Bangalore Bird Race 2008 on 20th Jan

Last year (2007), for the first time we had the Bangalore Bird Race on 11th February. Our team, EAGLES with Dr. Gururaja (as Captain), Dr. Raghurama, Karthick and myself participated and logged about 88 species of birds in 12 hours. The highest that was logged that day was a whopping 125 species! There were around 40 teams and nearly 130 participants in all. This was also probably the first time all birders came under one roof! That was indeed a great feat by the organisers. Read the detailed report of last year's Bird Race by Raghu here.

This year too, the Bangalore Bird Race 2008 is scheduled for 20th January. This year again, our team has retained the same name (EAGLES) and Captain :) But we have some changes. With Raghu away, we have Harish Bhat with us. With less than a day away for the bird race, two of our team members are out of town and we are only hoping to assemble at least on Sunday morning! Today, Gururaja and myself had some initial discussions on probable places for setting out. Since I will be driving and the rest have to look out for birds, I need to take care of the destinations, routes and the corresponding travel times to plan them properly. That implies one needs to be aware of all the places and routes.

One of my friend and a keen birder, Prashanth MB, had prepared a detailed note of all the major bird habitats and even prepared a sort of map on MS Excel with relative locations. This was shared to all participants of the Bird Race last year as an aid to destinations and routes of birding places in and around Bangalore. As a trained map-maker I felt ashamed of not being able to help them make a better map. I did communicate this to one of the organisers, Dr. S Subramanya (Subbu) after the Bird Race last year. Sometime last month, Subbu called me up and reminded me that I had volunteered for something (prepare a better map...). With the details for the habitats obtained from Prashanth, I prepared a map using a combination of Quantum GIS and Google Earth, which is later hosted on to Google Maps here. At the time of posting this, the map has, believe it or not, 2,304 views in a span of only 6 days!

I only hope now that we will be able to sight a decent number of species on Sunday! Of course, expect another post after the Bird Race!