When birdwatching is a window to conservation

“It is always in our best interests as conservationists to be more inclusive in our actions,” remarks K.S. Seshadri, who recently delivered the Dr. Joseph George Memorial Talk on Bengaluru Bird Day, an annual event held in the city in memory of the pioneer of the group birdwatching movement in Bengaluru.

Getting a sense of the key landscape stakeholders and accounting for these different perspectives will help the long-term success of any conservation intervention. Working with communities and figuring out their needs is therefore essential, reiterates the Bengaluru-based ecologist associated with Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE) in a post-event interview. “Else we are likely to fail.”

The link between communities and conservation frequently emerged at the talk on Birdwatching as a Window to the World of Ecology and Conservation, held at the Indian Institute of World Culture, which delved into six vignettes that shaped his journey as an ecologist, researcher and conservationist. He expanded on how birdwatching was instrumental in kick-starting this journey.

Starting with sparrows

It all started with sparrows. “I grew up watching sparrows in Bangalore,” recalls Seshadri. His house had a little courtyard, and there used to be sparrows nesting in the well, so he would throw broken rice for them every morning. “They would come up in large numbers,” he says.

Birds were in Seshadri’s sphere of influence through all those school-going years, even after that fateful day when he came back from school and found the well gone, the sparrows that nested in them “the victim of what we now call urban sprawl.” But he only got into group birdwatching in his teens, after serendipitously stumbling upon “a bunch of people with the binoculars” in Lalbagh around the time he was in the first year of his PUC. They turned out to be members of BngBirds, a birding community in the city, and he decided to join them, he says. In this process, he interacted with other bird watchers, and this was in his formative years a very important experience.

So he began going out with people, looking for birds in and around Bengaluru, often photographing them, a hobby that soon expanded into something much bigger.

Wildlife volunteer and more

One of the things that happened because of birdwatching was that he met many interesting people. “What was really nice and what is still really nice about a BngBirds outing is that it has a very flat structure. You can walk up to anybody and talk to them,” he says. Scientists associated with research organisations often were on these walks, and he began volunteering with a few of them in 2005 while still a student at St Joseph’s College, Bengaluru.

One such volunteer experience was at the Male Mahadeshwara (MM) Hills in Karnataka. “This was just after Veerappan was assassinated, so the forest was really unexplored until then.” Not only did he end up watching a lot of birds in this hitherto unexplored area, but he also learnt how to use a GPS device as part of his fieldwork. “In 2005, it was likely the most sophisticated technology out there,” says Seshadri, who also learnt to navigate the terrain using topographic maps along with GPS. “Everyone uses GPS now, but back then, it was probably the first time anyone was using it to study wildlife in India.” 

Seshadri spent another summer volunteering at the Nagarahole Tiger Reserve, monitoring the prey base for tigers. “Tigers need 50 deer-sized animals per year to survive, and measuring how many deer-sized animals (are present) is a good indicator of how many tigers one can sustain in a national park,” he says. He remembers early mornings and late nights spent in the forests, often walking past tigers and elephants and camping in remote places, like abandoned schools, with no running water or electricity. “I think this experience in my formative years gave me training on what today we call it as roughing it out in the field.” 

It was also when the first seeds of conservation were planted in his head. “I saw first-hand for the first time all the crossroads that wildlife are at,” he says, adding that travelling to all these places, particularly in the Western Ghats, exposed him to the destruction that was taking place back then. “I also got to travel across different landscapes, traverse through different regions where people were intimately tied with nature: parts of Uttara Kannada, for example, are known for how dependent they are on the forest and how well they protect the landscapes,” says Seshadri. “I think, in hindsight, all this is what helped me make up my mind of being a conservationist.”

Other key projects

Seshadri interned at ATREE during his undergraduate degree and later joined the organisation as a research assistant. As part of his research, he studied orchids or epiphytes growing way up in the canopy of the moist deciduous forests of the Kalakad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve (KMTR) in southern Tamil Nadu. “The forest canopy used to be covered by clouds,” he says about this experience, which he believes was yet another vignette that has influenced his calling. “It was super misty, full of leaches, very scary, and it took about a day to get there from the nearest hospital.”

He talks about using a device called Jumars to ascend the trees, many of which were over 100 feet in height, and access their vast canopies, which have been described as “the last biotic frontier of the world” by the American entomologist Terry L. Erwin due to their relative inaccessibility and rich species diversity. “The icing on the cake is that once you get up into the canopy, you see the forest like a bird would see it when it’s soaring over the forest canopy,” says Seshadri, who spent a lot of time watching birds up close in these canopies. 

High up in the trees, he also encountered frogs. So, he used the opportunity to record the calls of these animals using an automated sound recorder. Seshadri, who has since done a considerable amount of research on amphibians, goes on to outline some fascinating, often puzzling, details about frogs at the talk: their colour patterns, songs, and even the relatively rare behaviour of parental care.

Seshadri also talks about using his time in the field to study road ecology, specifically about how road kills are influenced by land use and so on, at both Kattalekan (located in the Siddapura taluk of the Uttara Kannada district) and at KMTR. Over the years, Seshadri and his colleagues at ATREE have been able to use their insights to nudge the local administration into regulating traffic (several thousand people visit a temple inside the Reserve once a year). “Eventually, we came up with guidelines, which went to the National Tiger Conservation Authority. Some of this is being followed today,” says Seshadri. 

The measures that have been adopted include setting up a check-post and banning traffic from plying these roads at night. ATREE has also partnered with the local administration to conduct outreach activities in schools in the neighbouring villages. Seshadri names the late Raja of Singampatti, Murugadoss Theerthapathy, one of the zamindars in the region, as someone whose help was critical for their conservation efforts. “He had a lot of sway in how the administration controlled things. We immediately realised that you can’t work without having them (administration, the deputy commissioner, forest department, temple authorities) on board, and we started working with them,” he remembers.