Birding Around Delhi
The Delhi Bird List now stands at 471 species, depending on the taxonomic approach adopted (excluding another 22 species that have not been re-recorded since 1975), which has given India’s capital the reputation of being one of the most bird-rich in the world. Delhi has also had the advantage of having hosted an almost continuous stream of ornithologists, mostly amateur, recording their observations of its birdlife over the last century or more, especially since the creation of New Delhi. Their published notes comment, to one extent or the other, on the status, populations and habitat of the various species and are of interest in their illustration of how Delhi’s birdlife has evolved along with the city.
Some History
An extract from the Delhi Gazetteer of 1883–1884 gives us a glimpse of the wealth of wildlife in the Delhi area from a century and four decades ago.
Pig abound all along the banks of the Jamná … Black buck are found almost everywhere. Chikára in the range of hills which runs north-east of Delhi … Wolves are not plentiful, but they are to be usually found in the neighbourhood of the old cantonment … The nilgai is to be constantly found near the villages of Borari and Khadipur … The mongoose is very common, and so is the hedgehog … Snakes of every kind are plentiful, the cobra especially so. The old Fort called the Kotla is infested with them … Leopards are found in the outlying villages … Pára are abundant, especially in the neighbourhood of Borari on the bank of the Jamná … Mahsír, rohú, and batchwa are found in the river Jamná and at Okhlah in the Agra Canal, and the entire river is infested with muggurs, the gurryál predominating; but the snub-nosed man-eater is also plentiful … Between the old Fort and Okhlah … Ducks of various kinds are found in the ponds in the cold weather; snipe in several places in marshes; quail are not uncommon in the fields; partridges, both black and grey, are abundant; and kúlan are fond of the fields of gram when the grain has not yet hardened.
According to a compilation by the Government of Delhi, the Ridge still reported sightings of wolf, hyena, leopard, blackbuck and chinkara at the beginning of the twentieth century, but by 1908, blackbucks had become rare, while wolves and chinkaras have not been seen in the wild after 1940. A number of nineteenth-century bird records from around Delhi are scattered across ornithological or sporting writings of the day, and they paint a remarkable picture. Consider this note18 in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society (JBNHS): In ‘Stray Sport’ by J. Moray Brown (1893) a chapter is devoted to small game shooting within a few miles of Delhi, from which attention might be drawn to statements which add to or differ from the recent lists of Delhi birds published in the Journal … Botaurus stellaris–The Bittern. Four were bagged in the course of a snipe shoot at Mongolpoor [sic – presumably Mangolpuri in west Delhi] where 3 guns got over a hundred couple of snipe on 26th November. Published in 1893, Brown refers to these notes having been made some years before, but it is interesting to remember that there was a time when a single gun could make a mixed bag of 60-odd head including antelope, hare, common and painted sandgrouse, black partridge, quail, snipe, mallard, teal, pochard and whistling teal, all on and within 3 miles of the Ridge! Hume has notes going back a century and more on the birds around Delhi, most notably those by Lt Col C.T. Bingham, an Irish military offcer who served in India in the 1870s who, amongst his other accomplishments, authored two volumes on Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants and similar insects with four transparent wings) (1897, 1903) and Lepidoptera (butterfies and moths) (in the Fauna of British India series.
The first attempt at drawing up a checklist of the birds about Delhi was by S. Basil-Edwards, who studied the birds in the area over five months, November–March, of the winter of 1924–25, mainly in the babool jungles around Raisina when New Delhi was being built. In his words, ‘Five months is too short a time … The following notes can only be regarded as a nucleus for a more comprehensive paper …’ He lists some 202 species, and his writing makes for fascinating reading compared with Delhi’s birdlife today. Sir Norman F. Frome, a former postmaster-general of India and a keen ornithologist, compiled a second checklist of 300 species from Delhi and its neighbourhood within about 50 km, based on sight records maintained independently by him and six other observers over the period 1931–45. By 1949, 10 additional species recorded by Maj Gen H.P.W. Hutson in 1943–45, 2 by Sir E.C. Benthall, businessman and public servant, who reported his observations over 1942–46 while stationed in Delhi as a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, and 13 more by H.G. Alexander had raised the Delhi bird list to 325. Horace G. Alexander, Quaker, teacher and ornithologist, spent much of his life in India and was a close acquaintance of Mahatma Gandhi and Indira Gandhi as well. His autobiographical memoir, Seventy Years of Birdwatching, devotes a number of pages to his time in Delhi. In 1950, he founded the Delhi Bird-watching Society (DBWS) along with Lt Gen Harold Williams, Engineer-in-Chief of the Indian Army and bird enthusiast, ‘to encourage the study of birds in and around the capital city’. The announcement in the JBNHS in December 1950 lists its founding members, a remarkable group of people in diverse positions and callings but united in their passion for birds and nature – Mr. H.G. Alexander (chairman), Capt H.C. Ranald (honorary treasurer and the Indian Navy’s first chief of naval aviation in 1948), Mrs W.F. Rivers (honorary secretary), Mrs Indira Gandhi (destined to lead the country as prime minister in later years), Mr F.C. Badhwar (nature enthusiast, first Indian chairman of the Railway Board till 1954 and first Indian president of the Himalayan Club, 1964–67), Rev. J. Bishop, Mr C.J.L. Stokoe (of the mercantile from Messrs. Bird & Co.) and Lt Gen H. Williams (as committee members). It also counted amongst its members Dr Salim Ali, Mrs Usha Ganguli (whose husband was then vice-chancellor of Delhi University), Mr Lavkumar Khachar (of Jasdan State, Gujarat) and others, including members of the diplomatic community stationed in the new capital.
In 1950, the DBWS brought out a Delhi checklist totalling 356 species (351 according to current taxonomic classification), based on information available till then, as a working document for its members. It also published Maj Gen Hutson’s bird notes from when he was stationed in Delhi (1943–45) as deputy engineer-in-chief of the Indian Army, supplemented by H.G. Alexander’s records, in book form as The Birds About Delhi, edited by Lt Gen Williams, then president of the DBWS. With this publication, the Delhi list stood at 370 (actually 365, as per current taxonomy). The impressive fieldwork over the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, even as the city of Delhi was changing at a rapid pace, by a galaxy of competent ornithologists – H.E. Malcolm Macdonald (British High Commissioner from 1955–60), Julian P. Donahue (professional lepidopterist with an interest in Asian birds since his time in India, 1958–62), Victor C. Martin (then with the British High Commission in New Delhi), Peter Jackson (Reuters correspondent in Delhi and honorary secretary of the DBWS in the 1960s, later of the International Union for Conservation of Nature [IUCN]), Capt N.S. Tyabji of the Indian Navy; Mrs Usha Ganguli and others – produced a flowering of new information about Delhi’s birds. Some wrote about their passion with a fair and competence that stands out to this day, such as Macdonald’s superb Birds in My Indian Garden. Much of this material, along with the new species recorded till 1970, was collated in Usha Ganguli’s A Guide to the Birds of the Delhi Area, published posthumously after her untimely demise in 1970, which lists 408 species (including historical records). This was a major addition to the literature on Delhi’s birdlife and remains a vital reference for any serious student of Delhi’s birdlife today.
Excerpted with permission from The Birds Of the Delhi Area by Sudhir Vyas. Published by Juggernaut Books.
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