Enter this one-of-a-kind feather library in Bengaluru

It began with a number of feathers of an Indian silverbill that Esha Munshi had saved from one in all her cats through the pandemic, again in 2020. Esha, an architect by coaching and the founding father of the Feather Library, which has simply added a particularly uncommon Sooty Shearwater —the one Indian specimen of this migratory seabird —to its assortment, says, “I rescued the hen, however, in fright, it misplaced a number of feathers.” She remembers trying down on the feathers she held in her arms, “smaller than my finger…so tiny and delicate,” and realised that she wished to know extra about them. “I simply obtained curious and wished to see the flight feathers of all birds,” says the self-confessed ‘hen nerd’, who has been obsessive about birds since she noticed a black-crowned evening heron exterior the window of her workplace in 2013.

She looked for extra details about feathers however could not discover it. So, she set the thought apart and returned to her common life in Ahmedabad, practising structure and pursuing the Cornell Lab’s ‘Ornithology: Comprehensive Bird Biology’ course, an internet certification course specializing in avian biology. She additionally started engaged on a undertaking with Cornell, annotating hen sounds to coach the AI device for the Merlin App. “I’m a hen sound recordist…was at all times taken with recording the sound of the hen, and through COVID obtained this undertaking,” explains Esha, who travels regularly to birdwatch and has noticed greater than 1000 of the 1300-odd species of birds in India.

Then, on a visit to the Rann of Kutch the subsequent yr, the thought got here again to her. She remembers telling the buddies who had accompanied her that she wished to create a set of feathers. “I keep in mind the date, September 9. In the morning, I mentioned this, and that night, I discovered a roadkill of a hoopoe. So, I took it as an indication,” says Esha, who approached the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests quickly after to get permission to gather hen feathers.

Since non-public people should not permitted to gather or possess taxidermy hen trophies and even feathers, she was requested to ascertain a personal belief and obtained permission to doc and digitise the flight feathers of birds that had died naturally.

In November 2021, lower than two months later, the Feather Library, a singular initiative devoted to documenting, figuring out, and learning the flight feathers of Indian birds, was born. “I printed the web site at midnight on November 15, which can also be my birthday,” says Esha, now an Honorary Curator of Birds on the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS-TIFR), Bengaluru, the place the bodily assortment of the Feather Library is at present housed.

“I created a web site with 5 specimens, a prototype,” she says, including that her co-founder was Sherwin Everett, who used to work at an animal rescue centre known as Jivdaya in Ahmedabad. “We would gather the birds that didn’t survive at Jivdaya and doc their flight feathers.”

Two months after the launch, she formally stop structure and poured her coronary heart and soul into this initiative, deepening her experience by learning additional on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “I already had buddies there due to my annotation undertaking. I instructed them that I had launched one thing like this in India, and wished to return and study taxidermy and the right way to make museum specimens,” says Esha.

On her return from Cornell, she had a gathering with ecologists Uma Ramakrishnan and Vivek Ramachandran at NCBS and determined to collaborate with the institute. “I shifted the entire assortment right here in August 2022,” says Esha, who had collected round 50-60 specimens again then.

Not solely is the Feather Library the one one in all its sort in India, however additionally it is a singular initiative globally, with solely Germany’s Featherbase and the United States’ The Feather Atlas enterprise an analogous endeavour, says Esha, who underwent coaching in feather microstructure on the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C, earlier this yr.

Today, it has grown to embody feathers of almost 160 species of birds and roughly 400 specimens housed within the temperature-controlled analysis collections facility at NCBS. Esha reveals me round, opening drawer after drawer full of wings, feathers and preserved complete birds, including that she now has permission in Karnataka and Gujarat to gather deceased animals for stuffing, not simply their feathers.

I hearken to her reel off names, “barn owl, noticed owlet, Indian pitta, golden oriole, coppersmith barbet, home crow, the Asian koel” till we lastly attain the pièce de résistance: the Sooty Shearwater, which she obtained in August this yr after it died of pure causes at a rescue centre in Porbandar, Gujarat.

“It was a jackpot, truly,” she believes. “There is just one different earlier report of a Sooty Shearwater in India…a photographic report taken off the coast of Mangaluru in Karnataka.”

Preserving these birds is a prolonged and meticulous course of that requires appreciable endurance and precision. “When I discover a hen, it’s frozen for 2 days to handle fundamental biosafety, if there are any micro organism or viruses,” says Esha.

After filling a type recording particular particulars concerning the hen, together with species and specimen quantity, the place and when the hen was discovered, and the reason for its demise, Esha takes some fundamental measurements, “like weight, wingspan, size of the hen, head and beak width.”

Then, she performs the taxidermy of the hen, skinning, stuffing, stitching, and drying it earlier than mounting it, with one wing stretched out to exhibit its form and varied feathers. “Before pinning, I take away particular person flight feathers, scan and quantity them and preserve them within the appropriate order. And then, when all the things is completed, I add it to the web site.”

The feather library serves extra than simply quenching Esha’s thirst to find out about and gather hen feathers. In her opinion, many elementary questions on feathers stay unanswered as a result of there are only a few researchers engaged on feathers worldwide.

“That is what makes it very distinctive and area of interest,” she says, stating that saving these feathers may assist reply a few of these questions. “The hope is that sometime, we are able to broaden throughout India and no less than have one specimen of each Indian hen,” says Esha, who additionally needs to sometime remodel the gathering into an ornithology museum the place specimen-based analysis may be performed.

“Having a hen in your hand permits you to determine so many minor particulars, which you’ll by no means have the ability to do whereas birdwatching. And there’s something new to study from each hen.”