HYDERABAD: Naturalist John Burroughs once said, ‘You must have the bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush.’ Aasheesh Pittie, the editor of Journal Indian Birds, has his heart in the books and his soul stolen by birds. He is not a typical birdwatcher dressed in camouflage, geared with cannon-like lenses and a scope in the wild — but is one who finds birds in the books.
CE catches up with Aasheesh in his book-lined study at Banjara Hills to discuss his new monograph titled: The Written Bird: Birds in Books 2 — an extension of his ornithological bibliography on Birds in Books: Three Hundred Years of South Asian Ornithology.
In the first bibliography published in 2010, Aasheesh had indexed over 1,700 books written from the early 18th century to 2008, covering ornithology of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Tibet. The latest monograph is an extension where the author has indexed books published between 2009 and 2021, after indexing 535 titles.
“It started in the early 1980s, when I realised that whatever was being published regularly on birds was not readily available to those interested. I began indexing articles and papers for my own benefit, but soon realised that others could benefit from it,” says Aasheesh, who has spent thousands of man hours at the Natural History Libraries of Mumbai and Kolkata in the last 40 years. With a pen and paper, he has indexed all the books that has mentions of birds, that too in Latin. “I sometimes forget the common names of the birds, not even those like a Copsychus saularis (Magpie Robin),” he chuckles.
Adding that “a bibliographer’s drudgery never ends,” Aasheesh is continuing to index both journals and books on his public domain portal, South Asian Ornithology which has over 35,100 references, by spending hours on it every day. “It’s a one-stop-shop for those looking for published literature on South Asian birds. People use it for historical references, editors use it for accurate citations and dating, authors use it to check published data on their subjects and academics use it for their research,” he shares.
Bibliographies may not be found on a general reader’s bookshelf, maybe not even at bookshops, but they are key resources in libraries across the world — they help scientists, researchers and anyone who is trying to find birds in books says Aasheesh, who, though writes like a professor and edits a scientific journal, is a commerce graduate.