Warblers: India
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Warbler, large-billed reed
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‘Extinct’ bird rediscovered in Afghanistan’s mountains
Afghanistan’s fledging conservation agency moved on Sunday to protect one of the world’s rarest birds after the species wasrediscovered in the war-ravaged country’s northeast. The remote Pamir Mountains are the only known breeding area of the largebilled reed warbler, a species so elusive that it had been documented only twice before in more than a century.
A researcher with the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society stumbled upon the tiny bird in 2008 and taped its distinctive song. Later, a research teamcaught and released 20 of the birds — the largest number ever recorded.
Afghanistan’s National Environment Protection Agency added the large-billed reed warbler to its list of protected species.
Warbler
2023: sighting in Bhondsi
Kushagra Dixit, Sep 26, 2023: The Times of India
NEW DELHI: In a first, a yellow-browed warbler, which is a forest songbird, has been spotted in NCR at a time the migratory season is around the corner.
Major General Arvind Yadav and Amit Sharma, two birders, documented its presence in the region on September 23 as the bird perched on a Siris tree at Bhondsi in Gurgaon. The warbler is a tiny bird, hard to recognise and spot.
The sighting has now become a matter of exploration for the region's birders, especially around Bhondsi Nature Park, which has a conducive environment for wild birds.This warbler is migratory and spends the winter mainly in tropical South and Southeast Asia. Its presence depicts a subtle balance in the region's ecology.
As birders in Delhi-NCR gear up to welcome water, wader and terrestrial birds, along with several avian migrants that make a pit stop around Delhi before flying to their destination southwards, the spotting of the little warbler has come as a treat for them.
The bird has vibrant plumage and chirps melodiously or warbles. It belongs to the Phylloscopidae family to which the tiny leaf warbler also belongs. The birds breed in the east Palearctic region.
"This is the first observation of this migrant avian in and around NCR. We spotted it on Saturday, September 23, at Bhondsi Nature Park in Gurgaon. We observed this warbler feeding in a Siris tree (Albizia lebbeck) with some very quick movements. At first glimpse, it looked like a Hume's leaf warbler, a close associate, but it was its call and some distinctive features which confirmed its identity. I heard him closely in North East last season. Identifying warblers is a complex process as the plumage and identity markers change rapidly during this season. The call actually plays a pivotal role. The rest was help from senior birders of NCR," Major General Yadav said.
He added that like many other leaf warblers, it has overall greenish upper parts and white under parts with prominent double wing bars formed by white tips on the wing covert feathers, yellow-margined tertial feathers and a long creamy supercilium.
"The bird is not shy, but its arboreal lifestyle makes it difficult to spot it. It is almost constantly in motion. Its song is a high-pitched medley of whistles. The call is piercing, often disyllabic 'tseeweest', strikingly loud for the bird's small size," Sharma said.
Birder Janardhan said the species has been earlier sighted along the Himalayan foothills east of Dehradun in the same season. The nearest to Delhi was near Aligarh in October 2020, according to Ebird records.
"It may not be a first visit by this bird to the area, but the small size, olive plumage, habit of feeding at the top canopy, dynamic movements and similarity to the Hume's leaf warbler would have allowed it to get away from birders' eyes and cameras. Or this unusual visitor to urban landscape might be a vagrant due to changed weather patterns," Gaurav Yadav, a young birder part of the birders' team which Major General Yadav and Sharma belong to, said.
2025: Suru Valley, Ladakh
Ipsita Pati, July 18, 2025: The Times of India
At an elevation of 3,200 metres, Ladakh’s rugged mountain sweep in the backdrop, a group of five sat huddled and listened intently to the ‘click-clickclick’ captured in a recording. The insect-like call was proof that one of the most elusive bird species they had come looking for was there.
Visual proof came soon enough, making July 15 the day when a confirmed sighting of the long-billed bush warbler would be recorded after 46 years, in a thicket in Kargil’s Suru Valley. The last time the bird (Locustella Major) was seen was also in Ladakh in 1979, when a group of birders from Southampton University were on a tour (1977-80) to chronicle avian fauna. Between 1979 and now, one more sighting of the longbilled bush warbler was documented when ornithologist James Eaton spotted it in Naltar Valley of GilgitBaltistan in 2023.
The current expedition by five birders – Harish Thangaraj, Lt Gen Bhupesh Goyal, Manjula Desai, Rigzin Nubu and Irfan Jeelani — was planned specifically to spot this warbler. Team leader Thangaraj told TOI the group “has years and years of experience sighting birds” and “what we are now looking for are ‘lost birds’ – that were spotted decades ago but were never seen since”.
This Feb, the group had made another expedition in search of the bird but failed to spot it. “We searched in Gurez and Tulail valleys at altitudes between 2,400m and 2,800m. But it yielded no results, possibly because of altitude mismatch,” Thangaraj said, referring to the Gilgit-Baltistan sighting, which was at a higher reach.
After the unsuccessful attempt, the group stepped up research and got in touch with Eaton. It was the Malaysia-based American ornithologist who steered them on the right path – in this case, near terraced fields surrounded by rumex and gooseberry shrubs at Sankoo in Suru. “The bird was found in a willow amidst terraced fields. It’s the first time it has been seen on a willow, which will now be added to its known habitats,” Thangaraj told TOI .
At 3,200 metres, this is also the highest recorded altitude at which the bird has been seen. Classified as ‘near threatened’ by International Union for Conservation of Nature, long-billed bush warblers were commonly seen in Ladakh and GilgitBaltistan till the 1930s. In the decades since, birding expeditions were sparse. In 2015, Eaton wrote, birder Shashank Dalvi sighted two warblers in Suru, but it was too brief for him to take a picture. “Expansion of settlements combined with climate change, could be pushing the birds to go higher,” Thangaraj said.
Pankaj Gupta, a Delhi Bird Society member who was not part of the expedition, said the “rediscovery” of the bird is “nothing short of extraordinary”. “It reminds us how much remains hidden in our fragmented landscapes, and how urgent it is to protect these last remaining pockets of wilderness,” Gupta said.
