Regd. Office: Revathi Bhavan, Edathala P O, ALUVA-683561. Reg.No.: ER 18/10 of 2010 Telephone No.: 0484-2837414 Email:cochinnaturalhistorysociety@gmail.com


WELCOME TO THE COCHIN NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY

The Cochin Natural History Society is a non-profit making, non-political charitable institution registered under the Travancore-Cochin Literary, Scientific and Charitable Societies Registration Act, 1955. This is a society of amateur naturalists who live in harmony with nature and seek to protect and to preserve the biodiversity and healthy natural environment. The mandate of the society is to undertake studies and documentation of biodiversity around us and to draw attention to the aesthetic, economic, scientific and conservation aspects.The society also intends to provide a platform to those who are concerned to come together and share, enlarge and correct our knowledge about Nature and its magnificence. Any person, who has a love, interest and commitment towards conservation of our biodiversity and natural history may become a member of the society*.







"You can know the names of a bird in all languages of the world,but when you are finished ,
You will know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.....
So let`s look at the bird and see what it`s doing --that`s what counts.
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."


-Nobel Laureate Richard P Feynman(1918-1988)


Thursday, October 30, 2014

Sri M Suresh, Beat Forest Officer ,Idukki WLS being awarded Forest Medal by Chief Minister on Independance Day for meritorious service


Sanctuary at Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit woos birders

Sanctuary at varsity woos birders

HIRAN UNNIKRISHNAN


Poorna bird sanctuary located on the campus of Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit in Kalady.– Photo: By Special Arrangement
Poorna bird sanctuary located on the campus of Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit in Kalady.– Photo: By Special Arrangement
Leaving the traditional birding sites, birders are now flocking the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit in Kalady, thanks to its rich avian wealth.
Located far away from the city, the varsity campus is serene, green and home to a bird sanctuary named Poorna. As per the estimates, the park houses about 30 species of birds and plant varieties.
Varsity officials pointed out that the sanctuary highlighted the role of the campus as a shelter for local and migrating birds and in spreading awareness about the importance of birds in the environment. Some of the bird varieties often spotted here includes Night Heron, Purple heron, Back Bittern and Brown Hawk Owl. The location often serves as a stopover for many migratory birds as well.
“The significance of the park, established in December last year, is that it promises to radiate onto the surrounding urban settlement and spread the bird population to the countryside,” said M.C. Dileep Kumar, Vice Chancellor of the varsity. According to him, the system does not concern solely birds, but also addresses the elimination or reduction of threats linked to the survival of species and plants.
“The students and staff together play a key role in maintaining the system, which has been declared as a plastic-free zone,” the VC explained, adding that the varsity would make every step to maintain its habitat intact even while taking up the various development projects. Aiming to spread awareness, the varsity officials also plans to organise bird identification workshop for students in the coming months. “Students of different schools would be invited to participate in the contest, identify birds and check with experts about their guesses. This is needed for systematic and collective efforts to save biodiversity of Poorna,” said an official.
Dr.K.G. Dileep, Head of the Sociology department at the varsity and an avid birder, said sensitising people on campus to wildlife conservation is very important. “Speeding vehicles, fencing, construction and even cutting down a small tree may disturb the habitat. Therefore, keeping the people on campus aware about what may disturb the wild habitats is essential,” he pointed out.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Bird Count India-Bird Count happenings, October 2014


Dear All,

CNHS is a partner in Bird Count India Consortium and here is the update on the happenings:-


Bird Count India
Bird Count happenings, October 2014

Posted: 27 Oct 2014 11:12 AM PDT

‘Bird Count happenings‘ will be an irregular series of updates describing various snippets of news related to bird listing and monitoring in India. Our focus will be on activity from India in eBird, a public repository of bird information, but is not restricted to this. Although we view eBird as a valuable tool for accumulating information in Indian birds, it is not the only way in which Indian birdlife is being documented.

The Bird Count India partnership

This partnership exists to encourage and support bird listing and monitoring in India. Since its inception in early 2014, a large number of organizations and online groups have joined the partnership, supporting its goals in various ways. We welcome any group into the partnership in the spirit of working together to better understand our precious bird life.

One way in which the partnership encourages birders to document and share their bird lists is to run a monthly series of eBirding Challenges. Each challenge focusses on the effort spent in birding rather than number of species seen or the rarity of species. All birders who reach the monthly target are recognized on the website and one among these is selected at random to receive a small bird-related gift. The challenges have been run since April 2014, and you can see the monthly list of birders who met the target at this link.

Ongoing projects and new events

The Asian Waterbird Census, our oldest bird monitoring programme, picked up in 2014 with better participation and more site coverage than in recent years. We are told that a summary of the results from 2014 will be out soon.

Other events from early 2014 included the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC; 14-17 Feb), which saw a large jump in contributions thanks to the simultaneous occurrence of the Kerala Common Bird Monitoring Programme (CBMP), the Big Bird Day and the Bengaluru Bird Count. This resulted in India topping all countries in number of species reported, and coming third behind Canada and the USA in terms of the number lists contributed to the GBBC.

A follow-up event to the Kerala CBMP occurred on 12-15 Sept. This event, the Onam Bird Count, garnered even more participation than in February, and results should be out very soon. Other projects in Kerala include the Heronry Count (preliminary summary here) and the pelagic bird surveys — which are also taking off in other States, including Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Goa. Lists from pelagic surveys are being uploaded to 11×11 km ‘hotspot’ cells in eBird.

During the months of June-August, the Goa Bird Conservation Network ran the Monsoon Sunday Bird Challenge, where birders were encouraged to upload their weekend lists to eBird. The eBird platform is also being used to document and archive the findings from formal bird surveys, for example the 2014 Melagiri Bird Survey by the Kenneth Anderson Nature Society.

A significant advance in Indian birding has been the initiation of the Mysore City Bird Atlas. In this, the city of Mysore has been divided into grids, and systematically surveyed in February and in June 2014. This atlas endeavour builds on a long tradition of serious bird documentation by the Mysore Nature group, as shown by the monthly Mysore Birding Diary. Discussions about possible bird atlassing in other parts of the country are going on.

Upcoming events

Winter is almost upon us, and there is a packed schedule of events ahead. The India Bird Races will continue as usual in different parts of the country, spread over the winter months. The Asian Waterbird Census will happen in the month of January. And the Big Bird Day and Great Backyard Bird Count are scheduled for February. Please do check birdcount.in for announcements of these and other upcoming birding events.

eBird in India

Until late 2013, the majority of eBirding activity from India was by visiting birders from abroad. Since that time, more and more Indian birders have been using eBird to document their birding outings, and as a consequence, information on the occurrence and abundance of Indian birds is rapidly building up. On 1st January 2014, the number of records of birds from India stood at about 1,20,000. This number crossed half a million in early September, and now (end October) stands at just over 6,00,000 records. The number of India eBird users (ie, those who have uploaded at least one list from India) is 2,100, up from 540 on 1 Jan 2014. Since March, every month roughly 150-300 birders have been uploading one list or more from India.

Past records

Past information on birds in India is scarce, and mostly tucked away in notebooks and offline and online reports (but see the digitized records in the BirdSpot, South Asia Birds and India Biodiversity Portal databases). Thanks in part to the bulk upload feature in eBird, birders are uploading their older observations to the system. Since January 2014, a large number of lists (over 5,500 lists, totalling > 1,30,000 records) from the past (ie, from 2013 and earlier) have been uploaded. Many of these lists (over 1,000 lists, >30,000 records) are from Mike Prince, whose lists from India go as far back as 1995 and cover 22 States/UTs. Other major contributors of past lists include the Kerala Birder group, who have uploaded nearly 1,000 past lists (>23,000 records), including those from previous Kerala Forest Bird Surveys, as well as all Asian Waterbird Count data from Kerala. Shivaprakash Adavanne, Praveen J, and Fionna Prins have each uploaded over 200 of their previous lists, and a number of other birders have contributed smaller numbers of lists from the past.

Such historical information on Indian birds is extremely valuable; please do consider adding to the database by digging up your old lists and records and uploading them!

Gaps

Despite all the recent activity on eBird from India, we have a long way to go, both in absolute terms and in achieving adequate coverage across different parts of the country. For example, the number of lists for all of India is about equal to the number of lists from a single reasonably well-birded county like Miami-Dade county in the USA. Within India, coverage across different Districts is highly uneven. Until there is relatively high coverage across India, it will be difficult to generate accurate species maps, and compare seasonality or changes over years. This is our major challenge.

eBird assistance and features

Uploading lists to eBird can be done through the regular web interface, through smartphone apps, and through the bulk upload feature. We have worked with eBird to display English names that are familiar to Indian birders, but many of us still face some confusion about names, especially because of the large number of recent splits in species. These new names (and also a comprehensive list of Indian bird names) are described here. Several additional features of eBird will be highlighted in the coming months on the Bird Count India website.

Join the effort

We invite individual birders and birding/nature groups from anywhere in India to join the effort to collectively document India’s birds. There are various ways in which you can do so: as individual birders, we can take care to note all the birds we see on our birding trips and upload these lists to a site like eBird. As groups, we can design surveys or monitoring programmes in the areas we cover, to generate and aggregate information on bird distribution and abundance. Entire projects can be run through eBird, like many of those described above, and also MigrantWatch, which gives the option of reporting of migrant sightings to eBird or directly to their database.

If you are interested in listing, surveying or monitoring birds, please do contact us if you would like any advice or other help.

To get updates from Bird Count India automatically into your email inbox, you can sign up here. If you are on Facebook and would like to join our discussion of bird listing and monitoring in India, do join our Facebook group. We also have a Google group, which we hope to re-energize soon!




Saturday, October 25, 2014

Members Meeting

Annual General Body  of the Society is scheduled at 10.30 am on 02nd November 2014 at the Mangalavanam Sanctuary .

We request all  members are to participate.

Secretary

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Kerala Bird Race 2014- Announcement


The eigth Kerala Bird Race will be held on  the Sunday, 16th November 2014 in Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Kozhikode. Kerala Birder along with The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC) and Yuhina Eco-Media  is organizing the HSBC Bird Race in Kerala, a signature event of the Bank, on 16th November 2014. Kerala Bird Race is a dawn to dusk event where teams of bird-watchers will spend the entire day birding in and  around  each city. There are no pre-determined routes - you can watch birds in multiple locations all within 100 km radius of each of the site to see as many birds as you can. The participants will try to record the birds from each site; learn about the finer points of bird-watching from the experts & the experienced, and then later in the evening, all teams will meet at a suitable venue over dinner and an interactive tête-à-tête. Each Team gets an opportunity to interact with the others and recount their day's experiences. All in all, it is a great end to a day well spent with and for the feather-folk, and for nature.

Like last time, HSBC Bird Race shall be NON-COMPETITIVE. There are no prizes for winners and the idea is visit multiple sites and make lists for the day. There are no strict rules and it is only about the fun element in this exercise, which will hopefully help stimulate enormous interest in bird-watching as a highly popular hobby. The event will give us a good idea of the nature of this region's birdlife and shall help build up support for environment and nature conservation.
Last year, we had more than 350 bird-watchers on the field on a single day, many of them fresh into the hobby. Birdwatchers from other states are encouraged to take it as a chance to do some great birding in Kerala. We sometimes have participants from Kanyakumari district joining us at Thiruvananthapuram.

This year HSBC Bird Race shall have eBird in the backend. We encourage teams to make site-specific complete lists and upload it in eBird. There is no time restrictions on each list; however you are encouraged to separate the lists for each site so that you get 3-4 lists at the end of the day.

The Grand Plan

Play the race hard - try to visit as many good birding sites as you can from dawn to dusk before assembling to your chosen site for the evening dinner. Play the race to enjoy and share – each of you can treat it as an opportunity to make one another person interested in birds and share the joy.

Try to share your lists through eBird and photographs through any medium like flickr, picassa or facebook - so that others can see what you saw.

Birdwatchers across Kerala (& outside) shall participate in this event - choose a convenient city where you can assemble for the evening of Nov 16th and contact the right coordinator.

Sites could be outside the district or even state.

You are free to make your own team. Each team can be 3 or 4 members; but there should be one good birdwatcher with every team who can identify most of the species around the city. You should name your team with a bird's name - we had several interesting names last time like "Falcons", "Cuckoos", "Flycatchers" etc. Also, make sure you drop in your phone numbers with the coordinators.

If you are a beginner bird-watcher and is not able to find a team, you still can contact the coordinators and they will help you out for finding you a team with a good bird-watcher in it.

The Thiruvananthapuram leg shall be lead by WWF-Kerala while Cochin Natural History Society (CNHS) will lead the Kochi site. Malabar Natural History Society (MNHS) shall be coordinating the race in Kozhikode.

Whom to Contact

Whom to Contact (Site Coordinators) for Team Registration:

Thiruvananthapuram:
A K Sivakumar (WWF-India)
Phone: 94473 86978
Email wwfklso@gmail.com

Kochi:
Vishnupriyan Kartha (CNHS)
Phone: 94464 37410
Email: cochinnaturalhistorysociety@gmail.com 

Kozhikode:
Sathyan Meppayur (MNHS)
Phone: 94472 04182
Email: satyanmpr@gmail.com


Whom to Contact (General)

P.O.Nameer
Phone: +91 94465 73106
Email: nameerpo@gmail.com

Praveen J
Phone: +91 94480 39906
Email: paintedstork@gmail.com

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Parambikulam Tiger Reserve- Bird Survey-Reg

Dear All,

There is a bird census coming in Parambikulam Tiger Reserve on 28th November to 01st December 2014..The announcement has appeared in Kerala Birder. If you are interested please contact directly Praveen.J by showing your previous birding survey experience.

paintedstork@gmail.com

Warm Regards,
CNHS