or of statistics.

Starting his career during the British times at the FRI, Dehra Dun, he went on to become the Assistant Director of the Buildings Research Institute in Roorkee, and then the Director at the Indian Plywood Industries Research and Training Institute, Bangalore. He was an adhesive specialist par excellence, with a special interest in wood substitutes. And to this end he worked hard and achieved one technological innovation after another, and derived more for nature conservation than what most of us only dream of. He had many patents to his credit and a few more coming. Even at ninety, he used to go everyday to his laboratory, and also actively involve himself in gardening which he was a great enthusiast of.

He has left a legacy for Bangalore that is at least a thousand times more birdwatchers than he started out with. And, that in short, is Dr Joseph George for you!