Over the years and through our interactions with birders and educators, we’ve observed an increasing number of children who have begun birdwatching and are eager to learn. There is also a significant diversity of eco clubs, schools and other groups teaching about nature and birds, who want to move beyond just ‘identification’. We intend to nudge them toward the right opportunities, tools and mentorship to help them delve deeper into the world of birds.
To achieve this, we have created a pan-India Young Birders’ Network as a hub for children to interact with one another, be guided by educators and naturalists, and connect with other birders too. It will be a platform to access resources, latest bird-related events, interact with experts, share experiences with their peers and more. We will create more freely accessible content and innovative learning tools such as games, workshops, webinars and activities to learn about birds in new and exciting ways.
As the first step in this direction, we conducted a 5 week workshop for 11-16 year olds in May-June of 2021 which explored a variety of themes related to birds and nature. We’ve done 4 more iterations of this workshop since then which have had more than 160 participants. You can read about the latest workshop here. We have kept in touch with the workshop participants online. Our long-term engagement with workshop participants includes interacting with them on Google Classroom. In 2021, we also started monthly online sessions to enable them to interact with experts as well as introduce them to new and interesting information about birds and birdwatching. These sessions provide a holistic view of birdwatching rather than just focusing on identification. Find out more about our online experiments with the Young Birders’ Network by reading our blog. To bring the learnings from the Young Birders’ Workshop to the field, we have conducted 15 bird walks in Bengaluru and 14 walks in other parts of the country in collaboration with educators and organisations. The cities include Agartala, Mysore, Panaji, Kolkata, Salem, Srinagar, Tirupati, Dehradun and New Delhi. You can read about these bird walks here.
We plan to scale up our efforts by building more collaborations with educators from all over India, so they can adapt our resources in their own language, to suit their local context and in this way, we will reach a wider audience and truly nurture the Young Birders’ Network. If you wish to collaborate with us for a bird walk, check out this blog. We hope that the Young Birders’ Network will emerge as the go-to platform for young birders across the country to enrich and grow their birdwatching journeys.
Activities of The Young Birders’ Network are supported by the Oriental Bird Club, Rainmatter Foundation and Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.
