Bird Podcast with Shoba Narayan

Today's guest, Anusha Shankar studies hummingbirds as a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She has lived and worked on four continents and loves being an Indian woman in science. She is fascinated by hummingbirds' ability to use a hibernation-like state called torpor to save energy at night. She is investigating how they can get cold (10°C / 50°F) and rewarm safely every night, without damaging organs like their hearts and brains. During her PhD, Anusha captured hummingbird nightlife with infrared video, and before that tracked king cobras and studied giant birds—hornbills—in India. Anusha is also a National Geographic Explorer and Young Leader and loves mentoring students, dancing salsa, bachata, and swing, and reading fiction.

Our guest today is Dr. Gopi Sundar, who heads the international ecological journal, Waterbirds. He is also a scientist in the cranes and wetlands program at the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) based in Udaipur. Gopi has worked on waterbirds for over three decades, particularly on the Sarus Cranes of Uttar Pradesh. In this episode, he talks about waterbirds and how they coexist with humans.

There is this bird that my mother watches. When it comes down, she says Garuda, garuda. And does a namaste. This bird is called the Brahminy kite. Haliastur indus. But is this bird really the Garuda that Hindus worship? That is the bird of Indonesia– after which its airline, Garuda Indonesia is named? We find out in this short episode.

Brahminy Kite. Haliastur indus. Latin names are precise. But they also give the history. Of why a bird is called what it is. Take Haliastur indus. It sounds like a Iranian deep dish pizza. But Halia means sea. Astur means hawk. So the origins of the name meant that this bird was considered a sea hawk. From India. Hence the name indus.

Now the question is– is this bird really garuda– the bird that was the Vishnu Vahana in Hindu mythology. Vahana means conveyance in Sanskrit. One of the nice things about Hinduism and many other ancient religions is that they incorporated the natural world into their beliefs. So a peacock becomes the vahana or vehicle of the warrior Lord Muruga and Garuda is the vahana or vehicle of Vishnu.

When you talk about birds in ancient India, most ornithologists refer to a book by KN Dave called Birds in Sanskrit Literature. According to this book, Garuda was a primeval bird that was the progenitor or parent of all the birds of prey that were mentioned in the Vedas. The most probable Garuda was also called Nagashi or snake eater. According to Dave, this was probably the majestic sea eagle. Later it became the Imperial Eagle or the Himalayan Golden Eagle. The word Naga means snake and elephant in Sanskrit, hence the image of Garuda carrying an elephant. Although this particular legend could be attributed to the Persian bird, the legendary Roc or Rukh of immense size. That could carry off a baby elephant to feed its young. Or maybe it was a lammergier that could carry a turtle– again there are images of Garuda carrying a turtle.

But that doesn't mean that the Brahminy kite isn't sacred. In fact, its presence was considered auspicious. Mussalman's called it Rumubarik. In Sanskrit it was called Ranalankarana. Kshemankari. The story goes that Shiva was enjoying the company of beauties– other than his wife– when Parvati took the form of a Brahminy kite and shooed them away.

Here are the links referred to in the episode:

About the Brahminy kite in Sanskrit literature

600 Brahminy kites near Salem in 1905

Using the Irrawady dolphin to herd fish

Kleptoparasitism

Our thanks to MB Prashanth and MB Krishna for inputs to this episode. Cover Image from Sreenivas via Unsplash

In this short 3-minute episode, we are talking about the amazing birds of Nagaland with Angulie Meyase, a birding guide based in Khonoma, one of the most picturesque towns of Nagaland. He describes many of the birds you can see in Nagaland including the gray sibia, great barbet, assam laughing thrush, crested finchbill, green cochoa, purple cochoa, some eagles, rusty capped fulvetta, mountain bamboo partridge, blyth's trogopan, spot breasted laughing thrush, yellow rumped honeyguide and many others.

This episode is about hornbills in Valparai. About human wildlife conflict and other things. But mostly about hornbills. Valparai in the South Indian state of Tamilnadu is verdant and beautiful. Entire slopes of these gently undulating mountains are covered with tea. It is in this landscape that the great Indian hornbill likes to play.

Our guest today is Dr. James Christopher Haney, a conservation biologist, wildlife researcher, and author of more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles, technical reports, and science summaries. His career trajectory spans the arc of conservation and extinction and we are going to talk about both these topics today. Dr. Haney's latest book, "Woody's Last Laugh: Ivory-billed Woodpecker as Trickster," features how that bird came to fool our heads for so long, leading us into various mental mistakes due to the high uncertainty over the bird's ultimate fate. In this episode, we discuss this and other ideas, including the "Romeo error," a condition in which we get bird extinctions wrong (thinking that species are dead when they aren't). We discuss the ivory-bill, but also other examples of bird species from around the world (including one or two from India) that went missing for a very long time, but then were re-found.

Dr. Haney has delivered 150 research and public speaking engagements to national and international audiences. Haney was a coauthor of the "Top 40 Priorities for Science to Inform U.S. Conservation and Management Policy." For expertise in advising the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, a cross-governmental coalition charged with restoring marine environments of south-central Alaska, he received an Outstanding Contributions as a Peer Reviewer Award in 2000, and an Outstanding Service Award in 2002. In 2010, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service invited him to lead what was at the time the largest-ever vessel survey of marine birds in the Gulf of Mexico in order to help document injuries to wildlife that were caused by the Deepwater Horizon blow-out and oil spill. Following 15 years of interdisciplinary research, Dr. Haney discovered how and why conservation makes faulty decisions in his new book: "Woody's Last Laugh - How the 'Extinct' Ivory-billed Woodpecker Fools Us into Making 53 Thinking Errors"

We are so sorry but we messed up. The previous episode that was published was an interview with Judith Mirembe. For some reason, the full conversation did not go out. Here is the full-length interview. Those who listened to part of it before, please fast forward to 22:00 minutes.

Our guest today is Judith Mirembe who is currently based in Uganda. Judith is a bird guide and researcher with a passion for birds, keen on their conservation as well as protection of their habitats. This passion stems back from when she was a kid where she learnt birds in her local language and appreciated the cultural stories attached to them.

She is the Chairperson of the Uganda Women Birders' Club, that started in 2013 as an initiative to introduce women to birdwatching, a profession that is dominated by men in Africa. This passion led her into starting a non-profit organization, Shoebill-Watch Uganda whose major aim is to protect the Shoebill and other bird species in Uganda. She holds a Masters Degree in Environment and Natural Resources and has done a number of courses by the Tropical Biology Association (TBA) on application of Citizen Science in research and conservation of species. She has in the past (2016-2019) worked with Nature Uganda, a Birdlife International Partner in Uganda as the research and monitoring coordinator where her major role was to coordinate bird population monitoring in Uganda. Judith is a Zoological Society of London (ZSL) EDGE (Evolutionally Distinct and Globally Endangered ) of Existence Fellowship Alumni (2017-2019) where she together with the local communities on the shores of Lake Victoria carried out research on the Shoebill, a globally threatened bird species. She has continued this amazing and ground breaking working with the local communities at Mabamba wetland where she has trained the local guides to use a mobile phone tool to monitor the Shoebill and the threats it is faced with as they go about their routine of guiding tourists. She is the editor for the Birdwatch, a newsletter talking about Uganda's birdwatching sector

Here are some questions that Judith answered in the interview.

1. For people who have not visited Uganda, can you tell us some of the species of birds that we can see there?
2. What are some of your favorite species and why?
3. Please talk about the different habitats that are found in Uganda.
4. Please tell us what is special about the shoebill and why you started the conservation program for this bird?
5. Tell us some of the cultural symbolism associated with birds? For example, do people believe that certain birds bring them good luck or bad luck?
6. What are some of the spectacular raptors that you see in Uganda? What about ground dwelling birds such as ostriches which we don't see in India.
7. The national bird of Uganda is the gray crowned crane. Is there any folk belief or any stories associated with this bird? Why did Uganda choose this as the national bird?
8. You have some incredibly beautiful birds in Uganda. Can you describe a few of your favorites. Maybe the turaco?
9. India's national bird is a great Indian bustard. You also have bustards in Uganda. Can you talk about that?
10. You also have hornbills-- some pretty impressive ones.
11. What made you start Uganda Women Birders?
12. Lastly, please tell us about conservation efforts that are happening in Africa and specifically in Uganda.

Our guest today is Judith Mirembe who is currently based in Uganda. Judith is a bird guide and researcher with a passion for birds, keen on their conservation as well as protection of their habitats. This passion stems back from when she was a kid where she learnt birds in her local language and appreciated the cultural stories attached to them.

She is the Chairperson of the Uganda Women Birders' Club, that started in 2013 as an initiative to introduce women to birdwatching, a profession that is dominated by men in Africa. This passion led her into starting a non-profit organization, Shoebill-Watch Uganda whose major aim is to protect the Shoebill and other bird species in Uganda. She holds a Masters Degree in Environment and Natural Resources and has done a number of courses by the Tropical Biology Association (TBA) on application of Citizen Science in research and conservation of species. She has in the past (2016-2019) worked with Nature Uganda, a Birdlife International Partner in Uganda as the research and monitoring coordinator where her major role was to coordinate bird population monitoring in Uganda. Judith is a Zoological Society of London (ZSL) EDGE (Evolutionally Distinct and Globally Endangered ) of Existence Fellowship Alumni (2017-2019) where she together with the local communities on the shores of Lake Victoria carried out research on the Shoebill, a globally threatened bird species. She has continued this amazing and ground breaking working with the local communities at Mabamba wetland where she has trained the local guides to use a mobile phone tool to monitor the Shoebill and the threats it is faced with as they go about their routine of guiding tourists. She is the editor for the Birdwatch, a newsletter talking about Uganda's birdwatching sector.