Shorebirds and lake shores in Bangalore

 

Changes over the past two decades.

An important thing we have learnt in many of the bird migration studies is that birds  require areas called ‘staging grounds’ where they rest and put on weight before migration. This in a way ties them down to the land. They are thus ruled by the state of the habitat they are part of and become vulnerable to human activities which destroy their habitat. Sadly, two-thirds of the endangered bird species globally are threatened because of habitat loss, and not all of them are migratory.

The local scenario for example, too has been the same story. Birdwatchers in Bangalore used to count the number of water birds found in our lakes every January for a decade ending 1996. Nearly a lakh birds would be counted in about eighty to a hundred sites. Sadly much of these sites are gone and just about a third are perhaps remaining. The birds which wade into the shoreline, the shore-birds, are vastly reduced and hardly a couple of individuals figuratively, are to be seen in those sites today, while they used to occur in the hundreds and thousands earlier. The singular loss of a sloping shoreline in our lake-tanks would have mainly led to this decline locally.

The magnitude of decline is shown in the graph with the magnitude of change in the lakes themselves. And it is not a happy story.

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E&OE,
KRISHNA MB.
making free time is culture!