WINGS—Birds of India

WINGS—Birds of India (formerly­­­ India BirdRaces) is now a nature awareness program that revolves around India’s birds.

Having started in 2005 in Mumbai, this event has now spread to many cities and regions of the country. One of the main ideas is to search for birds from dawn to dusk and record as many species as possible while enjoying being outdoors and watching birds!

For more information and to look for an event  in your city, click here (coming soon)

For all general enquiries on programs of WINGS—Birds of India, contact the coordination team lead by Sunjoy Monga. Email: [email protected]

For upcoming events, visit: https://wings-avianindia.in/

General Guidelines for uploading your sightings during the WINGS Nature Awareness Program

The sightings during the various events of WINGS are meant to be recorded in eBird, to create a long-term record of bird distribution and abundance in the country. Here are some guidelines for using eBird during the bird races.

• Each team should designate a person to keep track of bird sightings. This is ideally done directly on the eBird app — it’s the quickest and most efficient way. The designated person should be familiar with using eBird already.
• For each location, create a separate birdlist, which includes all species seen or heard, together with counts. The app will ask for effort information for each list, including distance travelled, duration.
• Birds seen while travelling from one location to another should be put in separate lists, with location tagged as near as possible to the actual place seen. These lists would be ‘incidental’ in eBird parlance.
• You can keep the lists unsubmitted, and keep starting a new list for each new location. At the end of the day, review each location’s list to check for errors and to add any useful notes/comments.
• During list upload, you will be given the option to ‘share’. This means to copy the list into another eBird account. Please share with all your team-mates and (depending on instructions given locally) with the India Bird Races central account. You will need the eBird usernames in order to share your list.

Note:

One of the easiest way to track what your team saw during the bird race is by creating an eBird Trip Report. eBird Trip Reports compile your eBird checklists and give you an overview of where you went and what you found, along with your photos and audio recordings, all in one convenient location for sharing.

Happy Birding !

Header Image: Greater Painted-Snipe Rostratula benghalensis © Lars Petersson/ Macaulay Library