‘Living With Birds’ by Asad Rahmani: Always a bird lover

At a time when memoirs around experiences with tigers, leopards and rhinos abound, here is a rare book about birds. India, after all, is not just home to over 500 species of mammals, with large vertebrates looming large in public consciousness. This book is also a timely reminder of the great tradition of modern ornithology, long before bird-watching got fresh wind due to the easy access to cellphone photography and electronic bird guides.

The memoir is in line with Dr Salim Ali’s autobiography ‘The Fall of a Sparrow’ (1985), with which it shares self-deprecating humour, and with ‘Reminiscences of Indian Wildlife’ (2000) by RS Dharmakumarsinhji, whose patient, long-term natural history observations find an echo here. Unlike many who write about vanishing species, Asad Rahmani is not in mission mode and frankly discusses both his failures and successes as a conservationist.

The world he grew up in is striking: UP of the 1950s and 1960s, with an abundance of birds, nilgai and other small animals on the outskirts of the various towns where his father served as a judge. It was also a world of libraries, such as the Raza Library in Rampur and Acharya Narendra Dev Library in Lucknow and bookstores like the legendary Ram Advani, also in Lucknow. The printed word took a young Asad from a love for the animals and birds he reared to a wider knowledge of wild things and nature.

At Aligarh Muslim University, his stumbling upon the back issues of the ‘Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society’ was a godsend. By 1980, armed with an MSc degree in zoology and having been active as founder of a natural history society in the varsity, he went off to be interviewed for a job in Bombay at the very institution he had long admired. Here, Rahmani got the chance to work with the greats of the past, such as Dr Salim Ali and the legendary JC Daniel, the anchor of the Society.

Soon after came the bird that changed his life: the Great Indian Bustard. Rahmani is unduly modest, but for much of his career, he has tried and tried hard to change the fate that awaits India’s largest bird. The surveys he conducted along with foresters (he is always careful to give due credit to them) led to documenting of stable populations in the Thar Desert, Maharashtra, MP and Karnataka.

Rahmani soon became part of a new wave of scholars studying grassland birds, and not large forest vertebrates. But their vision of these landscapes as biologically rich and productive was not widely shared and Rollapadu in Karnataka, which had a fine population, soon saw a change in its ecology with a canal coming up nearby. More recently, high-tension wires have made the survival of the Great Indian Bustard impossible. There is hope in a captive breeding programme, but habitats are vanishing.

He returned to AMU, where he would later head the Centre for Wildlife Studies. From 1996 on, he helmed BNHS for two decades. His story of the large-scale die out of Gyps vultures due to eggs not hatching on account of the animal drug diclofenac accumulating in bird tissue reads like a thriller. The Society played a key role in addressing the crisis.

Rahmani shows how cooperation with state forest departments is as vital as the dialogue at the community level. Yet, his own evidence shows how often short-term development takes priority over long-term ecological integrity. All told, his love of our feathered friends and the world we share comes through in this warm-hearted memoir.

— The writer teaches environmental studies and history at Ashoka University