Why this woman left a career in architecture to catalogue bird feathers | 24CA News

Esha Munshi has been an architect for 15 years — however her true ardour is birds.

“I breathe birds, I paint birds, I read about birds, I look at birds, I record bird sounds. So 24/7, birds are on my mind,” the Ahmedabad, India, girl advised As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

During the pandemic lockdowns, Munshi took a two-year on-line course on fowl biology from Cornell University. And now, as an alternative of designing buildings, she places her aesthetic expertise to make use of by accumulating, photographing, measuring and cataloguing the wings and feathers of India’s greater than 1,300 fowl species. 

“I wanted to give something back to science — something related to birds. So I left my architecture career behind and I got into this full time,” she stated.

Munshi teamed up with avian veterinarian Sherwin Everett to create the Feather Library, an on-line database of Indian fowl feathers. It’s the primary assortment of its variety in India, and certainly one of solely a handful around the globe. 

The concept got here to her throughout lockdown when folks have been principally inside, and birds have been out in full pressure, she stated.

One day she noticed an Indian silverbill outdoors her dwelling, a species of passerine birds that solely grows to about 11 centimetres in size. 

While Munshi loves birds, she additionally has cats, so she has fowl netting put in to shield them from her pet predators. But the tiny silverbill managed to slide thorough. 

“My cat rushed to attack it, and I happened to rescue [the bird] right in time and release it back. But, in fright, birds tend to lose some of their feathers, and that’s what this little bird did,” she stated.

She picked up the handful of feathers in her hand and was fascinated by them. The longest was smaller than her little finger. It made her take into consideration Indian peacocks, whose vibrant tail feathers can grown so long as 1.5 metres. 

“It just got me curious to know more about feathers,” she stated. “Those two are the contradictory feathers, which I have seen, and I wanted to know the entire spectrum in between. And I [wondered] where do I go and find it? And I could not find the answer to it. So I thought: Why don’t I create one?”

FeatherLibrary.com is obtainable for informal birdwatchers and scientists alike, she stated. 

“Wherever a person would go, if it’s a kid or older person, if one finds a feather lying on the ground, they’ll pick it up. And you know, there’s something about feathers which fascinates everyone,” Munshi stated. “So I think the first idea is to create curiosity. The second idea is to create a dataset for the future scientists to look at and to analyze.”

The feathers principally come by the use of Everett, who works at a fowl hospital in Ahmedabad. 

According to the Feather Library web site, his clinic treats between 1,500 and a pair of,000 birds a yr — some commonplace, and a few fairly uncommon.

But not each fowl makes it, and after they succumb to their accidents and die, their our bodies are merely discarded. 

Now, reasonably than let all that potential information go to waste, the avian clinic permits Everett and Munshi to {photograph} and digitize the feathers and the wings earlier than they’re disposed of. 

So far, they’ve catalogued 100 species, of an estimated 1,331 within the nation.

“Still a lot of way to go,” Munshi stated.

Scott V. Edwards, a Harvard ornithologist who is just not concerned within the mission, referred to as it “super exciting.”

“I think it really will draw attention to the beauty of bird feathers when you can really look at them in detail. And, you know, it also serves some practical uses. People are often trying to identify species by individual feathers, and so this will be a big aid to that,” he stated.

“This is really exciting and it’s new. I haven’t really seen anything like it.”

Edwards says it might show helpful for scientists who must determine fowl species as a part of their analysis. 

What’s extra, he says you possibly can be taught rather a lot about birds primarily based on their wings and feathers — how they entice mates, how they fly, what sort of habitat they occupy, and their moulting patterns all year long, for instance.

Not to say, they’re lovely to behold.

“I think it’s always marvellous how natural selection has just sculpted these exquisite details. It’s not all about survival, though. I think things like bird wings really let us see the exuberance of life and biology,” he stated.

“Birds are declining all over the world, and so, hopefully, resources like this will inspire people to remember where they came from and contribute to their longevity in terms of keeping the planet biodiverse.”