- Living with Birds chronicles Asad Rahmani’s life, from his early fascination with wildlife to his impactful career where he has championed grassland and wetland bird conservation.
- Rahmani’s work reflects his deep connection with grassroots communities, innovative research, and a lifelong passion for preserving India’s avian biodiversity.
- In the book, he gives credit and talks warmly of the people from villages and forests who helped him spot the birds and shared their knowledge.
- The views in this book review are that of the author.
Asad Rahmani’s autobiography, Living with Birds, is fast-paced and readable and gives interesting insights into their struggles for survival. Rahmani traces his interest in wildlife and ecology from his early years to the large collection of books, newspapers, and periodicals his father provided at home. He did his M.Sc. at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), worked 12 years as a scientist at the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), came back to AMU’s Department of Wildlife Sciences, and then, at the pinnacle of his career, he was the director of BNHS from 1997 till his retirement in 2015. His devotion to nature conservation, knowledge, and love for the myriad birds that reside in the Indian subcontinent is unquestionable.
He gives credit and talks warmly of the innumerable people from villages and forests who helped him spot the birds and shared their knowledge on creatures big and small. An international network of birders and organisations also gave wings to his endeavours. This review will, however, focus more on the birds he helped save, the great Indian bustard (GIB) and the florican – both the lesser florican and the Bengal florican – and the vultures.
BNHS was a pioneer NGO, with Salim Ali, India’s greatest ornithologist, and J.C. Daniel steering scientific research on birds and ecology. In the mid-1960s, Rahmani found Salim Ali’s classic The Book of Indian Birds in his school library, which helped him recognise and understand birds. It was his first encounter with Salim Ali and BNHS, and little did he realise then that both would change his life. Others who influenced his desire to become a wildlife biologist were M Krishnan, E.P. Gee, and Jim Corbett.
Looking for bustards
Rahmani’s main interest was grassland and wetland birds, focusing on lesser-known species and habitats. He elaborately documents the efforts to save bustards. In 1980, in the aftermath of an Arab sheikh’s attempt to hunt the Houbara bustard in the Thar Desert, where the GIB also lives, the Jaipur-based Tourism and Wildlife Society of India organised an international conference on the GIB. It projected the status of the GIB in India, including a few found in Solapur, Maharashtra, in 1979, where the forest department took over 100 hectares of barren, overgrazed land. Near Nannaj village, a large bird was seen, but no one could identify it. A school principal in Solapur, B. S. Kulkarni, identified it as maldhok, the local name for the GIB.
In April 1981, as a part of the Endangered Species Project of BNHS, he went to Nannaj looking for the GIB but had no luck. The following month, he went to Ajmer, and a forest officer put him in touch with Ranvir Singh Rathore, a local who knew a lot about bustards in that area. Along with Rathore and Goga, a local driver equally well informed about the GIB, he roamed the best habitat of the bustard and saw his first bustard, a juvenile. Then it was a bonanza – 15 GIBs were sighted in two hours.
He saw three at the Karera Bird Sanctuary, 45 km from Jhansi. They were large birds, the male two metres tall and the female a little smaller but still conspicuous. Returning to Nannaj, he sighted eight bustards, including two displaying males. He stayed there for five months and collected good preliminary data on the bird. During the four years of study, he saw displaying males and bustards mating. Details of nesting, chick survival, and behaviour were collected at Nannaj and published in research papers and popular articles.
As he crisscrossed the country looking for the elusive bird, a field station was proposed for Karera. The GIB’s distribution range in the eighties was from Punjab and Haryana in the north to Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in the south, Odisha in the east, and Rajasthan-Gujarat in the west. Breeding season varied from region to region. A birdwatchers group counted 40 bustards in the Rollapadu grasslands of Andhra. In 1984, Rahmani and BNHS helped filmmakers Ashish Chandola and Joanna van Gruisen make a film on the bustards in mating mode at Karera. Additional footage was from Rollapadu and Nannaj. Three decades old, the film is still the best on bustards.
Rahmani’s pleas to start a bustard conservation breeding programme went unheard, and, despite the spread of its population and innumerable sightings in the eighties, their numbers plummeted. It was sad to see the extinction of bustards in Sorsan in Rajasthan, Karera, and Ghatigaon in MP and a decrease in the Naliya grasslands of Kutch, Rollapadu, Nannaj in Solapur, and many areas in the Thar Desert. Thanks to a breeding programme started by the Rajasthan government and the Wildlife Institute of India in 2019, in July 2024, there were (while Rahmani was writing the book) 43 bustards in two breeding centres in Sam and Devra and in-situ conservation in some other areas, with a plan to reintroduce the birds in their old habitats.
Saving vultures
An innocuous comment, “Ab toh gidh bhi kum ho rahe hain (now there are fewer vultures),” by an animal keeper of AMU in 1996, alerted Rahmani and led to one of India’s biggest bird rescue projects. It was common to see hundreds of vultures and dogs feeding on cattle carcasses on roadsides, near water bodies, and railway lines. A visit and talk with Vibhu Prakash, who had been studying raptors, including vultures, in Bharatpur for 15 years, confirmed a big drop in the vulture population.
In May 1997, Rahmani joined BNHS as its director and asked Prakash to investigate whether the drop was limited to Bharatpur-Aligarh-Meerut or more widespread. The vulture decline was missed because the Gyps species, particularly the white-backed and long-billed, were so abundant in North India up to the mid-1990s that even if 50% disappeared, thousands of them could still be seen. Since there was also no systematic monitoring, the declining trend was missed.
The action began with BNHS, Worldwide Fund-India, Wildlife Institute of India, and others coming together, vulture alerts being sent out, and the Journal of BNHS publishing Prakash’s 15-year study on the status of the vultures in Bharatpur, especially the Gyps population. Prakash’s study showed a sharp decline in the vulture population over 10 years. It was followed up by a Vulture Conservation Strategy Planning meeting attended by 28 scientists and researchers from top organisations interested in birds and wildlife. BirdLife International and the Royal Society for Protection of Birds, UK, were also in the loop. Postmortem investigation at the Hisar Veterinary College showed that the vultures suffered from visceral gout.
Vultures were dying in Pakistan and Nepal, too. The Peregrine Fund initiated an Asian Vulture Crisis project. At the Word Conference on Birds of Prey in Budapest in 2003, the Peregrine Fund revealed that the painkiller diclofenac sodium was causing visceral gout in vultures that consumed livestock carcasses contaminated by the drug. Further research by Peregrine Fund, Washington State University, and the Ornithological Society of Pakistan and data published in the journal Nature in January 2004 was a turning point in saving the vultures. Thirteen authors from six institutions showed a 100 percent correlation between diclofenac and kidney failure in vultures. After that, half a dozen ministries and the Drug Controller in India banned the manufacture and use of veterinary diclofenac. Vultures received a second lease of life.
The floricans belong to the bustard family and live in grasslands. From 2013 to 2017, Rahmani ran two projects on the Bengal florican, funded by the Environment Ministry and the Preventing Extinction Programme of Birdlife International. The species is still surviving in protected areas of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. According to Rahmani, conservation work on this critically endangered species of our grasslands needs to be continued. Since he constantly highlighted neglected species, the Ministry of Environment and Forests nicknamed him ‘father of the neglected species.’
Fighting for flamingos
Rahmani writes nostalgically about the BNHS flamingo festivals, where 15,000 of these resplendent birds could be sighted at the Sewri mud flats of Mumbai till almost 2018 when construction work started on the Trans-Harbour bridge; the centenary and 125th-year celebrations of BNHS; the battle to save the Rani Bagh Botanical Garden of Mumbai and the role of those who passionately fought, and continue to fight, for plants, animals and the green lungs of Mumbai.
Rahmani writes with warmth about Ali Hussain, the skillful, traditional bird trapper of the Mirshikari community from a Bihar village, and others employed by BNHS to trap birds for ringing. It was a delicate operation ensuring the safety of birds. Hundreds of birds were caught between 1959 and 1973 as BNHS launched a major study on bird migration.
The author regrets not having the time to study the white-bellied Minivet, which lives in dry tropical thorn forests; the Kashmir Flycatcher, which breeds in a small area in the western Himalayas (Kashmir and parts of Pakistan) and winters in the southern Western Ghats and Sri Lanka and the Orange Bullfinch which too is confined to a small area of the western Himalayas. “India is a vast country with such a rich biodiversity of birds that even if we work on them for hundreds of years, we will not be able to study all species,” he says.
Since its independence, India has largely averted major species extinction, though there has been a decline in the population of 180 bird species. While the number of mountain quail may have declined naturally, the pink-headed duck, he says, was hunted to extinction with just about 80 museum specimens. There have been a few rediscoveries, like that of the Jerdon Courser in 1986 by BNHS scientist Bharat Bhushan. However, it has gone missing again for a decade. The forest owlet, too, though extinct for eight decades, was found in 1997 and now exists in several protected areas of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh.
Banner image: A 1986 image of Asad Rahmani watching birds in Madhya Pradesh. Image by Ravi Sankaran.
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