Surfbirds News

The local language versions will be made available free to forest guards and others working at the front line of conservation in India. Birds of Northern India was published in 2003 in English, and has subsequently been published in Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati.

The soon-to-be published Birds of Southern India will be available in English, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. The guides are based on A&C Black's Birds of the Indian Subcontinent by Richard Grimmett, Carol Inskipp and Tim Inskipp (1998).

A&C Black, which includes the Christopher Helm, Pica Press and T&AD Poyser imprints, is the world's largest publisher of serious bird books, including field guides, handbooks, family guides, and 'where to watch' guides.

"The original Birds of the Indian Subcontinent was divided into regional guides for Nepal, Bhutan, Northern and Southern India, using the same plates of illustrations, and with new, regionally-specific text," explained A&C Black's commissioning editor, Nigel Redman. "At the instigation of the authors, we have supported a programme to translate them into regional languages."

A&C Black supports the publication of the local language guides on a non-profit basis. "As we all know, the only way anything is going to be conserved is by local people in the countries concerned," Nigel Redman added. "Local language guides are needed to disseminate knowledge, and helping to publish them is something positive we can do for conservation."

The translations and publication were organised by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS). "I am sure local language field guides will greatly help in generating interest in bird conservation, and also in developing a database on Indian avifauna," said Dr Asad Rahmani, Director of BNHS. "Our main aim is that these books should reach the front line staff of the forest department and the local grass-roots people. We are also encouraging our members to sponsor copies of these wonderful books for distribution to schools."

Tony Whitten, a senior biodiversity specialist with the World Bank, campaigned for the Bank to fund the first local language field guides in the early 1990s, and has subsequently seen the number of guides rise to almost 100, covering different kinds of wildlife in Asia, Africa and most recently Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. "Given the clear role they can have in supporting conservation initiatives, production of field guides should be recognised as an important aspect of in-country capacity building," he said.

"Without these guides, people would lack one of the basic tools for field work and conservation," stressed Richard Grimmett, co-author of the guides and head of BirdLife International's Asia Programme.