Time to celebrate 💐 facebook.com/share/uDsuQaASx… We're now highly engaged #Facebook community of half a MILLION passionate #birders, sharing 10s of thousands posts & pics/month from every parts of #India & countries of #IndianSubcontinent #IndiAves #BirdTwitter #birdphotography

Heartiest congratulations to Purnima Devi Barman, distinguished wildlife biologist and conservationist, on being named a recipient of the prestigious 2026 Wayfinder Award presented by the National Geographic Society and Kia America. A celebrated conservation champion from Assam, she has earned global recognition for her remarkable efforts in protecting and restoring the population of the Greater Adjutant Stork (Hargila), inspiring communities and advancing wildlife conservation through her dedication and leadership. Wishing her continued success in her mission to safeguard biodiversity and bring pride to Assam and India. @StorkSister 🙏

What ho! ☀️ Here's a jolly good weekend poem for you! • John Masefield •

Surenavan is one of several Armenian villages where White Storks have adapted to nesting very close to humans.

🇮🇳 Delhi has the worst air quality in the world today! Source: IQAir

As you watch Aaron Rai in the PGA Championship, you might notice he uses iron covers for his clubs and wears two gloves — two habits often viewed as golf faux pas. But both are actually inspiring. Rai grew up in a working-class family in England, where his father sacrificed heavily to support his golf career. When Aaron got an expensive set of irons as a kid, his dad would clean every groove with a pin and baby oil after practice because the clubs meant that much to them. The iron covers became a reminder to appreciate what you have. And the two gloves? Rai started wearing them as a kid during cold-weather golf in England and eventually became so comfortable with the feel that he never stopped. Not gimmicks. Just gratitude… and comfort.

He was Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist whose quiet brilliance in the 1920s forever altered our understanding of the quantum world. In 1924, Bose, then a 30-year-old professor in British India, sent a groundbreaking manuscript directly to Albert Einstein. The paper offered a novel, more elegant derivation of Planck's law for blackbody radiation by treating light quanta (photons) as indistinguishable particles—a radical departure from classical statistical methods. Impressed by its insight, Einstein personally translated the work into German and facilitated its publication in the prestigious Zeitschrift für Physik. This exchange sparked a brief but profound collaboration. Einstein extended Bose's statistical approach to material atoms, predicting a bizarre new state of matter at ultra-low temperatures: what we now call a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), where particles behave as a single quantum wave. Bose's original framework became known as Bose-Einstein statistics, and the class of particles that obey it—those with integer spin, including photons, gluons, W and Z bosons, and the Higgs boson—was later named bosons in his honor by Paul Dirac. Unlike fermions (matter particles like electrons), which obey the Pauli exclusion principle and cannot occupy the same quantum state, bosons can pile into identical states en masse. This "social" behavior underpins extraordinary macroscopic phenomena: the coherent light of lasers, the zero-resistance flow in superconductors, and the collective quantum coherence in BECs. Despite the monumental impact—his statistics describe half of all fundamental particles and enabled key advances in quantum field theory, condensed matter physics, and particle physics—Bose remained remarkably unassuming. He continued teaching at universities in Dhaka and Calcutta (now Kolkata), mentored students, pursued ideas in X-ray crystallography, unified field theory, and other areas, and never sought the spotlight. Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize (notably for Bose-Einstein statistics and his later work), he was never awarded it, and his name rarely appears in popular accounts of 20th-century physics. There's a poignant humility in his story: a man whose legacy literally names one of the two fundamental families of particles in the universe, yet whose personal fame never matched the scale of his contribution. Bose reminds us that true influence often arrives without fanfare. Some breakthroughs echo through textbooks and technologies, while their creators work in the background, content to let the universe carry their ideas forward—even if history's spotlight rarely finds them.

Gujarat sees a GIB chick after a decade, through a novel conservation measure - the jumpstart approach, coordinated by the Ministry, State Forest Departments of Rajasthan and Gujarat, and Wildlife Institute of India. Envisioned by PM Shri @narendramodi ji in 2011 to conserve GIB in its natural habitats including Gujrat, Project GIB was launched in 2016. As a result the number of birds in conservation breeding centres, started at Sam and Ramdevra in Rajasthan, have reached 73 with addition of 5 new chicks in this season and we are moving ahead towards rewilding of birds in near future. In achieving another milestone, a female GIB, tagged in August 2025, had laid an infertile egg in Kutch, as this population has lost all its males long back. In a major trans-state conservation effort, a captive-bred GIB egg from the conservation breeding program in Rajasthan was transported by road over 19 hours in a handheld portable incubator and was replaced in the nest on 22 March. The female completed incubating this fertile egg and hatched it on March 26. The field monitoring team found the young chick being reared by its foster mother. This effort is among one of the many steps to recover the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard populations. With the commitment to save GIB, we are making great progress in India’s conservation journey. Congratulations to all scientists, field officers and wildlife enthusiasts who made this possible. We are keeping our fingers crossed for the survival of the chick. At the same time we remain committed to leaving no stone unturned to make the endeavour successful. 🎥 The GIB takes a stroll with her chick.

Dr. Zach Bush shares a mind-blowing nature insight: Birdsongs in each region have evolved to interact with tree pores (stomata), helping them open to breathe more oxygen and CO₂—kickstarting the life cycle. Historical / science nugget: Studies on plant bioacoustics (e.g., from Yeungnam University and others) show sound vibrations—like birdsong or "green music"—can influence stomata opening, boost nutrient/water uptake, and enhance growth by triggering molecular changes in plants. While not every regional birdsong is proven to "perfectly match" local trees, vibrations from natural sounds act as a gentle signal for better respiration and vitality. Bush extends it to us: Nature's sounds and beauty do the same for the human body—up-leveling metabolism, energy, and resilience no matter diet or toxins around you. Get outside aggressively—listen to the birds, feel the shift. Nature is the ultimate viral healer. What's your favorite way nature "turns you back on"—birdsong, ocean waves, forest walks?

Scarlet-backed Flowerpecker #Karimganj, #Assam, Feb 2026. This gorgeous picture by Momita - facebook.com/share/1Ay2WHREu… #IndianBirds #BirdTwitter #birdphotography #Birds

The great ecologist Madhav Gadgil died last night. I am devastated. He was an exemplary scientist and citizen, and, to me, a friend and mentor for forty years and more. Here’s a piece I published on his 80th birthday in May 2022: telegraphindia.com/opinion/p…

Female Sclater Monal walk over Seven Lake treks path.

The population of critically endangered and endemic Lesser Florican (Kharmor खरमोर ) has reduced from 4,374 individuals in 1982 to around 200 in 2025. @IUCN #IUCN @IUCNsos @IUCNRedList Image @WildlifeSOS

A message from a Kindergarten teacher: After forty years in the classroom, my career ended with one small sentence from a six-year-old: “My dad says people like you don’t matter anymore.” No sneer. No malice. Just quiet honesty — the kind that cuts deeper because it’s innocent. He blinked, then added, “You don’t even have a TikTok.” My name is Mrs. Clara Holt, and for four decades, I taught kindergarten in a small Denver suburb. Today, I stacked the last box on my desk and locked the door behind me. When I started teaching in the early 1980s, it felt like a promise — a shared belief that what we did mattered. We weren’t rich, but we were valued. Parents brought warm cookies to parent nights. Kids gave you handmade cards with hearts that didn’t quite line up. Watching a child sound out their first sentence felt like magic. But that world slowly slipped away. The job I once knew has been replaced by exhaustion, red tape, and a kind of loneliness I can’t quite describe. My evenings used to be filled with construction paper, glitter, and glue sticks. Now they’re spent filling out digital reports to protect myself from angry emails or lawsuits. I’ve been yelled at by parents in front of twenty-five children — one filming me with his phone while I tried to calm another child mid-meltdown. And the kids… they’ve changed too. Not by choice. They arrive tired, anxious, overstimulated. Their tiny fingers know how to swipe a screen before they can hold a crayon. Some can’t make eye contact or wait in line. We’re expected to fix all of it — to patch the gaps, heal the trauma, teach the curriculum, and document every move — in six hours a day, with resources that barely fill a drawer. The little reading corner I once built, full of soft beanbags and paper stars, was replaced by data charts and “learning metrics.” A young principal once told me, “Clara, maybe you’re too nurturing. The district wants measurable results.” As if kindness were a weakness. Still, I stayed. Because of the small, holy moments that no spreadsheet could measure — a whisper of, “You remind me of my grandma.” a shaky note that read, “I feel safe here.” a quiet boy finally meeting my eyes and saying, “I read the whole page.” Those tiny sparks were my reason to keep showing up. But this last year broke something in me. The aggression grew sharper. The laughter in the staff room turned to silence. The light went out of so many eyes. I watched brilliant teachers — my friends — vanish under the weight of burnout, their joy replaced by survival. I felt myself fading too, like chalk on a board that’s been wiped one too many times. So today, I began my goodbye. I pulled faded art off the walls and tucked thirty years of handmade cards into a single box. In the back of a drawer, I found a letter from a student from 1998: “Thank you for loving me when I was hard to love.” I sat on the floor and cried. No party. No applause. Just a handshake from a young principal who called me “Ma’am” while checking his notifications. I left my rocking chair behind, and my sticker box too. What I carried with me were the memories — the faces of hundreds of children who once trusted me enough to reach out their hands and learn. That can’t be uploaded. It can’t be measured. It can’t be replaced. I miss when teachers were partners, not targets. When parents and educators worked side by side, not in opposition. When schools cared more about wonder than numbers. So if you know a teacher — any teacher — thank them. Not with a mug or a gift card, but with your words. With your respect. With your understanding that behind every test score is a heart that cared enough to try. Because in a world that often overlooks them, teachers are the ones who never forget our children.

Never imagined that while looking for #GIB, one can encounter #White_Storks in Jaisalmer, and that too is 13 in a short distance from each other. @BonnConvention @Team_eBird @and_ecology @orientbirdclub @BirdersStore @BRStretch @KB1997_ @GobindsagarBha1 @rawatscorner @VinoBhojak

Finally, these golden rays and a brilliant sunset today offer a hope of relief from the incessant #DelhiRains. #DELHINCR #GurgaonRains @navdeepdahiya55

India is not for the beginners. The irony of it all; the cheaper Indian cars were easily able to wade through this knee deep water at the entrance to the society gates 😊 #DelhiRains #GurgaonRains #DelhiNCR @navdeepdahiya55

Why does sugarcane taste so sweet in India today? India’s sugarcane wasn’t always this sweet. The reason it tastes the way it does today goes back to the stubborn brilliance of one woman who fought prejudice, doubt, and even war. Thread. 1/19

Some bird species from my Biodiversity Map of Arunachal Pradesh- the land that welcomes the first rays of Sun in India, illustrated in my FolkIndica art style. (Map in the thread)

When she was just 26 Florence Merriam wrote the first guide to birding with binoculars in 1889. And she slipped in this incredible feminist gem:

Resident waterbirds breed across the country during the monsoon months. Abundant rainfall = higher breeding success. #Monsoon2025 #birds #IndianBirds