After successfully expanding the scope of the annual Ahmedabad BirdRace event beyond the Ahmedabad district last year, the Bird Conservation Society of Gujarat (BCSG) has decided to broaden the scope of the day-long birdwatching event this year to cover almost the entire state.
The BCSG has created a list of 38 birding areas from across the state for this year’s Ahmedabad BirdRace, which will be held on January 8 with financial support from the India Bird Races. This year, the BCSG has added 14 new areas, taking the total to 38 sites spread across all regions of the state for the dawn-to-dusk bird watching event.
The new areas include Kalo Dungar and Dholavira on Khadir island in Kutch district; Nanda Bet, Vachhraj Bet etc in the Little Rann of Kutch in Surendranagar, Jasadhar-Tulsishyam-Khambha area in Gir East wildlife division in Gir Somnath and Amreli districts in Saurashtra region, Nada Bet on the Indo-Pakistan border in Banaskantha and Khokhala-Taranagar-Subapura in Patanin.
Uday Vora, honorary secretary of the BCSG said that “We have tried to cover all sorts of habitats in the Gujarat, ranging from wetlands to deserts, evergreen forests to dry and deciduous forests and shrublands woodlands to map the avian diversity in the state on a given day, adding the focus of the event is to note bird diversity and not population abundance of bird species.”
This will be the 14th Ahmedabad BirdRace. Till a couple of years ago, birdwatchers participating in Ahmedabad BirdRace used to do birdwatching only within 100 kilometre radius of Ahmedabad city.
“But last year, BCSG proposed that they want to expand the scope of the event beyond Ahmedabad and make it a pan-Gujarat exercise.
Monga, the India coordinator for the India BirdRaces said that, “We said we won’t mind if it’s done within the limited funds we have for the event. Eventually, they made it a pan-Gujarat event and birders sighted birds of more than 350 species which was more than 50 percent of the total number of bird species recorded in Gujarat.”
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