UDUPI : Gone are the days when you woke up to crows cawing or woodpeckers pecking your neighbourhood tree. With rapid urbanisation, even the common house sparrow has become uncommon! The fallout is that, today’s children have limited interaction with birds.
The feathered beauties also provide a wonderful opportunity for children to connect with nature at a tender age and develop a deeper understanding of the world around them.
The ‘Early Bird’ initiative of the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), a charitable trust with its head office in Mysuru and functioning across the country, is supporting the cause of making naturists out of children.
The foundation engages children in various outreach activities to make them bird lovers through Arivu Kendras — rural libraries in Karnataka.
It all started with the Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Department rebranding gram panchayat libraries in Karnataka as ‘Arivu Kendras’ not long ago. In March this year, under the Early Bird initiative, NCF came forward to transform 500 librarians at Arivu Kendras in all districts into ‘bird educators’. There are 16 such bird educators in as many Arivu Kendras in Udupi district alone.
NCF has equipped these libraries with a specially designed ‘Nature Education Kit’ to foster a deeper understanding of nature and birds among children.
Abhisheka Krishnagopal, Programme Manager, Education and Public Engagement, NCF, who led the training for master trainers, told The New Sunday Express that experienced nature educators from across the state were trained who now conduct workshops for librarians at Arivu Kendras. The nature education kits are used to ignite curiosity about nature and birds among children.
Abhisheka added that children have an innate curiosity about nature which is lost as they grow up. “Birds can be a wonderful starting point for nature education since they are beautiful and interesting and can be found all around us, no matter where we live. Through the Early Bird initiative, we work towards facilitating this by creating high-quality resources, training people to become bird educators, and conducting outreach,” she adds.
The initiative between NCF and Karnataka government aims to take bird education to 500 Arivu Kendras across the state. “Through this, we are promoting nature education in a fun and interactive manner. Close to 16–20 libraries from each district were selected and equipped with nature education kits.
They consist of posters of birds and plants, a set of 40 flashcards about common birds of Karnataka, creative activities like join-the-dots and folk-art bird activity sheets, games like bingo, jigsaw puzzles, storybooks, and natural history booklets,” Abhisheka says.
In March this year, 12 nature educators from NCF travelled across 31 districts, training 500 gram panchayat librarians to use the kit.
Sumathi, a librarian at the Arivu Kendra in Havanje, Udupi district, told TNSE that the biodiversity committee existed in Havanje earlier too, and a lot of activities concerning birds and nature were conducted. “The Early Bird initiative further boosted the bird-watching exercise in our village,” she said.
As a master trainer, Sumathi said Havanje has four spots where bird sightings are common. ‘‘Around 400 species of birds visit our village, and children can identify them. We conduct bird watching in the village at 6 am, and along with kids, adults too join us in good numbers,” she adds.
Deepa S Shetty, the librarian at the Arivu Kendra in Tallur near Kundapur taluk of Udupi district, says that puzzles in the kits helped children match birds with their diets and habitats and also other facts about winged friends. More children are coming to the library now after their class hours, and on Sundays too, she says.
In June 2024, three NGOs — Adhyayan Foundation, Children’s Movement for Civic Awareness (CMCA) and the Early Bird programme of NCF -- collaborated to develop a year-long course in creating child-friendly libraries. They aim to make librarians more confident and turn them into creative resource persons who can run library programmes regularly and effectively for children. Trained librarians now can identify birds, remember bird calls, draw birds and play bird-related games, as well as narrate several interesting facts about birds.