It's been a while since I sat down to type a few words on Blogger. In a world full of vloggers, I wonder if bloggers will attract attention any more.
The whole of the last (2021) Covid lockdown was spent transitioning into a videographer from a photographer. I confess, it needs a lot of fine tuning and I had to partially abandon the projects as my current hardware wasn't quite capable of keeping up with the needs of Da Vinci Resolve and handling video editing very smoothly.
Therefore, till such time my hardware gets upgraded, I will crib about something that makes me increasingly disheartened about birding.
I have, as I have mentioned time and again, transitioned from 'tigertracking' to 'woodcrawling' over the last few years. Increasing expenses, a growing son and the Covid pandemic in the last two years have ensured that my woodcrawling has been mostly confined to my backyard!
During the years I spent 'tigertracking', it didn't take very long to realize the pursuit of a tiger or for that matter, any carnivore, was a like searching for the elusive Scarlet Pimpernal. It was, therefore, not very difficult to shift attention to something that didn't need much searching, birds!
Birds are just about anywhere. Open your ears and eyes; they are all around us. The best part is that you don't have to go searching for them, they'll come to you. Of course, some of them, like the elusive tigers, won't come to you but they'll make you go searching for them. For these rare birds, it requires a lot of planning and company of like minded friends. Please don't get the impression that we are a bunch of 'twitchers' and in case you don't know what that word means, take the help of Bing, Google or a more birdy DuckDuckGo search engine! After all, what really matters is the journey and not the destination or target species when you are with the right people.
Becoming a Birder
So, from randomly shooting birds on my jungle trips more than 20 years ago, I graduated to picking up the field guide to try to identifying them myself. From a combination of
a Bikram Grewal pocket guide and Salim Ali's field guide, I have graduated to half a dozen different guides. I still possess both these books. The pocket guide, in tatters, went with me into the field and Salim Ali remained in my room for reference. Unfortunately, both of them listed details of only under 300 birds combined and quickly became inadequate for a serious birder.
My collection of field guides now include
Grimmett & Inskipps, Krys Kazmierczak, a bigger Bikram Grewal and Rasmussen & Anderton. They cover all possible birds, numbering around a 1300 or more species found on the Indian subcontinent. Not only that, I found my interest in nightjars, owls, raptors and warblers so I have another half a dozen and more books on specific birds. I had become a dedicated birder!
For a little more than twenty years, I've been honing my skills and have now become quite adept at identifying birds both by sight and sound, thanks to the company of accomplished birders I call friends. We birded the
old fashioned way, with a pair of binoculars, handheld GPS, a notebook and pencil. Not all of us carried cameras and if we did, it was a tool for birding. While I don't claim to be an expert or professional, I am now able to identify most of the endemic birds seen in peninsular India and western ghats.
In 2014, I was introduced to the eBird portal and my
randomly scribbled bird lists suddenly became very
orderly checklists! Not only that, my photographs that used to be uploaded unsorted to photo upload social media sites like Picasa, Flickr and Facebook or the old Yahoo Groups, could now be uploaded to a dedicated site for birds. Now, with a click of a mouse, I could get the list of birds I had seen photographed and recorded sounds of.
In the initial eBird years I carried my field guides with me till I eventually downloaded the eBook version of Grimm-Skipp. Identification of a bird was based on points noted in the field. Photography itself was for recording what we saw. The, so called, eBird checklists were completed after reaching home from memory and notes made in the field.
From Birder to eBirder
Somewhere around 2015, the eBird mobile app was launched and what it did was cleverly combine checklist for a specific location with GPS coordinates and a live mapping of the tracks we walked during the session. The notebook and pencil, though still an essential part of the birding kit, became redundant. The consequence of this change was that the fun went out of birding.
Earlier, we did make observations in the field but most of the listing was done at the end of a session, with each of us shuffling our memories to remember what we had heard or seen. Usually
over a rather sumptuous breakfast for which, planning was done days in advance! Numbers were at best for academic interest and not for competition.
As time passed most of us realized in the guise of citizen science we were becoming statisticians. The app was like a modern version of the abacus. We were all busy adding to the numbers in the field almost instantaneously, as we were seeing the birds, (I decline to use the term 'observing' here!). All of a sudden the camera's importance grew as media uploads were adding colour and sound to the checklists. Beside photographs, some of us were now recording bird calls as well as shooting videos.
It became a period where the purpose of each trip seemed to be for adding to the collection of photographs and call recordings. A simple pass time for which the most expensive tool was the binoculars suddenly became quite an expensive hobby. High end cameras and lenses, sophisticated microphones and field audio recorders became a part of our birding armamentarium.
Gone were the days where we could go into the field with a simple backpack and water bottle. Now we had heavy camera bags, audio recorders and shotgun mics with cables draped around our anatomy. Birding had suddenly lost its simple charm.
We had become data collection agents but were euphemistically called 'citizen scientists'! Along the way our Birding with Breakfast also took a hit especially after Covid lockdown came into our lives. Not only that, after we returned from a birding trip, substantial amount of time was spent editing and uploading the media files to our eBird checklists.
From eBirder to Num-birders
Of late, the new habits seem to have become completely alienated from traditional birding. The eBird website lines up
challenges for each month and some lasting all year. Essentially, it is making
birding a competition and one that is becoming very unhealthy. eBirders seem to be more keen to get numbers under their belt than enjoying birding for birding's sake. Not for them are the field guides and binoculars. Most of them are armed with the latest cameras and far reaching lenses. At the sight of a bird they fire away a few hundred shots. Then, the photograph is posted in some birding group with the query,
"ID please"!
As a matter of fact, I have now confirmed my worst fears. Many so called eBirders are on the platform only
to get access to information regarding interesting sightings and their locations! I maybe wrong but that is what my gut tells me.
It seems that these bird photographers aren't interested in identifying a bird in the field. The Merlin app is used to identify and sometimes misidentify a bird. Their sole aim seems to be to photograph the maximum number of species in the minimum time. From time to time we see a comment on an eBird checklist, "The first photographic record of ABC species in XYZ location"! Seriously! Who cares?
I am afraid, traditional birding has become a dying art. It is eBirding or Num-birding now and I don't enjoy being a part of this new trend. Most of the new and young individuals with an eye for birds are following this route now. I don't deny there are a few who still follow the traditional birding habits but most are 'collectors'. They are more interested in acquiring the latest photography gear first, rather than a simple pair of binoculars, and notch up the numbers in double quick time!
I will continue my contribution to eBird because it aids science and also helps me catalogue my birding experiences more systematically. However, I refuse to be drawn into Num-birding. I have made sufficient contribution in terms of media uploads, both photographs and audio recordings. Despite my reduced activity, I'm surprised that my name is included in the list of prolific birders contributing to eBird! However, unless I go out and explore newer territories for my future birding adventures, I'm afraid I'll not be making much contributions in the foreseeable future.
For that, Covid has to decide that it has punished humans enough. However, it seems we still haven't learnt our lessons, two years into the pandemic. As for me, I'm not leaving my comfort zone in a hurry and no numbers can tempt me to embark on a birding trip to locations where I can add to my species list substantially.
At this point of time in life, perhaps the twilight zone for me, I prefer to be with Funny Friends, Feathered Fiends and Food, in no particular order or location!
After all, I'm a Woodcrawler first and everything else afterwards!
