By Anokha Venugopal, Communications, with inputs from Chandrasekar Das and Justin Raj, Additional Programme Coordinators, Biodiversity Conservation Team
This month, our Sigur field centre hosted a two day naturalist training for bird watching and monitoring. Participants, consisting of 22 Indigenous youth from local villages, learned about local wildlife, odonata (insects), butterflies, and birds in the area.
Participants visited Maravakandy Dam, many for the first time, and the Masinagudi Dump Yard, where they participated in bird watching. During field visits, participants took notes on the birds they observed. They also learned dragonfly and butterfly identification.
Shiva and Jaganathan from the Nature Conservation Foundation were resource persons for the programme. They presented on birds and their habitats, behaviors, and how to identify them by birdcall and appearance.
At the end of the training, we gave students a booklet by NCF on birds, as well as a Keystone booklet on snake identification. Students from the training shared that because of the workshop, they had a desire to learn more about local wildlife in the future. The following training in Sigur will focus on using the eBird and iNaturalist apps to log bird, flora and fauna sightings.
This training was funded by Synchronoss Technologies.
