Purpose: “BARBET – Bws rARe Bird alErt iniTiative” – to Document rare birds sighted within West Bengal.
The need arose to document & archive rare birds/vagrants/escapees sighted in West Bengal for ready reference. While eBird, the citizen science initiative that maintains a global repository of all bird sightings, including the bird’s range, exists, extracting the requisite data is often time-consuming and takes immense effort. On the other hand, there are several social media groups (Whatsapp, Telegram, Meta, X) where the general public shares such news. However, to receive the alert, one must be a member of the respective group. Moreover, this data is not readily available for analysis or studies in the longer run.

At BWS, we have started recording this data in Excel sheets collected from various public sources to keep a lookout and plan future activities. In the future, we intend to take a more scientific approach to the automatic collection, storage and dissemination of a rare bird sighting database which can aid in the study/analysis/graphic presentation of the trend of rare bird sightings in WB. We plan to drive the entire initiative through our website and minimise data duplicity and other integrity issues.