- The elusive and nocturnal Jerdon’s courser was spotted in Sri Lankamalleswara Wildlife Sanctuary, Andhra Pradesh in 1986 and again in 2004. Last month, a group of birders recorded its call.
- The search for the bird been confined to a very small geographic area in and around Lankamalleswara, primarily through camera-trap surveys and a brief passive acoustic monitoring project.
- Human resources are lacking for innovative approaches such as coordinated field surveys involving volunteer birdwatchers, and interviews with communities most familiar with the landscape.
- The views in the commentary are that of the author.
Only a handful of people alive have ever seen one. And they’re all ageing, with waning hope of ever seeing one again. If you’re lucky enough to get them to open up about their once-in-a-lifetime encounter with this celebrity, they’d likely narrate it to you like it happened yesterday. In many respects, the Jerdon’s courser is an oddity: nocturnal and secretive, bound to a very specific open scrub forest habitat, and with its closest relative, the three-banded courser that lives on a completely different continent. Scientist P. Jeganathan, who studied this bird for his Ph.D., describes how it takes off “vertically upwards, like a helicopter” when flushed or startled into flight.
Only a few birds have captivated the minds of ornithologists, birdwatchers, and hobbyists like the Jerdon’s courser. Written off to the history books and brought back to life after its rediscovery in Sri Lankamalleswara Wildlife Sanctuary in Andhra Pradesh in 1986, only to quietly slip back into the books after it was last seen in 2004. Two decades on, it refuses to fade from the public imagination, igniting news articles and debates around its existence to this day. You might be wondering how well the media buzz around this near-mythical enigma may have translated into field efforts to look for it.
Unfortunately, since its last confirmed report, efforts to relocate the courser have been confined to a very small geographic area in and around Lankamalleswara, primarily through camera-trap surveys and a brief passive acoustic monitoring project focused on listening for the courser, rather than ‘photographing’ it. None of them managed to gather any conclusive proof that the bird still exists in the cradle of its rediscovery.
Update: On August 24, a group of birders recorded the call of the Jerdon’s courser in Lankamalla Hills, Andhra Pradesh.
Listen: Wild Frequencies: Find them
It’s time to broaden the search
I’ve been bitten by the courser bug ever since I first read about it as a child. One of my deepest regrets is not having been born early enough to go looking for it while it was still at Lankamalleswara, but if anything, this has only made me determined to look for it in all the unknown, unsurveyed habitat that’s still out there. Although Lankamalleswara represents only a tiny fraction of the open scrub forest habitat ideal for the courser, efforts to look for it outside the Kadapa district have been few and in between.
After months of scouting for ideal open scrub forest patches in different parts of Andhra Pradesh on Google Earth, we set out on a reconnaissance mission to ground-truth some fantastic-looking spots for the courser in July 2025. After a short pilgrimage to its former home at Lankamalleswara, we drove north to a small town named Yerragondapalem in the Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh. I’d prepared and done all the homework, read every paper and field note there was, and marked out habitat patches that looked promising on satellite view.
By day, we’d drive down to scrub forest patches to survey habitats. Some of them looked fantastic; vast tracts of beautiful, open scrub forest waiting to be searched. We found several interesting indicator species that preferred these open environments: an abundance of rufous-fronted prinias, rock bush-quails, white-tailed ioras, chestnut-bellied and painted sandgrouses, and yellow-wattled lapwings. It is also home to a host of unique, non-bird wildlife: fan-throated lizards scurry along the open patches between bushes, while the heavily trafficked Indian star tortoise munches on some of the region’s unique shrubs and grasses: zizyphus, carissa, and randia.
By night, armed with torches, we’d spend a few hours searching each patch as best we could. This fascinating landscape transforms when the sun goes down: the bubbling daytime calls of bulbuls, prinias, and babblers transition into the mellow screeches of nightjars, thick-knees and owls. The nocturnal avifauna here is unmatched.
The open scrub forests are a melting pot for all four of south India’s nightjars that can be heard from a single spot: the “tk-tk-tk-trrrrrk” of Indian nightjars echoes through the open grassy patches, accompanied by the savanna nightjar’s unearthly, metallic “chreeik”. The jungle nightjar’s continuous “pikou-pikou-pikou” emanates from clearings in lightly wooded shrubbery, while the Jerdon’s nightjar’s “kuhuhu” can be heard from denser patches of scrub along streams that flow down from the mountains. Indian thick-knees, spotted owlets, and lapwings occasionally punctuate the nightjars’ brilliant orchestra. But one member of this orchestra seems to have gone silent.
The Jerdon’s courser was never known to be a very vocal bird, but has been known to call occasionally during dusk. I was left wondering, were we simply here in the wrong season, since they were known to call more in the winters? Were we just unlucky? Has the courser really disappeared from everywhere? The answers lie hidden in vast expanses of scrub jungle yet to be explored.
We opportunistically interviewed locals living close to patches of scrub forest by showing them pictures of the courser and playing recordings. A farmer tending to his fields along the boundary of some scrub forest exclaimed, “Yes, I’ve seen it! You see them a lot around waterbodies; they make a lot of noise in our fields,” describing what was most likely a lapwing. Others from the town asked why we travelled this far looking for a bird: “Don’t you have birds where you live?”
Aitanna, a former hunter turned forest guard from Reddipalle village on the fringes of Sri Lankamelleswara Wildlife Sanctuary, was instrumental to the courser’s rediscovery in 1986. A very important (and often ignored) component to finding the courser may also lie with communities who are most familiar with the region’s wildlife: hunters, pastoralists, and farmers.
I came away from our little expedition without finding a courser, but with a mix of triumph, hope, and equal alarm. Many habitat patches we surveyed were located partly or entirely outside protected area networks. Shockingly, even scrub forest patches inside protected areas have been cut down and replaced by monoculture Eucalyptus plantations. A study by Senapathi and colleagues revealed that a whopping 11-15% of open scrub forest had been cleared in the ten-year period between 1991 and 2000, and these numbers continue to grow. We’re in a race against time to find and protect the Jerdon’s courser before it succumbs to relentless land-use change.
Historically, we’ve been guilty of losing a lot of our wildlife by not understanding their needs, and the courser’s disappearance from Lankamalleswara may be a harrowing reminder of how inaction may sometimes be better than uninformed action. A now-abandoned canal sits in parts of its most ideal habitat, numerous water trenches have been dug through scrub forest almost everywhere in the region, and irrigated agricultural fields, orchards, and Eucalyptus plantations line what was once beautiful scrub jungle. I also can’t help but wonder, would the courser have lived on if it had never been found? I’d like to think its rediscovery did more good than bad for the species, but the fact that we may only have extended its demise by a decade or two doesn’t sound as encouraging.
Do we have enough resources?
We’re in dire need of a state-wide survey spanning multiple districts in Andhra Pradesh, primarily Kadapa, Kurnool, Prakasam, Anantapur, and Nellore where most of its suitable habitat remains. The courser was also known to inhabit parts of Telangana, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and maybe even southern parts of Chhattisgarh and Odisha. Although the forest department has partnered with NGOs and research institutes in the past to search for the Jerdon’s courser in and around Lankamalleswara, expanding operations to more regions in Andhra Pradesh would require mobilising funds and personnel on a scale that is currently impossible.
Using just camera-trap surveys, this would also be extremely improbable. A study by Jeganathan and team, using camera-traps to detect the presence of coursers, found that to be able to conclude that a Jerdon’s courser wasn’t in a particular patch roughly two hectares in size with eight camera-traps deployed each night would take more than 458 nights of camera-trapping. That’s more than an entire year of camera-trapping!
But no road is too long for the willing traveller. We’re seeing a massive growth in the number of forest department-organised bird surveys in the country that have been wildly successful through the participation of an ever-growing community of volunteer birdwatchers. Despite the risks, several well-organised nocturnal surveys with volunteer participant teams have also been carried out successfully, covering large parts of wildlife reserves and national parks on an impressive scale. Some of our biggest problems often have simple, elegant solutions.
The author is a wildlife biologist and is currently a research associate at NCF-India’s bird monitoring team.
Citation:
Jeganathan, P., Green, R. E., Bowden, C. G., Norris, K., Pain, D., & Rahmani, A. (2002). Use of tracking strips and automatic cameras for detecting Critically Endangered Jerdon’s coursers Rhinoptilus bitorquatus in scrub jungle in Andhra Pradesh, India. Oryx, 36(2), 182-188.
Senapathi, D., Vogiatzakis, I. N., Jeganathan, P., Gill, J. A., Green, R. E., Bowden, C. G., … & Norris, K. (2007). Use of remote sensing to measure change in the extent of habitat for the critically endangered Jerdon’s Courser Rhinoptilus bitorquatus in India. Ibis, 149(2), 328-337.
Jeganathan, P., & Wotton, S. R. (2004). The first recordings of calls of the Jerdon’s courser Rhinoptilus bitorquatus (Blyth), family Glareolidae. JOURNAL-BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 101(1), 26-28.
Knox, A. G. (2014). The first egg of Jerdon’s courser Rhinoptilus bitorquatus and a review of the early records of this species. Archives of natural history, 41(1), 75-93.
Arvind, C., Joshi, V., Charif, R., Jeganathan, P., & Robin, V. V. (2023). Species detection framework using automated recording units: a case study of the Critically Endangered Jerdon’s courser. Oryx, 57(1), 55-62.
Kasambe, R., Pimplapure, A., & Thosar, G. (2008). In search of Jerdon’s Courser Rhinoptilus bitorquatus in Vidarbha, Maharashtra. Newsletter for Birdwatchers, 48(6), 89-91.
Bhushan, B. (1986). Rediscovery of the Jerdon’s or double-banded courser Cursorius bitorquatus(Blyth). Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. Bombay, 83(1), 1-14.
Banner image: Painting of the Jerdon’s courser. Image by Subbuka via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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