Feather report: Wknd interviews award-winning birder Aasheesh Pittie
He’s written books, built an archive, helped launch a journal. He has now won the HH Bloomer prize, for amateur naturalists who change our view of the world.
“In order to see birds, it is necessary to become a part of the silence,” the Irish writer Robert Lynd once said.
That’s certainly how Aasheesh Pittie sees it. “For me, birdwatching is all about being in the moment, sitting still and allowing nature to come to me,” says the 64-year-old from Hyderabad.
Pittie — an author, archivist, and one of the country’s best-known birders — recently won the prestigious HH Bloomer award, presented by the Linnean Society of London, for his contributions as an amateur naturalist.
In his case, the award celebrates a lifetime dedicated to expanding our knowledge of birds and the history of South Asian ornithology. Among other things, Pittie, a businessman by day, has served as founding-editor of the ornithological journal Indian Birds; built a massive archive of mentions of birds in literature across centuries (there’s more on that in a bit); and written four books, including a 2002 monograph titled The Written Bird, and The Living Air (2023), a collection of essays on the quiet pleasures of birds and birdwatching.
“I love having the opportunity to get away from our structured, human-centric city life and just immerse myself in nature,” he says. “It’s all about trying to cross that barrier between the human and the non-human.”
His journey as a birder began when he was 15. Naval captain (Retd) Nadir S Tyabji, founding chairman of the Andhra Pradesh chapter of the NGO World Wildlife Fund, gave a talk about birds and birdwatching at Pittie’s school, in 1976. The teenager, always happier musing by himself, was intrigued by the promise of a hobby that leaned into his love of solitude.
Not long after, he bought a copy of the legendary Salim Ali’s Book of Indian Birds, a landmark text. Armed with this field guide, and a pair of his father’s “very heavy” binoculars, he began to spend hours in the Banjara Hills near his home.
“I remember sitting on a rock and watching a bee-eater land nearby. I was able to identify it using Ali’s book, and that was such a thrill,” he says. “It started raining, but it didn’t matter. The bird was so beautiful.”
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By the time he was 19, Pittie was a founder member of the Birdwatcher’s Society of Andhra Pradesh (now Deccan Birders). In the 45 years since, he has sought out and observed hundreds of species, jotting down vivid descriptions in a series of notebooks.
He has made precious memories along the way. There was the night he saw the extremely rare Jerdon’s Courser, a bird that was first described by the surgeon and naturalist Thomas C Jerdon in 1848, and was not sighted again until 1986. “Seeing it was exceptionally special, because it was like searching for a needle in a haystack,” says Pittie, who encountered it soon after its rediscovery, in the hills of Andhra Pradesh.
Part of the thrill of this hobby comes from rare sightings, he adds, but its true allure lies in the way it can turn the everyday into something magical. He remembers a quiet afternoon spent watching an osprey catch fish; another time, it was a Shaheen falcon swooping and diving in search of prey. “I’m also happy to just go to my backyard and watch the same birds every day,” he says.
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That love of nature for its own sake is partly what the HH Bloomer award recognises.
It’s an award for amateur naturalists; people led by passion alone. In acknowledging such passion, it seeks to underline how much it matters.
When Pittie started out, for instance, information about birds was scant and hard to access. There were only a handful of publications and journals to turn to in India: resources such as Ali’s masterful work, the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, and Newsletter for Birdwatchers.
Pittie has spent decades working to bridge that gap, not an easy thing to do, in one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet.
In 2004, he founded Indian Birds, a journal of South Asian ornithology that he edited for 19 years (before handing the reins to current editor Praveen Jayadevan two years ago). “The idea was to bring science to nature-lovers in a language they could understand. A lot of our contributors became very skilled at doing this, which is wonderful,” he says.
Pittie also created the Bibliography of South Asian Ornithology, a vast searchable online database that tracks every time a specific bird is mentioned in books and academic literature. This started as a personal project but has evolved into a key resource for ornithologists and birdwatchers around the world. There are currently more than 38,000 entries spanning three centuries of ornithological literature.
“Just to give an example, if a checklist of the Western Ghats was published in a journal, and it listed 350 or so species, then I’ve actually sat and keyed in the scientific name of every single species as a keyword,” he says. “It became an obsession. I was like a bloodhound, poring through the literature and going further and further back in time as I chased references to birds.”
The online archive also yielded a book, Birds in Books: Three Hundred Years of South Asian Ornithology – A Bibliography (2010; available free online).
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In his most recent work, Living Air, Pittie attempts to encourage “slow birding”. Be patient, be mindful, he suggests. Pause the chase for posts and Likes; leave some of that expensive camera gear behind. It isn’t about the perfect picture… not at all.
He avoids pictures altogether. One can either photograph the bird or study it, but not both, he says. Instead, he trusts in his mind to remember the experiences and the details, and notes them down between sightings or at the end of each day.
Of course, others may choose to do things a different way, Pittie adds. What matters is that many more people are engaging in the important task of watching and documenting our avian neighbours. On platforms such as eBird (the global crowdsourced online Cornell University project), “Indians upload over a million checklists a year now, and that is unbelievable.”
This “army” of amateur ornithologists and naturalists is particularly important, he adds, because the data they gather serves as an essential resource for conservationists studying falling populations and changing habitats, and for researchers studying changing behaviours, migration patterns and other shifts.
“In my lifetime, I have noticed a reduction in the population of several bird species around Hyderabad. Why is this happening? How does this affect us? These are questions that everybody should be asking,” Pittie says.
Amateur naturalists have always played a key role in the natural sciences, because there simply aren’t enough professionals to do it all, he adds. That’s why he is particularly proud of receiving the Bloomer award.
“This award is a reminder of all such contributions to the study of the world’s natural history. So I feel very happy that it exists.”
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