The State of India’s Birds 2023 report, released recently, is an assessment of the distribution range, trends in abundance and conservation status of 942 of India’s 1,200 bird species.
- It and has been carried out by 13 partner organisations, including the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and Zoological Survey of India (ZSI).
Key findings
- There is a general decline in numbers in most bird species in the country – some recording current decline and others projected to decline in the long term.
- The report found that 60 per cent of species show long-term declines (out of 348 species that could be assessed for long-term trend).
- Raptors, migratory shorebirds and ducks have declined the most.
- 178 species are categorised as High Conservation Priority which includes, Greater Flamingo, Indian Vulture, White-bellied Heron, Brown-winged Kingfisher and Baer’s Pochard.
- The several bird species such as the Indian Peafowl, Rock Pigeon, Asian Koel and House Crow are not only healthy in both abundance and distribution, but showing an “increasing trend”.
- The Peafowl, India’s national bird, is one of the most rapidly increasing species in the country today. In the last 20 years, Indian Peafowl has expanded into the high Himalaya and the rainforests of the Western Ghats. It now occurs in every district in Kerala, a state where it was once extremely rare.
- Among the bird species that have been doing well, compared to their pre-2000 baseline, the Asian Koel has shown a rapid increase in abundance of 75%, with an annual current increase of 2.7% per year. So have the House Crow, Rock Pigeon and the Alexandrine Parakeet that has established new populations in several cities.
- The bird species which are “specialists’’ – restricted to narrow habitats like wetlands, rainforests and grasslands, as opposed to species that can inhabit a wide range of habitats such as plantations and agricultural fields – are rapidly declining.
- The “generalist’’ birds that can live in multiple habitat types are doing well as a group, the report says.
- “Specialists, however, are more threatened than generalists. Grassland specialists have declined by more than 50%, indicating the importance of protecting and maintaining grassland ecosystems.
- A steep decline of birds that live in a wide variety of open habitats in addition to grasslands suggests a need to investigate threats in, for example, open agricultural landscapes and fallow land.
- Birds that are woodland specialists (forests or plantations) have also declined more than generalists, indicating a need to conserve natural forest habitats so that they provide habitat to specialists.
- Monoculture is the practice of growing one type of seed in a field at a time. In India, commercial monoculture plantations of rubber, coffee, and tea have been rapidly expanding in recent years. It is affecting bird population.
