India was in full lockdown for all of April, with most people required to stay at home. Many took up the challenge of exploring the birds at or around their homes, and helped document them by uploading their lists on eBird. Here is the breakup of eBirding in the country in April 2020 (with previous month in brackets):
Number of birders:1,829 (2,533)
Number of lists (all types): 28,100 (28,300)
Number of observations: 3.46 lakh (4.48 lakh)
April challenge
The challenge for April was to look for birds twice a day (morning and evening) for every day of April and upload lists of 15 min in duration (details at the link above). A total of 43 birders met the target (relaxed by +/- 2 min for duration, and allowing for one missed day!). These are (excluding group accounts and those with no identifiable name):
| Abhisheka Krishnagopal, Ankur Shringi, Anu Anto, Aravind P S, Aravind AM, Arulvelan Thillainayagam, Bimal Modi, Chirag Munje, Claudia Pinheiro, Hakimuddin F Saify, Hardeep Gazdar, Isheta Divya, Jageshwer verma, Jayadev Menon, KARTHIKEYAN R, Kaushik Sarkar, Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, Lakshmikant Neve, Loukika Neve, Navaneeth Sini George, PRABHAKARAN PV, Praveen Velayudhan, Rajeev Gejje, Rama Narayanan, Ramesh Shenai, Renju TR, Ritobroto Chanda, Sashi Kumar, Selvaganesh K, Shylajesha S, Sriram Reddy, Steffin Babu, Subhadra Devi, Suhel Quader, Surendhar Boobalan, Swetashree Purohit, tanuja dasharath haunsbhavi, Vanitha P, VASEN SULI, Vidhya Swaminathan, Viji G, Vishnupriyan Kartha, Yousaf Olavilam |
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Many congratulations to all of them!
From these 43 names, one was drawn using a computer-generated random number. This person is
Steffin Babu (see eBird profile)
who receives a copy of How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, by Simon Barnes, as a small gift in appreciation.
Are you birding towards the target for May (one checklist per day)? And of course, there are also the yearlong challenges for 2020!
congrats to the winner but my name is missing from the list