A Birdman InHis Early Flight

Tara Gandhi relates how she was turned away at the age of 19 when she first applied to do an MSc in field ornithology under the legendary birdman. "We don’t take girls for field research," Salim Ali told her with a smile. "You see, we have to send them off to forests and so on...it is not safe for them." Fourteen years later, attitudes towards women entering what was regarded as a male preserve must have changed, for she was admitted into the MSc programme at the bnhs, with Salim Ali as her guide. He was 87. He died two years later, but by then had supervised her two-year field study and thesis. "Meticulous to the last, he had left nothing unfinished.... This personal account could very well have been written by almost any of Salim Ali’s students," Gandhi writes in the Preface. "For me, working with him, and now compiling this anthology to honour his work and memory, have been journeys of discovery and learning.... It is my hope that his work, set out within this anthology, will keep alive the vibrant spirit of a great scientist, an engaging writer, and fascinating personality."

The collection is perhaps inevitably a bit of a ragbag and the editor has chosen to resist a purely chronological ordering in favour of organising them into thematic sections: bird migration, breeding and nesting, bird ecology and so on. It works well for the most part, but I found myself wanting every now and then to follow Salim Ali’s evolution as a birdman and/or as a writer, and this is perhaps much more easily done if one can read the essays chronologically. It came as a big surprise to me that some of the meatiest, most substantial essays in the anthology—some of the regional bird surveys (Hyderabad, Travancore and Cochin, Gujarat, Bombay and Salsette, etc) as well as three essays in the sections on Bird Ecology and Breeding and Nesting—are also some of his earliest writings, dating back to the 1930s and ’40s. This was about the time when he was working on his first book, the one that made him famous: The Book of Indian Birds, which appeared in 1941 (and cost Rs 14). It must have been an extraordinarily prolific time in Salim Ali’s life.

You don’t have to be a birder to enjoy this anthology. If you are interested in history or wildlife, you will find in these pages a thoroughly enjoyable account (written in 1927) of the Mughal emperors as naturalists and sportsmen, including a sidelight on a Mughal miniature painting of the dodo, executed some time between 1624 and 1627. If your interests lean towards descriptive geography, there are some little gems tucked away in the bird surveys, particularly the deft description of Travancore and Cochin in the mid-1930s. Salim Ali’s more personal writing, such as the memorials and obituaries for some of the founders and builders of the bnhs, are touching and generous.

On the other hand, if you are a birder, you’ll find yourself transported by delight. Some of the birding classics included here are: The Nesting Habits of the Baya (1931), in which he proposed a new interpretation of their "domestic relations"; Mainly in Quest of Finn’s Baya (1935), an account of an expedition to search for this bird that had been considered extinct; Notes on the Baya Weaver Bird (1956), in which he cuts holes in their nests to see how they react—an uncharacteristic intervention for Salim Ali; and this is not half of it. Here be riches beyond compare, a real feast.