Dipu Karuthedathu

The Wood Snipe Gallinago nemoricola (Family Scolopacidae) is a Vulnerable species that has experienced a steep population decline over the past century (BirdLife International 2023). Once relatively uncommon in the 19th and early 20th centuries, records of this species have dwindled drastically, with only three photo-documented sightings in India o...

We document a Spelaeornis species from the slopes of Mugaphi Peak in eastern Arunachal, India, with photographs and sonograms. We compared and analysed the birds in our photographs with museum specimens of the Grey-bellied Wren-Babbler S. reptatus and the Naga Wren-Babbler S. chocolatinus and found that most of the morphological features of the pho...

Citizen-science driven exercises (e.g., bird surveys) and online platforms (e.g., eBird) provide voluminous data on bird occurrence but the data quality is often compromised. Bird atlases are based on standardized surveys and describe the distribution of bird species over a predefined region and have less biases, and thus are better suited for use...

The article discusses the Kerala Bird Atlas (KBA), Asia's largest bird atlas, which systematically surveyed bird species distribution across the state of Kerala, India. The KBA dataset provides valuable information on bird occurrence, species richness, and conservation priorities, making it a valuable resource for ecological research and science-ba...

This note describes seven frigatebird sightings from the Indian coast during the 2014 south-west monsoon season,

Lord Derby’s Parakeet or Derbyan Parakeet Psittacula derbiana is primarily a Tibetan species that occurs in a narrow strip of north-eastern Arunachal Pradesh in the upper Lohit Valley, possibly as a summer visitor from April to September (Ali & Ripley 1987). Though Grimmett et al. (1998), and Kazmierczak (2000) considered it a breeding visitor/resi...

Himalayan Vulture Gyps himalayensis is considered a resident of the mountains of Central Asia, the Himalayas from northern Pakistan till Bhutan, southern and eastern Tibet, and China. Post breeding, the adults remain for most of the year in the breeding grounds while juveniles wander, in winter, into the plains of South-, and Southeast- Asia (Naoro...

Cory's Shearwater Calonectris borealis is a large seabird that breeds on islands and cliffs in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as in the Atlantic Ocean in the Canary Islands (Spain), and Berlengas Islands and the Azores (Portugal). After breeding, birds from the Atlantic colonies predominantly winter off the coast of South America and southern Afric...

The identification of Catharacta skuas in the northern hemisphere has always been a hot topic (Devillers 1977) and our observations reported below from the Arabian Sea off the south-west coast of India are in this category. During a pelagic birdwatching trip off the coast of Kerala on 1 October 2012, two large skuas were observed about 20 km west o...

Studies on marine birds of India are scarce and available information is based mainly on wind-blown bird data and a few isolated off-shore trips. An attempt was made in recent years to address this lacuna by conducting off-shore trips from the coasts of Karnataka and Kerala to monitor marine birds. We report the significant results from these studi...