Bird Podcast with Shoba Narayan

This episode is about the magnificent migration of the Amur Falcons, the largest raptor migration in the world.

It is 4:30 AM on a cold day in November. A group of us from Bangalore are driving from Dimapur to Hakhezhe, Nagaland to observe a spectacle like nothing we've seen before: the greatest raptor migration on earth.

The Amur falcon or Falco amurensis breeds between Northern China and Southeastern Siberia. Amurland. Where the Amur river-- the tenth longest in the world flows. Unusually for this year, these falcons have come near Dimapur. They are roosting overnight on the sal and teak trees. Come dawn and they will fly, looking for the large amount of insects-- termites, dragonflies, bees and others-- that they will catch on the wing.

They are headed for Eastern and Southern Africa where they will winter in warm climes, eating locusts and termites in the fertile red earth of Africa. To get there, they undertake one of the most arduous migrations in the world. First they fly from Siberia to Northeast India. They stockpile food and fat and then fly in one stretch over peninsular India and then over the Indian ocean, covering anywhere from 22,000 kilometres to 30,000 kilometres, over five long days and nights.

Listen to this podcast but also go to the episode page for more links about the successful conservation story behind Amur falcons.

With us today is Dr. Samira Agnihotri, who has studied bird song, racket-tailed drongos and ethno-ornithology. Dr. Agnihotri has worked in the Biligiri Rangana Betta or BR Hills from 2005 when she began to study birdsong while pursuing a Master's degree in Wildlife Biology and Conservation from the National Centre for Biological Sciences. She then studied racket-tailed drongos, walking through the forests with a mike and recorder, and obtained her Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science. She followed up her research on drongos as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institute of Advanced Studies. She is keenly interested in the traditional ecological knowledge of the Solega people and has dabbled in ethno-ornithologies, collaborating with linguist Dr. Aung Si, and is intent on documenting Solega knowledge and oral histories. Samira is also interested in nature education, and in exploring different ways to popularise the ecological sciences as well as encourage and aid the preservation of traditional knowledge systems. Samira is a member of Punarchith, a collective that works with farmers and rural youth in Chamarajanagar District. Currently, she works at the Office of Communications at IISc.

Our guest today is Dr. Nancy Jacobs, a professor of history at Brown University. The topic of our discussion is based on her third book, a really wonderful read. It is called Birders of Africa: history of a network. He current work is on the "Global Grey Parrot."

Nancy Jacobs is Professor of History at Brown University. She specializes in South Africa, colonial Africa, the environment, knowledge, and biography. Her recent work links her to birds.

Her third book, Birders of Africa: History of a Network (Yale University, 2016;

University of Cape Town, 2018) was an examination of the politics of knowing birds in colonial Africa.

This episode features two senior conservation specialists from Audubon: Aurelio Ramos and Gloria Lentijo. They talk about Audubon's new strategies in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada. This hemispheric approach stems from the recognition that the majority of vulnerable bird species found in the U.S. spend most of their lives in Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean, which have some of the world's most biodiverse landscapes and seascapes. The Neotropical Realm alone has 41% of all bird species on Earth, and Canada is North America's bird nursery.

In this episode, Aurelio and Gloria talk about Audubon Americas and their ambitious plan to address conservation shortfalls in Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the next five years, Audubon is targeting 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of prime ecosystems that are important for priority birds and wildlife, and human well-being. Along the way, they talk about their favourite birds and landscapes.

Below is the video recording of the episode.

Based in Washington DC, Aurelio Ramos is senior vice president for Audubon Americas. In that role he oversees the program, its international partnerships, and conservation teams working throughout Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Gloria Lentijo is the working lands strategy manager for Audubon Americas. A native of Colombia, Gloria has more than 18 years of experience integrating community participation in conservation through the implementation of bird-friendly practices in agricultural landscapes.

1. Aurelio, first of all, basic question. Why are the Americas important for birding and birds?

1. Gloria, you are an expert in connecting community, agriculture and bird-friendly practices. Now, this varies from culture to culture. Can you tell us how you do this in Latin America.

1. Gloria: follow up question. You are an expert in cattle ranching and nature based solutions. How does this influence the conservation of birds.

1. Aurelio, follow up question: can you outline the four strategies that Audubon has decided to follow in the Americas.

1. Aurelio, Audubon's website says that your "new strategies are designed to deliver conservation results at an unprecedented scale and pace." Both those words are important. Please talk about scale, and talk about pace. Why is this speed necessary?

1. Gloria: talk about the challenges that you faced? And what are some of the learnings that other countries like India can use?

1. Aurelio: According to your AIAP Executive summary, Audubon aims to conserve 10 million hectares of important bird habitat in Latin America and the Caribbean by 2026, and 40 million hectares by 2030. That is very ambitious. But first, how did you come up with this number-- your 'north star' as the report called it. Aurelio, how did you come up with this number? Is it important?

1. Aurelio: follow up. Your report says, "We will concentrate on habitats of highest value to migratory birds and threatened and endemic resident birds, factoring in future climate strongholds. We will test and scale pilots and demonstration projects across priority habitats in four core countries." Please help me understand what "highest value" habitats means. Also, what are some of the pilots you are thinking about or working with.

1. Gloria, Columbian coffee is almost as well known as Columbia as a birding destination. Talk to us about why these two are interconnected and how to solve the coffee business so it is favourable for birds.

1. Some lighter questions. Aurelio: please tell us for people who have never visited South America about what we can expect to see there. What are some of your favourite birds? And some great birding experiences?

1. Same question for Gloria-- favourite birds and experiences.

Dr. Aparajita Datta leads The Nature Conservation Foundation's Eastern Himalaya programme, under which research and community-based conservation with hornbills as a flagship have been carried out for over two decades. She completed her PhD on hornbill biology and their role in seed dispersal in 2000. Since then, she along with her team have worked all over the North East on a variety of hornbill-related projects. She has received several awards including the National Geographic Emerging Explorer award (2010) and the Whitley Fund for Nature award (2013), and the Women in Discovery award. Her interests include plant–animal interactions in rainforests, understanding human impacts on wildlife, and engaging with tribal communities for conservation. She is also currently the Co-Chair (Asia) for the IUCN SSC Hornbill Specialist Group. In this episode, Aparajita talks about hornbills and their ecosystem. She writes and speaks regularly about conservation and her take on nature.

Dr. Datta's work has encompassed long-term research on hornbill biology in north-east India (breeding biology, roosting, diet), hornbill movement and seed dispersal using telemetry, long-term monitoring of tree phenology, hunting & logging impacts, biological exploration in Arunachal Pradesh & new mammal species discoveries, seed dispersal & seed predation; established community-based conservation interventions with tribal communities (health, education, rural energy), conservation education, a citizen science initiative for hornbills.

A Hornbill Nest Adoption Program set up in 2011 protects hornbill nests in forests outside a Protected Area, while providing income to people. We have contributed to this programme. You can too by donating here.

1:30 She lays out the contours of your work with hornbills. Nesting biology of hornbills. Their breeding is very unique. They are secondary cavity nesters. Females imprison themselves inside the cavity for up to 4 months. They seal the nest with their own droppings. The male is the sole provider.

6:30 Varities of hornbills. She talks about the majesty of hornbills. 62 species in the world. Africa- 30, Asia- 32, India-9. The casque atop their bills. Rhinoceros hornbills. Casque is hollow. Fused neck vertebrae. Epitome of monogamous birds.

10:30 The connection between plants and animals explained through hornbills. The specialist seed dispersals of hornbills. Terrestrial forest rodents. Scatter disperser. Generalist plants and trees and specialized seed dispersal by frugivores. Complex connections between species in a tropical forest. Talks about the laurel trees, Phoebe cooperiana-- called Sanchar in Nyishi. They love the fruits.

14:00 Have you seen all the nine hornbill species found in India? Can you talk about them for those who are not as lucky as you? How are they similar and how are they different?

Larger tend to be frugivorous in their diet. Smaller ones eat animal matter.

1. Great hornbill: Northeast India. Disjunct population-- in Uttarakhand, UP. Also
2. Wreathed hornbill: Northeast India
3. Rufuous necked hornbill-- Northeast, higher elevation,
4. Brown hornbill-- Northeast, cooperative breeding system. In the others, you have the male feeding the female inside the cave. In Brown hornbill, the adult male is helped by juvenile males from the previous years in both nest feeding and defense.
5. Oriental pied hornbill-- wider distribution, Northern, Eastern and Central India
6. Malabar pied hornbill-- western ghats, central India,
7. Malabar gray hornbill-- endemic, Western ghats, smallest of all hornbills, in the Malabar area,
8. Narcondam hornbill-- restricted to a six square kilometre Narcondam island in the Andaman-Nicobar islands.
9. Gray hornbill.

21:00 Talks about her research on the functional role that forest hornbills play as seed dispersers. How hornbills are great seed dispersers. All seeds except the ficus (which are defecated) are regurgitated. How to measure the quality of seed dispersal.

27:00 What is recruitment? Rohit Naniwadekar's work in Namdapha. Scatter dispersing seeds.

30: 00 You have worked with the local Nishi tribes in the area of hornbill conservation. Tell us about the complexity of this. What is roost monitoring and how do you do it?

She talks about partnerships that they have crea

38:00 Talks about nesting trees. Tetramelis nudiflora. Altingia

42:00 What are your favourite species of birds?

Indian pitta, Blythe's reed warbler, Paradis flycatcher, yellow-wattled lapwing. Talks about her neighbourhood birds.

44:00 Her favourite is the rufous necked hornbill. Final thoughts?

Well, author and American birder, Jim Wright says there is. The title of his latest book says it all. "The Real James Bond: A True Story of Identity Theft, Avian Intrigue and Ian Fleming."

The book says, "Long before Ian Lancaster Fleming became a bestselling author, a single-minded Philadelphia ornithologist named James Bond wrote Birds of the West Indies, based on repeated expeditions to the Bahamas and the Caribbean from 1927 to 1935." Let's find out more about the real James Bond.

From this episode, we have started recording audio and video. Here is our Youtube video link of this episode.

Jim Wright is the author of The Real James Bond, a biography of the author and birdman who fell prey to the world's most famous case of identity theft. The Wall Street Journal called it "siim and elegant" -- like Bond himself. It is available as a hard-cover, ebook and audiobook.

A long-time prize-winning journalist, Wright has written lavishly illustrated nature books about Central America's largest rainforest, Pennsylvania's legendary Hawk Mountain, and the New Jersey Meadowlands. He has also written an interactive ebook about Bald Eagles.

Wright is a nature photographer and blogger. He writes "The Bird Watcher" column for USA Today newspapers in New Jersey. He lives with his wife Patty in Allendale, NJ, where he is a deputy marsh warden.

1. So who was the real James Bond? (Cuba's bee hummingbird, red-billed streamertail, ivory-billed woodpecker).
2. Tell us about James Bond meeting Ian Fleming and the cave swallows episode?
3. You have written about America's most iconic bird: the bald eagle. Tell us about these spectacular raptors.
4. In your blog, Celery Farm and Beyond, you describe the raptor counts that you've done at Hawk Mountain. For those of us who have never been to Hawk Mountain, tell us why it is special and the raptors that you can see there?
5. What attracts you to raptors? Which ones are especially interesting and why?
6. Back to Bond…. In 1936, Bond wrote Birds of the West Indies. Tell us about these birds that he discovered-- like the Zapata rail, wren and sparrow. Also the Bahama nuthatch.
7. Why do ornithologists make good spies? "Birdwatcher is old intelligence slang for spy. . . .
8. Who are some ornithologists who make good spies?
9. Talk about James Bond's legacy.
10. Have you been to the West Indies? Which are some interesting birding locations you've visited and would recommend.
11. What are some of your favorite bird species-- you've written about sparrows, pileated woodpeckers, juncos and such.

Jonathan Franzen is arguably America's greatest living fiction writer. He has won numerous accolades and awards. His latest book, Crossroads, is just out. Like many of his novels, it has little to do with his other passion. As Jonathan says in this interview, he doesn't bird very much when he is working.

Now to birding. In his New Yorker essay, "My Bird Problem," Franzen says that he began birding in 1999 at the age of 40. Since then, he has written a number of lyrical essays about birds, conservation and his birding adventures from Africa to Antarctica. My second favourite is this one in the New Yorker which talks about him going to search for Masafuera rayadito in faraway Chile. My absolute favourite is this one in the National Geographic which talks about the sheer joy of birding and the number of species he has seen. It is both a ringing, yet seemingly self-evident, endorsement for birds and a fine argument for conservation. A more incisive and heartbreaking essay is this one in the National Geographic on seabirds. He also speaks about how he fell in love with birds and protecting them in this Youtube video. Franzen also lends his name and voice to conservation efforts that matter to him such as this interesting one about the Chatham albatross. Watch it.

This New York Times piece, which put him on its 2018 "The Greats" cover, gives an idea of where he is at currently. For more details, visit his website: https://jonathanfranzen.com

Franzen has also written controversial pieces about climate change that have evoked responses from Audubon.

Life on Earth is undergoing its sixth ever mass extinction, one that is entirely driven by humans. Amongst the multitude of "global change" factors causing species' extinctions, climate change and the loss and degradation of natural habitats are major causes. This is especially the case for species in tropical mountain ranges, where most of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity is concentrated, and where species tend to be thermally sensitive.

Umesh Srinivasan and his team study how forest degradation combines with climate change to impact Himalayan biodiversity at multiple levels, from geographic range shifts to behaviour and demography. Their main ongoing work is in the eastern Himalayas of Arunachal Pradesh, where they have been monitoring bird populations in primary and logged forests for a decade using mist netting and bird ringing. They combine this with behavioural observations to understand how climate change and forest loss are altering the composition of mixed-species bird flocks across the elevational gradient. In addition to the Arunachal long-term project, they work with various institutions to study the impacts of global change drivers on Himalayan birds in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim. Almost all their work happens in the field.

Apart from the research that they do, Dr. Srinivasan also works with the Bugun community of Singchung village in Arunachal Pradesh and the Arunachal Pradesh Forest Department on a range of conservation issues. These initiatives include wildlife and nature education for schoolchildren from Arunachali tribal communities and the management of the Singchung Bugun Village Community Reserve, established to protect the critically endangered Bugun Liocichla.

Before joining IISc, Dr. Srinivasan was a postdoctoral fellow with David Wilcove at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He did his PhD on the demographic impacts of selective logging on birds in Arunachal Pradesh with Suhel Quader at the National Centre for Biological Sciences. His MSc was in Wildlife Biology and Conservation from the Wildlife Conservation Society-National Centre for Biological Sciences. His undergraduate studies were in medicine at Government Medical College, Mysore.

The Eastern Himalayas are one of the most species rich regions in the world. Dr. Umesh Srinivasan studies the effects of selective logging on birds. Are there parts of the Himalayas where birds are more temperature sensitive than others?

2:00 What is selective logging and how does it affect primary forests?

3:15 The sixth extinction. What are the drivers of the sixth extinction?

5:00 What are the survival rates for birds in primary versus logged forests.

7:00 How do bird species respond to selective logging? What are the changes that you see in birds in logged forests? Hint: it has to do with something that humans always want for their bodies.

11:42 What are some of the fascinating birds in Eastern Himalayas?

13:00 Differences in bird species between Eastern and Western Himalayas.

16:00 Western Himalayas are more temperate than Eastern Himalayas which is more tropical. This affects the species that colonize these regions.

18:00 Which is better? Birds that are thermal generalists verus thermal specialists? The answer is not straightforward

21:00 What is biotic homogenization? And how does this affect Western Himalayan birds versus Eastern Himalayan birds? How do birds adapt when you convert forests into agricultural land? Again thermal generalists versus specialists.

25:00 Fascinating nuance amongst the Great Barbet.

27:00 The contours of forest degradation in the Himalayas.

28:30 "Himalayas are not like a cone." The band of land between 1800 to 2500 metres.

30:00 Tell us a good story and a bad story.

32:00 About the endangered Bugun Liochicla with a global population of 20 individual birds. In Singchung village. Tale of how to work with a community.

35:00 An appeal to preserve the 4% of land that is protected in India.

Dr. Seshadri KS grew up in Bangalore and started to watch birds at a young age. An avid naturalist with interests across many taxa, he has chosen to study natural history, ecology and conservation biology as a career. He was part of the team that described three new species of frogs from India and described a new behavior in frogs. Dr. Seshadri is currently a DST-INSPIRE Faculty Fellow at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc Bangalore. In this episode, we talk about wetland and grassland ecology, and bird photography.

Over the last decade, Seshadri's research has taken him to remote and often inhospitable environments where he has spent extensive periods of time. His research spans a swath of biology ranging from orchids in the tall forests of the Western Ghats to discovering new species and new behavior among Amphibians. He led a team to study amphibians in the forest canopy, for which he was honored with the "Future Conservationist" award by the Conservation Leadership Program in 2010. He has a doctoral degree from the National University of Singapore which bestowed him the prestigious (late) Prof. Navjot S. Sodhi Conservation Biology Scholarship in 2013. He has travelled extensively to some of the last remaining strongholds of biodiversity in the rapidly vanishing forests of Southeast Asia to find solutions to effectively conserve nature. He enjoys photographing natural landscapes and biodiversity and often teaches ecology, evolutionary biology and research methods to students and nature enthusiasts.

1:00 What does a terrestrial ecologist mean?

2:30 You are unusual in our guests in that your wingspan is wide and encompasses amphibians, snakes, mongooses, trees and many others. Place birds in the ecology that you operate in. Seshadri talks about Poornachandra Tejaswi

4:00 Seshadri's paper parenting in frogs and the link to birds. Sexual dichromatism and cryptic colouration.

6:00 Caregiving and predation risk, particularly in frogs and birds.

7:30 Tell us about mistaking a frog for a bird. How did that happen? About C.R. Naik and mistaking a frog for a white-throated kingfisher.

11:00 Discovery of a new species of frog.

13:30: Birders use binoculars and walk a lot. Do frog people crouch in the jungle? Do they work at night? Seshadri talks about the differences in posture, practice, equipment between observing birds and frogs. Dangers like walking into elephants. Being near leopards.

18:00 Seshadri tells us about his work with wetland birds. At the Kalakkad Mundanthurai tiger reserve. Tamaraparani river.

25:00 Favourite birds and why? Tailorbird or Ashy wren-babbler. Whooshing sounds as the Great pied hornbill flies by.

27:00 Common birds in Bangalore. Darters, dabchicks, pygmy cotton teals.

30:00 What are some things about grassland birds that beginning birders may not know. Seeing the Lesser Florican in Bidar. Listen to our Great Indian Bustard episode here.

31:46 About kavals or regional grasslands. The concept of ecological succession.

34:30: The impact of photography on birds. Tips for photographers. Hesarghatta grasslands— spotting a European Roller. Chasing birds on cars. The MB Krishna episode is here. The Sy Montgomery episode is here.

40:00 Last words and advice.

44:00 Seshadri speaks in Kannada about his birding experiences.

Our guest in this episode is Dr. Emily Duval whose Duval lab at Florida State University studies behavioral ecology, population genetics, and in the role of sexual selection in speciation.

In this episode, we talk to this much feted, and much-cited professor about topics that would be a divorce lawyer's nightmare: multiple paternity, non-optimal choice of mate, alpha and beta males, and the adaptive basis of female mate choice. More specifically, we are going to talk about the manakin of Panama, the lance-tailed manakin in particular, whose spectacular breeding dance makes time fly.