Reflections on gadget-birding

A few weeks ago I was invited to join a survey for birds in the Maley Madeshwara betta region, a vast savannah and forest region around the Kaveri river valley that was once the legendary home of Veerappan and his band. It is hard to find a balanced version of what factors led to his lifestyle but if one could live for that long in this area, it would be a good indicator of the water, wood, and wild foods to live on. The region was recently consolidated into a wildlife sanctuary and this was apparently the first time that there was an attempt to find out what birds lived within the boundaries. A very large number of young bird observers had been recruited for the exercise, apparently based on their contributions to ebird. Many sported fashionable hairstyles and some toted hard trolley bags that would have been more at home at an airport than in a forest. Most of the participants were less than thirty years of age and the kind of personal connection that some of us knew from the much smaller birding networks of the pre-internet past was not apparent. I was randomly assigned to a location that was 70 km away from the Kollegal forest headquarters and we stayed at an anti-poaching camp (APC). The camp itself was a far cry from my past experiences of roughing out in APCs in Bandipur. Here was a solid building with several rooms with a perfectly functional toilet and bathroom.  It had solar powered lighting and power systems that could even run a borewell pump in the daytime to fetch water. The well-head was carefully covered in a heap of stones and decorated with the best selections of thorns to keep away elephants from doing what they do best in these parts - rewilding - by removing the debris of civilization.

Along with another volunteer, we spent a full day and a half  walking two hours in the morning and two hours in the morning to collect data on bird detections in 15 minute sampling intervals. As usual more birds are heard than seen and my fellow volunteer was equipped with the Merlin app and recorded data on ebird. The Merlin app runs continuously and detects bird calls based on the ML model that it has and comparisons are assisted by a shortlist of birds of the area. While it took a while for the app to pick up many calls, I was quite impressed with the accuracy of the commoner birds that it detected. It did make serious mistakes - such as identifying a Yellow-throated Sparrow as a Eurasian Tree Sparrow, but I think it was far better than what I had expected! More importantly it was able to keep up the monitoring process without fatigue. Now one can see how a system like this could actually be incorporated into an automated monitoring setup and entirely do away with human labor and expertise. There is a certainly place for that kind of monitoring, meant for long-term institutional work. There is however a lot of scope for nuanced observation that continues to remain for those of us who are not in institutions!

Apart from gadgets that seemingly compete with humans are those that enhance humans. Many years ago, one of our friends obtained a night-vision scope. We made a trip one evening to the place of Krishna Narain (KN) on the outskirts of Bannerghatta to see what might be revealed. KN was impressed and he shortly afterwards got himself another of these gizmos. The next time we met, he mentioned that he observed a courtship display of the Common Indian Nightjar and declared that it was similar to and as exciting and amazing as a Bengal Florican in display. Unfortunately he did not give sufficient details and he never published his observations. He died in an unfortunate accident. Years later, on this recent trip, I remembered KN's observation since I observed something that might take years before someone gets to observe it again and perhaps takes a video as evidence. Fortunately for those of us trained on pen and paper, free form descriptions still work, the kinds that does not fit squarely into online databases with drop-down options and pre-made lists of exclusive options to select. 

The camp where we stayed in the MM Hills was wonderfully dark. February was getting warm and the evening quickly saw the dusk calls of birds going to their roosts and the crepuscular shift getting into action. There were three species of nightjar that were all calling in full strength as the sky darkened. There was the constant chucko-chucko of the Jungle Nightjar, there were more distant Ch-whoo calls with a vibrato to the second part of the Jerdon's Nightjar and then there was the more widespread and familiar stone-skipped-on-ice call of the Indian Nightjar. At one point a Jungle Nightjar landed close to the boundary post of the camp and I was able to shine a torch beam onto it and observe it through my binoculars. It was perched on a low tree along the length of the branch and facing away from the trunk of the tree. It emitted a long series of rapid chucko calls and then it stopped calling, raised its outstretched wings above its body (about 60 degrees between the left and right wings, ie a dihedral of 60 degrees) and facing into what appeared to be a headwind, it rose slowly, almost vertically, and effortlessly, apparently without making any downstrokes, above the branch and then it lowered its wings to a more normal flight position and glided down the valley. From the time that it raised its wings, it produced a low "ghostly" woo-hoo-hoo-hoo call that I don't think has ever been described! I imagine it is some kind of territorial display. 

I wonder however when this display might be seen again and described in better detail or supported by video footage. With the lack of encouragement for nuanced observation and an excessive emphasis for adding data points to structured databases, we can be sure that even if observed, the motivation for recording it in print is not nurtured or encouraged by most online or even straight-jacketed offline systems of journals with their presumptions of exactitude.