Apart from the national-level (and some global-scale!) bird listing and monitoring events planned for Jan/Feb 2014, some groups are planning State-level events too. Here is a listing of what we are aware of. Please do let us know in the comments if there are other events we are missing!

• Kerala: Common Bird Monitoring state-wide on 14-17 Feb, as part of the Green Partner’s Initiative. More details here and here.
• West Bengal: Bengal Bird Day on 19 Jan, where teams will watch and list birds from any location in the State. More information available from the bengalbird e-group.

Continuing with bird listing and monitoring events for Jan/Feb 2014, the countrywide Big Bird Day will be held on Sunday 16 Feb 2014. The idea here is for individuals or teams to conduct a dawn-to-dusk search for birds at any location(s) of their choosing.

Last year, a large number of teams from across India took part. More details about BBD 2014 are at this link.

The Asian Waterbird Count started in 1987, and many birders (of a particular generation!) were initiated into bird counting and monitoring through this project. In the early years, the AWC was very popular in India, but it then went through a bit of a slump. In the past year or two, however, it is gaining momentum again, and we encourage you to take part.

Here is more background information about the AWC. To take part you simply visit a wetland and count the birds you see there. So that there is some consistency in dates, the AWC recommends that you carry out your counts between Saturday 11 Jan, and Sunday 26 Jan 2014, although counts from any date in January are welcome.

Before you plan your counts, please contact the AWC Coordinator for your state, who will be able to provide more guidance. You can take a look at the AWC India Data Entry Form as well: scroll down the page to find the link to the excel file.

The main webpage of the AWC is here, and linked here is the text of a message sent by AWC coordinator Taej Mundkur.

If you do take part in the AWC this year (which we strongly recommend!), do drop us an email or leave a comment below.

The latest news at MigrantWatch has been emailed to all participants via the November 2013 issue of the monthly round-up. You can see an archive of these monthly messages here.

If you are registered with us, but haven’t received this email, please check your spam folder; and add mw@migrantwatch.in to your address book. Please send us a message if you have any questions.

Resighting of previously-tagged birds always generates a lot of excitement as it provides crucial information about migration patterns. The odds of sighting a tagged bird again are very low. So, it was a indeed a stroke of good luck when a tagged Bar-Headed Goose (bearing the tag ‘H55’) was seen and photographed by Parbhat Bhatti in Rupnagar in Punjab.

Read more about this interesting sighting in this news article by Vikram Jit Singh in The Hindustan Times. [Photo courtesy Parbhat Bhatti]

 

The latest news at MigrantWatch has been emailed to all participants via the October 2013 issue of the monthly round-up. You can see an archive of these monthly messages here.

If you are registered with us, but haven’t received this email, please check your spam folder; and add mw@migrantwatch.in to your address book. Please send us a message if you have any questions.

MigrantWatch reached yet another landmark with the logging of the 25,000th record — a White Wagtail by Nil N. Mohite. Remarkably, this sighting was from Amravati (Maharashtra) again! It may be noted that Amravati also has the distinction of reporting the 10,000th, 15,000th, as well as the 20,000th observation on MigrantWatch!

Hearty congratulations to everyone from the MigrantWatch community who contributed to this effort!

The latest news at MigrantWatch has been emailed to all participants via the September 2013 issue of the monthly round-up. You can see an archive of these monthly messages here.

If you are registered with us, but haven’t received this email, please check your spam folder; and add mw@migrantwatch.in to your address book. Please send us a message if you have any questions.

We pay tribute to Zafar Futehally, one of India’s pioneering ornithologists and conservationists, who passed away on 11 August 2013. We are very grateful to him for his support and encouragement when we started MigrantWatch back in July 2007.

Here are some recent articles on this remarkable person:

Remembering Baba – by Zai Whitaker in the Indian Express

Veteran naturalist Zafar Futehally passes away – by Ashish and Shanthi Chandola on the BNHS website.

A guiding light.. – by Deepa Mohan on Citizen Matters.

And here is an old interview of Zafar saab on kolkatabirds.

The latest news at MigrantWatch has been emailed to all participants via the July 2013 issue of the monthly round-up. If you are registered with us, but haven’t received this email, please check your spam folder; and add mw@migrantwatch.in to your address book. Please send us a message if you have any questions.