Bird Podcast

Our guest today is Dr. Gopi Sundar, who heads the international ecological journal, Waterbirds.  He is also a scientist in the cranes and wetlands program at the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) based in Udaipur.  Gopi has worked on waterbirds for over three decades, particularly on the Sarus Cranes of Uttar Pradesh.  In this episode, he talks about waterbirds and how they coexist with humans.      

There is this bird that my mother watches.  When it comes down, she says Garuda, garuda.  And does a namaste. This bird is called the Brahminy kite. Haliastur indus.  But is this bird really the Garuda that Hindus worship? That is the bird of Indonesia– after which its airline, Garuda Indonesia is named? We find out in this short episode. Brahminy Kite.  Haliastur indus.  Latin names are precise.  But they also give the history.  Of why a bird is called what it is.  Take Haliastur indus.  It sounds like a Iranian deep dish pizza.  But Halia means sea.  Astur means hawk.  So the origins of the name meant that this bird was considered a sea hawk.  From India.  Hence the name indus. Now the question is– is this bird really garuda– the bird that was the Vishnu Vahana in Hindu mythology.  Vahana means conveyance in Sanskrit.  One of the nice things about Hinduism and many other ancient religions is that they incorporated the natural world into their beliefs.  So a peacock becomes the vahana or vehicle of the warri

The beginning of a new avatar. Where we do short episodes. As always, thanks for your attention.

In this short 3-minute episode, we are talking about the amazing birds of Nagaland with Angulie Meyase, a birding guide based in Khonoma, one of the most picturesque towns of Nagaland. He describes many of the birds you can see in Nagaland including the gray sibia, great barbet, assam laughing thrush, crested finchbill, green cochoa, purple cochoa, some eagles, rusty capped fulvetta, mountain bamboo partridge, blyth’s trogopan, spot breasted laughing thrush, yellow rumped honeyguide and many others.

This episode is about hornbills in Valparai.  About human wildlife conflict and other things.  But mostly about hornbills. Valparai in the South Indian state of Tamilnadu is verdant and beautiful.  Entire slopes of these gently undulating mountains are covered with tea.  It is in this landscape that the great Indian hornbill likes to play.

Our guest today is Dr. James Christopher Haney, a conservation biologist, wildlife researcher, and author of more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles, technical reports, and science summaries. His career trajectory spans the arc of conservation and extinction and we are going to talk about both these topics today.  Dr. Haney’s latest book, “Woody's Last Laugh: Ivory-billed Woodpecker as Trickster,” features how that bird came to fool our heads for so long, leading us into various mental mistakes due to the high uncertainty over the bird's ultimate fate. In this episode, we discuss this and other ideas, including the "Romeo error," a condition in which we get bird extinctions wrong (thinking that species are dead when they aren't). We discuss the ivory-bill, but also other examples of bird species from around the world (including one or two from India) that went missing for a very long time, but then were re-found. Dr. Haney has delivered 150 research and public speaking engagements to national and interna

We are so sorry but we messed up.  The previous episode that was published was an interview with Judith Mirembe.  For some reason, the full conversation did not go out.  Here is the full-length interview.  Those who listened to part of it before, please fast forward to 22:00 minutes.   Our guest today is Judith Mirembe who is currently based in Uganda.  Judith is a bird guide and researcher with a passion for birds, keen on their conservation as well as protection of their habitats. This passion stems back from when she was a kid where she learnt birds in her local language and appreciated the cultural stories attached to them. She is the Chairperson of the Uganda Women Birders’ Club, that started in 2013 as an initiative to introduce women to birdwatching, a profession that is dominated by men in Africa. This passion led her into starting a non-profit organization, Shoebill-Watch Uganda whose major aim is to protect the Shoebill and other bird species in Uganda. She holds a Masters Degree in Environment and

Our guest today is Judith Mirembe who is currently based in Uganda.  Judith is a bird guide and researcher with a passion for birds, keen on their conservation as well as protection of their habitats. This passion stems back from when she was a kid where she learnt birds in her local language and appreciated the cultural stories attached to them. She is the Chairperson of the Uganda Women Birders’ Club, that started in 2013 as an initiative to introduce women to birdwatching, a profession that is dominated by men in Africa. This passion led her into starting a non-profit organization, Shoebill-Watch Uganda whose major aim is to protect the Shoebill and other bird species in Uganda. She holds a Masters Degree in Environment and Natural Resources and has done a number of courses by the Tropical Biology Association (TBA) on application of Citizen Science in research and conservation of species. She has in the past (2016-2019) worked with Nature Uganda, a Birdlife International Partner in Uganda as the research a

This episode is about the magnificent migration of the Amur Falcons, the largest raptor migration in the world. It is 4:30 AM on a cold day in November.  A group of us from Bangalore are driving from Dimapur to Hakhezhe, Nagaland to observe a spectacle like nothing we’ve seen before: the greatest raptor migration on earth.   The Amur falcon or Falco amurensis breeds between Northern China and Southeastern Siberia.  Amurland.  Where the Amur river-- the tenth longest in the world flows. Unusually for this year, these falcons have come near Dimapur.  They are roosting overnight on the sal and teak trees.  Come dawn and they will fly, looking for the large amount of insects-- termites, dragonflies, bees and others-- that they will catch on the wing.  They are headed for Eastern and Southern Africa where they will winter in warm climes, eating locusts and termites in the fertile red earth of Africa.  To get there, they undertake one of the most arduous migrations in the world.  First they fly from Siberia to No

With us today is Dr. Samira Agnihotri, who has studied bird song, racket-tailed drongos and ethno-ornithology.   Dr. Agnihotri has worked in the Biligiri Rangana Betta or BR Hills from 2005 when she began to study birdsong while pursuing a Master’s degree in Wildlife Biology and Conservation from the National Centre for Biological Sciences. She then studied racket-tailed drongos, walking through the forests with a mike and recorder, and obtained her Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science. She followed up her research on drongos as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institute of Advanced Studies. She is keenly interested in the traditional ecological knowledge of the Solega people and has dabbled in ethno-ornithologies, collaborating with linguist Dr. Aung Si, and is intent on documenting Solega knowledge and oral histories. Samira is also interested in nature education, and in exploring different ways to popularise the ecological sciences as well as encourage and aid the preservation of traditional k

Our guest today is Dr. Nancy Jacobs, a professor of history at Brown University.  The topic of our discussion is based on her third book, a really wonderful read.  It is called Birders of Africa: history of a network.  He current work is on the “Global Grey Parrot.” Nancy Jacobs is Professor of History at Brown University. She specializes in South Africa, colonial Africa, the environment, knowledge, and biography. Her recent work links her to birds. Her third book, Birders of Africa: History of a Network (Yale University, 2016; University of Cape Town, 2018) was an examination of the politics of knowing birds in colonial Africa.

This episode features two senior conservation specialists from Audubon: Aurelio Ramos and Gloria Lentijo. They talk about Audubon's new strategies in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada. This hemispheric approach stems from the recognition that the majority of vulnerable bird species found in the U.S. spend most of their lives in Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean, which have some of the world's most biodiverse landscapes and seascapes. The Neotropical Realm alone has 41% of all bird species on Earth, and Canada is North America's bird nursery. In this episode, Aurelio and Gloria talk about Audubon Americas and their ambitious plan to address conservation shortfalls in Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the next five years, Audubon is targeting 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of prime ecosystems that are important for priority birds and wildlife, and human well-being. Along the way, they talk about their favourite birds and landscapes. Below is the video recording of the episode.

Dr. Aparajita Datta leads The Nature Conservation Foundation’s Eastern Himalaya programme, under which research and community-based conservation with hornbills as a flagship have been carried out for over two decades. She completed her PhD on hornbill biology and their role in seed dispersal in 2000. Since then, she along with her team have worked all over the North East on a variety of hornbill-related projects. She has received several awards including the National Geographic Emerging Explorer award (2010) and the Whitley Fund for Nature award (2013), and the Women in Discovery award. Her interests include plant–animal interactions in rainforests, understanding human impacts on wildlife, and engaging with tribal communities for conservation. She is also currently the Co-Chair (Asia) for the IUCN SSC Hornbill Specialist Group. In this episode, Aparajita talks about hornbills and their ecosystem. She writes and speaks regularly about conservation and her take on nature. Dr. Datta's work has encompass

Is there a link between birds and 007?  Well, author and American birder, Jim Wright says there is.  The title of his latest book says it all.   “The Real James Bond: A True Story of Identity Theft, Avian Intrigue and Ian Fleming.” The book says, “Long before Ian Lancaster Fleming became a bestselling author, a single-minded Philadelphia ornithologist named James Bond wrote Birds of the West Indies, based on repeated expeditions to the Bahamas and the Caribbean from 1927 to 1935.” Let’s find out more about the real James Bond. From this episode, we have started recording audio and video. Here is our Youtube video link of this episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSAcISsWbR8&t=132s Bio Jim Wright is the author of The Real James Bond, a biography of the author and birdman who fell prey to the world’s most famous case of identity theft. The Wall Street Journal called it “siim and elegant” -- like Bond himself. It is available as a hard-cover, ebook and audiobook. A long-time prize-winn

Jonathan Franzen is arguably America’s greatest living fiction writer. He has won numerous accolades and awards.  His latest book, Crossroads, is just out. Like many of his novels, it has little to do with his other passion. As Jonathan says in this interview, he doesn’t bird very much when he is working. Now to birding.  In his New Yorker essay, “My Bird Problem,” Franzen says that he began birding in 1999 at the age of 40. Since then, he has written a number of lyrical essays about birds, conservation and his birding adventures from Africa to Antarctica. My second favourite is this one in the New Yorker which talks about him going to search for Masafuera rayadito in faraway Chile. My absolute favourite is this one in the National Geographic which talks about the sheer joy of birding and the number of species he has seen. It is both a ringing, yet seemingly self-evident, endorsement for birds and a fine argument for conservation. A more incisive and heartbreaking essay is this one in the National Geographic

Life on Earth is undergoing its sixth ever mass extinction, one that is entirely driven by humans. Amongst the multitude of “global change” factors causing species’ extinctions, climate change and the loss and degradation of natural habitats are major causes. This is especially the case for species in tropical mountain ranges, where most of Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity is concentrated, and where species tend to be thermally sensitive. Umesh Srinivasan and his team study how forest degradation combines with climate change to impact Himalayan biodiversity at multiple levels, from geographic range shifts to behaviour and demography. Their main ongoing work is in the eastern Himalayas of Arunachal Pradesh, where they have been monitoring bird populations in primary and logged forests for a decade using mist netting and bird ringing. They combine this with behavioural observations to understand how climate change and forest loss are altering the composition of mixed-species bird flocks across the elevationa

Dr. Seshadri KS grew up in Bangalore and started to watch birds at a young age. An avid naturalist with interests across many taxa, he has chosen to study natural history, ecology and conservation biology as a career. He was part of the team that described three new species of frogs from India and described a new behavior in frogs. Dr. Seshadri is currently a DST-INSPIRE Faculty Fellow at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc Bangalore. In this episode, we talk about wetland and grassland ecology, and bird photography. Full Bio Over the last decade, Seshadri’s research has taken him to remote and often inhospitable environments where he has spent extensive periods of time. His research spans a swath of biology ranging from orchids in the tall forests of the Western Ghats to discovering new species and new behavior among Amphibians. He led a team to study amphibians in the forest canopy, for which he was honored with the “Future Conservationist” award by the Conservation Leadership Program in 2010. He

Our guest in this episode is Dr. Emily Duval whose Duval lab at Florida State University studies behavioral ecology, population genetics, and in the role of sexual selection in speciation. In this episode, we talk to this much feted, and much-cited professor about topics that would be a divorce lawyer’s nightmare: multiple paternity, non-optimal choice of mate, alpha and beta males, and the adaptive basis of female mate choice. More specifically, we are going to talk about the manakin of Panama, the lance-tailed manakin in particular, whose spectacular breeding dance makes time fly.

This episode features Josep Del Hoyo, one of the founders as well as the director of Lynx Edicions and an expert videographer of birds.  This episode is a wide-ranging conversation about birds in different parts of the world.   Josep is an Editor of the 17-volume Handbook of the Birds of the World series (1992–2013) and an Author of the HBW and BirdLife International Illustrated Checklist of the Birds of the World in two volumes (2014–2016). He has most recently authored the book All the Birds of the World (2020), which presents every bird species in a single, fully illustrated volume. Josep has been the driving force behind these and many other projects at Lynx, always motivated by his passion for nature, books and conservation.

Every good city needs a generous birding guide, one who is empathetic and loves to explore nature around her. If this intrepid explorer is empathetic, generous and inclusive, that’s even better. Deepa Mohan is one such wildlife enthusiast and explorer in Bangalore, India. In this podcast, we discuss the many aspects of Deepa’s birding all over India, about how to count birds, about going to the same location many times and some of her favourite birding areas in India. Some of the locations Deepa mentioned in an around Bangalore: Hoskote Lake, Begur Lake, Bannerghatta National Park, Bannerghatta biosphere, Ankasamudra, Eagle Nest, Talle Valley, Arunachal Pradesh, Jaipurdoddi, Manipal, Western Ghats. Unusual species include over-wintering birds, vagrant species such as black-capped kingfisher, a blue throat wintering in Anekal Lake, a Demoiselle Crane, a dark sided flycatcher in Nandi Hills. The location that Deepa mentions early in the podcast– the one she took me to in the morning, is Muninagara Kere. Her ebi