GREAT BACKYARD BIRD COUNT
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Context
- Bird Count India supervised the India portion of the four-day event, which allowed participants to count birds for as short as 15 minutes from a specific spot.
- They reported their observations to eBird (www.ebird.org/india), the world's biggest citizen research platform for biodiversity.
What is the count all about?
- The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society originally started it in 1998 as an online citizen science or community science initiative.
- People from all around the world are invited to spend time in their favourite spots and participate in birdwatching while sharing data and photographs online.
- The occurrence is significant because it allows scientists to have a better understanding of the worldwide bird population ahead of one of their yearly migrations.
- This exercise provides a "snapshot" of the bird population and sheds insight on the ecology that supports it, as well as if the population is shrinking or the bird distribution pattern is shifting as a result of human involvement and its influence on habitat.
What are the findings?
- Three thousand birders submitted 41,694 checklists, resulting in 1,017 species, or 75% of the total number of species known to exist in the nation.
- The house crow, common mynah, and black drongos remained the most regularly seen birds in South India.
- The Andaman coucal, red-whiskered bulbul, white-throated kingfisher, and brown shrike are among the top five new species recorded in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
- Kerala, Karnataka, Gujarat, and Maharashtra were the states that contributed the most data.
- In Tamil Nadu's Salem district alone, nearly 8,000 checklists were posted.
- While India had previously placed third behind the United States and Canada in number of checklists posted, it now ranks second after the United States, which has uploaded about two lakh checklists.
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