Interview | Ornithologist Asad Rahmani on his new book ‘Where Have the Birds Gone?’

Noted conservationist and ornithologist Asad Rahmani’s latest book, Where Have the Birds Gone? Empty Nests. Quiet Skies. One Question (Indian Pitta, an imprint of Juggernaut Books), is dedicated to lost species: “the mountain quail, pink-headed duck and numerous other species that were exterminated, with an apology from humankind”. This sombre beginning sets the tone of his nuanced book.

Where Have the Birds Gone? illuminates “the scale of the crisis confronting birds today — a crisis unfolding not with a single dramatic blow, but through the steady erosion of safe skies, quiet habitats and the fragile continuity on which avian life depends,” writes the Lucknow-based Rahmani, former director of Bombay Natural History Society and author of 27 books and 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers.