Generational Amnesia: The Forgotten Wildlife Numbers

“Hamida, ab chidiyan bahut kum ho gai hain” (Hamida, the birds are fewer in numbers), Salim Ali said in 1974 while on Sapanmori Road in what is now the Keoladeo National Park (earlier called Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary). On that occasion, Dr Hamida Saiduzzaffar, Head, Department of Ophthalmology, Aligarh Muslim University, and a friend of Dr Salim Ali and I were visiting Bharatpur. I had been to Keoladeo twice, but this was my first visit during peak winter to see the birds and meet Dr Salim Ali from Mumbai. Though I was in touch with Dr Salim Ali from the early 1970s, this was my first face-to-face meeting. Besides being awed at finally meeting the great man, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of waterfowl. However, for Dr Salim Ali, who had been coming to Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary since the 1930s, there were much fewer birds than before. Earlier reports indicate that he had probably seen many more birds here, in the millions perhaps.

In 2021, when I went to Keoladeo again, I saw perhaps 10 per cent of the waterfowl I had seen in the 1970s. But hordes of birdwatchers and photographers were milling around a flock of 200-250 ducks in the same Sapanmori area, telling each other, “There are so many ducks!”. 

My friend, the great environmentalist and educator Lavkumar Khacher of the royal family of Rajkot, Gujarat, once told me that in the 1960s, when he travelled the 60-km distance from Rajkot to Jasdan, he would see 50-60 black-winged kites from his vehicle. In 2015, my friend Manish Trivedi of Jamnagar called me excitedly that he had seen “many black-winged kites between Rajkot and Jasdan”. When I asked him, “How many?” his reply was “three”. A generation ago, 50-60 was normal, and now, three kites excited the new generation of birdwatchers.

My third example is of vulture decline. After the decrease in vulture populations was noticed in the 1990s all over India, whenever I would go for bird study surveys in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh, villagers would always ask, “Sahib, where have the vultures gone?” Such questions became progressively less and less, and during my surveys in 2023-24, no one asked me this question. A whole new generation has come up without seeing vultures, and older people have forgotten vultures were once a part of the rural landscape and everyday experiences. Every generation has its own yardstick and generational memory and experience. This is known as generational amnesia. It refers to how each generation considers how it first experienced a place/area as its true baseline, and any change that comes after it is abnormal or unnatural. The baseline changes with every generation.

Peter Kahn and Thea Weiss coined the term environmental generational amnesia in a 2017 paper entitled “The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature”, published in the journal Children, Youth and Environments.

Environmental generational amnesia is the idea that each generation perceives the environment into which it is born as normal, no matter how developed, urbanised or polluted it has become. There is also cultural amnesia: the widespread ignorance of and indifference to what used to be important culturally but is now forgotten.

All over the world, birds have declined by moderate to huge numbers, depending on the species and habitats. For example, a paper published in 2019 in the prestigious journal Science showed that since 1970, the baseline year of counting, bird populations in the United States and Canada have declined by 29 per cent — almost 3 billion birds are gone! The results also showed pervasive losses among common birds across all habitats, including backyard birds. Grassland birds saw a 53 per cent reduction in population – more than 720 million birds – since 1970, and shorebirds or waders, most of which frequent sensitive coastal habitats, were already at dangerously low numbers and have lost more than one-third of their population. The volume of spring migrations, measured by radar in the night skies, has dropped by 14 per cent between 2014-2024. Another paper, based on 40 years of monitoring in 28 European countries, shows that Europe has lost 550 million birds.

The situation in India is not different; it is probably worse. For instance, in the State of India’s Birds 2023, a total of 942 species were assessed, out of which 523 species had sufficient data for estimating long-term population trends. Among 523 species, 338 had good data to draw scientific conclusions. Of these 338 species, 204 have declined in the long term, 98 remain unchanged, and 36 have increased. Even many common birds, such as the Indian roller (Coracias bengalensis), northern shoveller (Spatula clypeata), northern pintail (Anas acuta), greater flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus), great thick-knee (Esacus recurvirostris), are showing a rapid population decline. This wonderful report is based mainly on 8-10 years of eBird data collected by nearly 30,000 birdwatchers. Once we have better data and for a longer period, we will get better trends on Indian birds.

Along with the usual and well-known threats (hunting, trapping, habitat destruction, pesticides, pollution), we have now added collision with windmills and high-tension wires, free-ranging stray dogs, climate change, plastic pollution, invasive species, and bird photographers in the category of threats to birds. While some forest birds may have stable populations, the worst impacted are the birds of grasslands, wetlands, and those living in large landscapes. Sometimes, the decrease is so subtle that we do not notice it or slowly become used to it. Our neighbourhood Indian roller does not nest anymore in the tall mango tree, nor does the black drongo (Edolius macroceros) call from the garden. I may miss them for a few years, but my children will not, as they have grown without the roller and drongo in our garden. The generational experience has changed. The empty wetland does not disturb the new generation as they do not know what they are missing. A forlorn little grebe (Tachybaptus ruficollis) and a few egrets should satisfy them. This is the new world order. A generational amnesia of forgotten numbers.