Mumbai birders go wild after Arctic Tern spotted in India after 96 years

MUMBAI: On Tuesday, Delhi-based architect Mohit Mehta flew down to Mumbai to meet a visitor returning to the country after 96 years: the Arctic Tern. The pelagic bird migrates yearly from Pole to Pole, leaving the Arctic Circle in the winter for the Antarctic summer and vice-versa, with India nowhere on its flight route. But this monsoon in Mumbai has continued to be full of surprises, with sightings of many rare birds, the latest being the Arctic Tern.
“For a week now, birder WhatsApp and Facebook groups have been buzzing with news that one of the rarest birds to be spotted in the country has been a regular sight early morning at Sassoon Dock, and I didn’t want to miss it,” said Mehta. “By 7 am on September 4, 50 other birders and I went there armed with camera and binoculars.”
Meha got his fill, spotting the bird about five times till 11 am. He also saw the White-cheeked Tern and Masked Booby, other rarities for the country, for the first time—what the birder community refers to as “lifers”, taking his lifer count up to 985. By night, he was back in Delhi.
“Of the 1,363 bird species spotted in India, the Arctic Tern ranks 1,330 in rarity as per veteran birder Subhadeep Ghosh,” Mehta said, explaining the craze behind the bird that made not just him but many others catch flights for a glimpse of it. As per the records of Indianbirds.in, the bird was last spotted in the country in 1928 in Ladakh.
The infectious enthusiasm of the birders is clear; the Arctic Tern has been reported over 90 times in the last week on eBird. Another fellow rare bird, the White-Cheeked Tern has been lodged 33 times.
The credit for the sighting , said Mehta, went to the birders who first saw the bird in early August. Pradnyavant Mane, a Mumbai-based birder with a lifer count of 905, said that it happened on August 7 when he was on a jetty to Elephanta Caves to spot rare pelagic birds. “We were not certain what it was, and confused it with the Common Tern,” he said. “One of us then put the photographs on Facebook, where Killian Mullarney, an orinthologust, identified it.”
Once identified, the birder community, connected by a web of online groups, took note. “I went to see the Masked Booby around five days ago at Sassoon Dock,” said naturalist Akshay Shinde. “There were many Terns there, among which were some Common Terns, Bridled Terns and one White-Cheeked Tern. As we kept photographing, we noticed that one Tern had a different flight pattern, as it flaps its wings more often due to their smaller span. That’s when we noticed it was the Arctic Tern.”
Shinde recalls the birds picking on the bycatch by the fishermen at the dock, in all probability regaining their energy before resuming their journey. “These are small birds that weigh between one and five kg, which usually traverse through the Mediterranean Sea or Atlantic Sea to get to the Poles,” he said. “Due to the storm in the Indian Ocean with strong winds, they are likely to have been blown here towards the coast, and are waiting to regain energy for their take-off or perhaps for more birds to join them so they can fly off as a flock.”
Yet another reason for the Arctic Terns’ spotting, said Mehta, was the influx of birder eyes on the Mumbai coast this year. “No one typically goes birding in the monsoon for fear that it can ruin their equipment,” he said. “But this monsoon, due to the many reports of pelagic birds stranded on Mumbai’s coast due to the storms, people have been venturing out. It is possible that the Arctic Bird has visited Mumbai more often than thought, but we are noticing it now.”