By Ritambhara
In 1930 Salim Ali spent several months at Kihim, a coastal village near Bombay, watching a colony of baya weavers build their hanging nests. Salim Ali’s baya weaver study appeared in 1931 in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. It explained how these small weaverbirds pair and breed, and it fixed the method he used for the next five decades.
Ali was born in Bombay in 1896. As a boy he shot an unfamiliar sparrow with an air gun, and W S Millard of the Bombay Natural History Society identified it as a yellow-throated sparrow. Millard showed him the society’s collections and taught him to preserve specimens. In 1928 Ali went to Berlin to train under the ornithologist Erwin Stresemann. He came home in 1930 without a job and settled with his wife Tehmina at her family’s house in Kihim.
Hours at the colony
Ali watched the colony for several hours a day over three or four months. Male bayas weave the nests from strips of grass and leaf, often hanging them over water from palms and thorny trees. A male builds to a half-finished stage, then flaps his wings and calls to passing females. A female inspects the nest and, if she accepts it, the male completes the entrance tube. He then starts another nest and courts another female. Ali titled his paper “a new interpretation of their domestic relations”, and he described this succession of mates in detail. Ornithologists call the pattern sequential polygamy, and accounts of the species still cite his 1931 paper.
Surveys across the princely states
The same field habit shaped his regional surveys. In 1931 he surveyed the birds of Hyderabad State for the Nizam, travelling on foot, on horseback and by bullock cart. Similar surveys followed in Cochin, Travancore, Gwalior, Indore, Bhopal and Mysore. He recorded calls, behaviour and habitat alongside the specimens he collected. His Book of Indian Birds, first published in 1941, turned this knowledge into a field guide for general readers. Its first ten editions sold more than 46,000 copies.
Birds on the farm
Ali treated birds as part of the farm economy. Bayas glean paddy and grain from harvested fields and sometimes damage ripening crops. Many other species eat the insects that attack those same crops. On his advice the Indian Council of Agricultural Research began studying birds as farm pests and allies. That work later became a national programme on agricultural ornithology, with research centres in several states.
The count today
The kind of watching he practised now runs at national scale through volunteer birdwatchers. The State of India’s Birds 2023 report, prepared by 13 government and non-government organisations, drew on records from about 30,000 birdwatchers and assessed 942 species. Of the 338 species with enough data for long-term trends, 60 per cent had declined. Vultures and grassland specialists showed some of the steepest falls.
Ali learnt the baya’s life by sitting with one colony through a breeding season. The 2023 figures ask readers to keep the same patient watch on the birds of their own fields and wetlands, and to treat a falling count as a report on the health of the land.
