Now an app for enthusiasts to track birds

The Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) has come up with a mobile application ‘Bird Band Sighting’ that will enable birdwatching enthusiasts to report tagged birds in their vicinity.

"The fast-evolving technologies are proving to be a boon for wildlife as well by enhancing the wildlife science to track the movement of wildlife even in difficult terrains," a BNHS spokesperson said.

The ‘Bird Band Sighting’ mobile application developed by BNHS is an example of the ease and increased accessibility towards tracking birds with colour bands and tags.

This will also provide a better scope to involve enthusiastic birdwatchers, volunteers, academicians and scientists to report and channelize their potential in tracking migratory birds and their movements. This application will also help the contributor with maintaining their own tag sighting list.

The nine-decade long BNHS study on bird migration by using different bird banding techniques has revealed enormous information on the movement pattern of migratory birds, age, sex, morphometric details along with their trend. This study has also yielded over 3000 ringed bird recoveries spanning 29 countries over five continents.

"The data generated through these studies have helped in establishing a linkage between spatially distant areas through ringing recoveries and marking the boundaries of the Asian flyways," the spokesperson said.

In addition to metal rings, BNHS has adopted the more recent methods of tagging birds with colour bands, colour-flags and neck-collars for tracking the routes of the birds and important habitats utilized by them.