• Bengal gets bird checklist, tops India with 929 species
    Times of India | 8 September 2024
  • Kolkata: After eight years of meticulous research by ornithologists, field biologists, conservationists and NGO members, Bengal has finally got its first comprehensive checklist of avian species.

    According to the checklist, the total number of bird species found in the state is 929, substantiated by 757 specimens and 868 photographs. This places Bengal at the top of the table in terms of number of bird species in India.The Zoological Survey of India’s ‘Birds of India’ had previously estimated the number of species found in Bengal at 837.

    The state’s diverse avifauna comprises 11 critically endangered, 11 endangered, 25 vulnerable, 53 near threatened and 131 Schedule I species. The pink-headed duck and the Manipur bush quail have not been reported in the past century, as per the checklist.

    Santanu Manna, the main author, said 22 museums were contacted for this project — three in India and 19 abroad, primarily in the United Kingdom and the United States. “The foundation of this checklist is specimen data. I personally verified more than 40 specimens using photographs provided by museum curators. I gathered the specimen data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility website, the largest repository of specimens,” he said.

    The co-authors are Sujan Chatterjee, Biswapriya Rahut, Kanad Baidya, Mousumi Dutta, Samiran Jha, Sandip Das, Arup Kumar Banerjee and Subhasish Sengupta.

    Recent discoveries, according to Manna, include sightings of several pelagic birds, mostly in the aftermath of cyclonic storms. “The western parts of the districts have been historically understudied and have yielded some recent discoveries of dryland species (e.g. striolated bunting, painted spurfowl, Indian spotted creeper) or species of the north-eastern ghats (e.g. Indian black-lored tit). Though many wetlands around Kolkata have been lost, those habitats are more or less preserved around the Sundarbans, and historical rarities such as the spoon-billed sandpiper, red phalarope, Nordmann’s greenshank and red-breasted merganser have been rediscovered in the 21st century,” he added.

    The report suggests that the wetlands of Kolkata serve as a staging ground for the large-billed reed warbler during its spring migration. The state was divided into 10 eco-regions, of which the lower Gangetic plains of moist deciduous forests, Chhota-Nagpur dry deciduous forests, Sundarbans mangroves and Terai-Dooars savanna and grasslands are the most significant.

    “The entire project was guided by Praveen J, a notable taxonomist of India. Several individuals, including Shubhankar Patra, Apurba Chakraborty, and the late Kushal Mookherjee, provided invaluable support,” Manna concluded.
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