Douglas Dewar presents a rich account of the bird life in April in his classic A Bird Calendar for Northern India, published in 1916. Here are a few extracts:

* Also called: Ruddy Shelduck.

# Also called: Eurasian Cuckoo.

Taken, with grateful thanks, from Project Gutenberg.

By Mousumi Ghosh (with inputs from Umesh Srinivasan)

Tips for Identification

If you’re keen to start leaf warbler watching, you just need an ear for it! You can start with the commonly encountered leaf warbler species in our backyard like Hume’s Warbler (in North India) and Greenish Warbler (in South India) and fortunately, both are extremely vocal. Anytime I want to hear a Hume’s Warbler in winter here in Dehradun, I just have to strain my ears a bit and sure enough I can hear one (yes, it’s that common during winter in North India). Both are territorial in winter and call incessantly guarding their precious trees from the canopy. So, let’s get acquainted with some of the commoner species which visit us in the plains in winter (Here is an illustration to help you with some of the terms commonly used while describing warblers):

Hume’s Warbler (Phylloscopus humei):  One of the commonest leaf warblers, it has an overall dull colour with greenish upperparts and off-white underparts. Other features include a long supercilium, weak/absent crown-stripe, prominently pale tertial edges, no white margins to the tail, one prominent pale wing bar (just a faint vestige of the second wing bar may be visible). The darker legs and lower mandibles are diagnostic. Hume’s is among the smaller of leaf warblers; it breeds near the tree-line and is partial to birch forests in the summer. In the winter it is one of the commonest species found all over the plains of North India. It’s solitary in winter and calls incessantly from the crowns of trees. Call: A repeated, disyllabic ringing tiss-yip, buzzy wheezing tzzzeeeeeu, often given interspersed with calls.

Greenish Warbler (Phylloscopus trochiloides): A common winter migrant in peninsular India, it is one of the larger leaf warblers. It has greyish-green upper parts and off-white underparts. Absence of coronal stripe, yellowish-white supercilium and a single wing bar are other features which help distinguish this species.

During the breeding season, Greenish Warbler occurs close to the tree-line in mixed-conifer forests and rhododendrons. In winter, it is territorial and partial to the canopy, from the top of which it calls incessantly to defend its precious territory. Call:  a disyllabic tisswit or chiswee.

Lemon-rumped Warbler (Phylloscopus chloronotus): This tiny little leaf warbler gets its name from its pale yellowish rump which is frequently exposed as it hovers at the edge of leaves to pick arthropod prey. It’s a rather active bird with olive green upperparts, whitish underparts, dark bill and pale legs. The head is rather distinctive with a prominent pale yellow crown stripe, a broad yellowish supercilium and a very dark eye-stripe which broadens behind the eye and hooks under the ear coverts. Typically two yellowish wing bars are visible, the lower one being larger and more prominent. This species is an altitudinal migrant, spending the summer in the mixed coniferous, oak and rhododendron forests and retreating to the foothills in winter where it joins mixed-species flocks to forage mostly in the mid-canopy and undergrowth. More than two may be part of the same flock, daintily hovering around the vegetation and is an absolute treat to watch! Call: A high-pitched tsip or uist.

Apart from the above there are a number of other species of Phylloscopus warbler that can be observed in the Indian subcontinent. Most of these species migrate over long distances to winter in the Indian plains and peninsular India, some show an altitudinal migration, and a couple of them are resident throughout the year. Here is a very handy key for their visual identification compiled by Umesh Srinivasan.

This concludes our three-part series on Phylloscopus warblers. We hope that these articles helped you in identifying the main species in this difficult group and also provided interesting information about the ecology of leaf warblers. We’d like to know if you liked this series and if you’d like us to run more such articles in the future on the MigrantWatch blog. Please do send in your comments and feedback at mw@migrantwatch.in. 

You can read Part I and Part II in this series of articles on leaf warblers.

Since 2007 MigrantWatch has brought together hundreds of birders across India to pool their observations of migratory birds. Over the years, our enthusiastic participants have collectively contributed more than 20,000 records of nearly 250 bird species. The idea of collecting all this information in one place is to document patterns of bird migration in the Indian subcontinent.

To mark the completion of 5 years of MigrantWatch, we have put together a brief summary of the migration patterns that are emerging. We hope you will enjoy it, and will tell your other birding friends about it too.

You can download a soft copy of the summary here [PDF, 2.9 MB; right-click to save it]. We have also printed a set of copies, and if you would like a hardcopy of the summary, just mail your postal address to us at mw@migrantwatch.in, and we will be happy to send you a copy.

A big ‘Thank You!’ to all participants and contributors, and we look forward to working with you for the next five years!

Here we present the next extract from Douglas Dewar’s A Bird Calendar for Northern India, published in 1916, where the author gives a wonderful account for the month of March, with particular reference to bird migration.

* Current name: Rosy Starling.

Taken, with grateful thanks, from Project Gutenberg.

Continuing our presentation of year-wise arrival patterns, here we show the results for Barn Swallow.

Please note that each sighting is shown as a vertical black line.

From the above illustration it is evident that Barn Swallows usually arrive around late July/early August and nearly all of them leave by April.

You can explore the Barn Swallow sightings on MigrantWatch here.

We reached another milestone on MigrantWatch with Dr. Jayant Wadatkar’s sighting of Garganey at Wadali Tank, near Amravati, Maharashtra, on 10 February, 2013. Dr. Wadatkar sighted eight migrants (including Garganey) during this visit. This was the 20,000th record to be uploaded on MigrantWatch. By strange coincidence the 10,000th, 15,000th and 20,000th sightings have all come from Amravati, Maharashtra, while 15,000th and 20,000th sightings have been reported by the same person – Dr. Jayant Wadatkar!

Congratulations to all MigrantWatchers who helped in reaching this landmark!

Continuing with the series of extracts from Douglas Dewar’s A Bird Calendar for Northern India, published in 1916, here is his lyrical description for February.

* Current name: Grey-headed Canary Flycatcher.

Taken, with grateful thanks, from Project Gutenberg.

Below is a photo of a Grey-Headed Canary Flycatcher taken by MigrantWatcher Jatin Shrivastava near Jalgaon, Maharashtra.

In this post we share with you the arrival patterns of Rosy Starling as it moves across the country. As is evident in the illustration below, Rosy Starlings arrive early (around mid to end July) in northwestern India, but then take three to four months to trickle down to the southernmost States!

You can look at all Rosy Starling sightings in the MigrantWatch database here. Many thanks for all who contributed their observations.

Note on how this map was made: you might wonder why, given there are many hundred Rosy Starling records in the database, there are so few points shown here. In each migration season (July to June; five migration seasons in all) we took the earliest sighting for each State; and these State-wise early sightings are depicted here. So, to reiterate, the points shown on the map are the earliest sightings for each State. Multiple  points within a State represent different migration seasons. The labels on the left describe the typical pattern for a given State or region, taking all migration seasons into consideration. You can download the State-wise first sightings in an Excel file here.

Continuing with the series of extracts from Douglas Dewar’s A Bird Calendar for Northern India, published in 1916, here is his lyrical description for January.

* Current name: Grey-headed Canary Flycatcher.

Taken, with grateful thanks, from Project Gutenberg.

We bring to you the second in the series of extracts from Douglas Dewar’s A Bird Calendar for Northern India, published in 1916. This is what Dewar writes for December.

Current names: [1] Scaly Thrush; [2] Grey-hooded Warbler; [3] Dark-throated Thrush; [4] Grey-winged Blackbird; [5] Grey Bushchat; [6] Blue Whistling Thrush.

Taken, with grateful thanks, from Project Gutenberg.