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Birds of a feather, only!

`Panchhi nadiya pawan ke jhoke, koi sarhad na inhein roke.' This song from the film Refugee rightly says that birds, like the winds and the rivers, cannot be stopped by manmade barriers. They symbolise the spread of happiness, tranquillity, serenity. A glimpse into the world of birds is one of the most attractive sights nature can provide, but catching them in action on the camera is not everyone's cup of tea. Now bird lovers and book collectors have one more publication to be happy about.

Wisdom Tree released "A Photographic Guide to Birds of India" by photographer Amano Samarpan. Taking in it sweep the Indian sub-continent, the book includes birds of Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The book is a real treasure for bird watchers. The launch this week included an exhibition of Samarpan's life-size colour photographs of a variety of birds of India, like the white-eared bulbul, the large grey babbler, the red-whiskered bulbul and the tawny fish owl (ketupa flavipes), an endangered species, and many more.

Author-photographer Samarpan is British by birth. Known earlier as Mark Tracy, he took an Indian name as he became immersed in Indian spirituality and culture. Any object that flies by with feathers tempts him to try and capture it on the camera, says Samarpan, but not Air India aircrafts as they don't flap their wings!

Timely book

Pawan Verma, the Director-General of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, appreciated the book as timely, small in size yet impressive and useful to be carried far and wide. Shobit Arya of Wisdom Tree added that it covers a wide variety of birds, mostly those resident and breeding in this region, though some winter visitors have been included. The handy book offers details of each bird with crisp descriptions and hints for their identification.

The author even proposes in his book the answer to that ubiquitous question, "Which came first - the chicken or the egg?" According to him, chickens have been around for thousands of years, whereas the egg has been there for millions of years. Dinosaurs, from whom birds evolved, laid eggs. So the answer is, the egg came first!

Samarpan's exhibition of photographs, life-sized images of Birds, is on at Ansal Plaza in New Delhi till Sunday.

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