GBBC 2017: Stories from the field

A brief report on Campus Bird Count in Indore

This year, the campus bird count programme was conducted in nine campuses of Madhya Pradesh, which was a great improvement on the previous years. Last year, only two campuses had conducted the programme.

A bird monitoring and documentation workshop conducted by Mr Ramit Singal of Bird Count India, in partnership with the The Nature Vounteers, a leading conservation movement NGO functioning from Indore, on 22nd Jan 2017. This event had got the local birders interested in participating in the event and to conduct a study of birds around their campus.

The participating campuses of MP were mostly from Indore. Out of the nine, six campuses were from Indore district.
A brief report on the same is given below.

01. Govindram Seksaria Institute of Management and Research: Here, I took the initiative and with about 18 students and 05 faculty members, went around the 6 acre campus and recorded 18 species of birds. We completed 05 checklists of 15 minutes or more in this campus. This campus is in the heart of the city, so we only found the birds which are able to co-exist with human beings.

02. Daly College: Here the initiative was taken by Ms Kanakbali Singh, a senior teacher of the school. In this school, as many as 25 students and 06 teachers participated in the bird count and 70 species of birds were recorded from here! This campus is very huge and has lots of trees and open areas. A wonderful habitat for a large number of birds. A number of teams were formed and they went to different locations of the school to observe the birds.

03. Medicaps University: Ms Neelam Dubey coordinated the event with the help of Mr. Dev Vasudevan here. This campus recorded 14 species of birds in about one hour of birding.

04. Army Public school: Mr Dev K Vasudevan lead the bird count here with around 20 birds listed in an hour’s time.

05. St Marys Higher secondary school: Mr Dev K Vasudevan was again the leader here. The bird species count here was 20. A total of 10 students participated in the drive.

06. Holkar Science college: Dr Kishore Panwar led the bird count here. A total of 25 species was counted from here.

I have observed that the birding activity across the wetlands and forest areas around Indore has increased this year but still many a birders are not recording the observations that they came across while birding. So, still there is a greater need to educate and convince them to document whatever they see, and at the same time telling them that it helps in understanding the major and minor details about avifauna diversity of the area.

– Ajay Gadikar, Indore