Birding in South Andaman

We did birding in four spots around Port Blair, marked by the green patches in the map here. Chidiyatapu was a mix of forest and shoreline. Since the Andaman Trunk Road passes through the forest, and disturbs the birds, our best viewing here was early in the morning. Sippighat and Ograbranj are wetlands, and yielded very good sightings. Mt. Harriet in Bambooflats is another place where a day can yield good sightings. We visited Sippighat in the afternoon of December 22, Chidiyatapu the same night and again in the morning of December 23. We did birding in Ograbranj in the afternoon of December 23, and went up to Mt. Harriet on December 25.

The Andaman group of Islands is full of endemics (marked with a star in the list below), and also has winter visitors. Even though I had done my reading, I was startled by the variety of visitors. I’d never expected to see Daurian’s starlings here. Andaman is so far from our normal birding grounds that our bird list is full of lifers (marked in bold):

1. Alexandrine parakeet: Chidiyatapu
2. * Andaman drongo: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet
3. * Andaman bulbul: Chidiyatapu
4. * Andaman collared kingfisher: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet, Sippighat, Ograbranj, Neil Island
5. * Andaman (brown) coucal: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet

1. * Andaman cuckoo-dove: Chidiyatapu
2. * Andaman flowerpecker: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet
3. * Andaman green pigeon: Mt. Harriet
4. * Andaman shama: Chidiyatapu
5. * Andaman treepie: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet
6. Asian brown flycatcher: Mt. Harriet
7. Asian fairy bluebird: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet
8. Barn swallow: Mt. Harriet, Sippighat, Ograbranj
9. Black bittern: Ograbranj
10. Black drongo: Ograbranj

1. Black-naped oriole: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet
2. Blue-tailed bee-eater: Mt. Harriet, Sippighat, Ograbranj
3. Brahminy kite: Chidiyatapu
4. Broad-billed sandpiper: Sippighat
5. Brown hawk owl: Chidiyatapu
6. Brown shrike: Chidiyatapu, Sippighat, Ograbranj
7. Brown shrike (Philippine): Mt. Harriet
8. Brown-backed needletail: Mt. Harriet

1. Cattle egret: Sippighat
2. Chestnut headed bittern: Ograbranj
3. Chinese pond heron: Sippighat, Ograbranj
4. Common coot: Sippighat
5. Common crow: Sippighat
6. Common kingfisher: Chidiyatapu, Sippighat, Ograbranj
7. Common moorhen: Sippighat, Ograbranj
8. Common myna: Sippighat
9. Common redshank: Sippighat
10. Common sandpiper: Chidiyatapu, Sippighat
11. Common sparrow: Port Blair
12. Cotton teal: Sippighat
13. Curlew sandpiper: Sippighat
14. Daurian starling: Sippighat
15. Eastern jungle crow: Mt. Harriet, Sippighat

1. * Edible-nest swiftlet: Ograbranj
2. Eurasian curlew: Sippighat
3. Eurasian Whimbrel: Sippighat
4. * Glossy swiftlet: Mt. Harriet, Sippighat
5. Gray heron: Ograbranj
6. Green imperial-pigeon: Chidiyatapu
7. Indian cuckoo: Chidiyatapu
8. Indian pond heron: Ograbranj
9. Intermediate egret: Sippighat, Ograbranj
10. Large egret: Sippighat, Ograbranj
11. Lesser sand plover: Sippighat
12. Lesser whistling teal: Sippighat, Ograbranj
13. Little green heron: Sippighat
14. Little-ringed plover: Sippighat
15. Long-toed stint: Sippighat
16. Oriental magpie-robin: Chidiyatapu, Sippighat

1. Pacific golden plover: Mt. Harriet, Sippighat
2. Pacific reef-egret: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet, Neil Island
3. Pacific swallow: Chidiyatapu, Sippighat
4. Pintailed snipe: Sippighat
5. Purple swamp hen: Sippighat, Ograbranj
6. Racquet-tailed drongo: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet, Neil Island
7. Red-breasted parakeet: Chidiyatapu, Ograbranj
8. Red-cheeked parakeet: Chidiyatapu
9. Red-collared dove: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet, Sippighat, Ograbranj
10. Red-necked stint: Sippighat
11. Red-throated pippit: Sippighat
12. Red-whiskered bulbul: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet, Sippighat
13. Scarlet minivet: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet
14. Small egret: Sippighat, Ograbranj
15. Small minivet: Chidiyatapu

1. * Spot-breasted woodpecker: Chidiyatapu
2. * Stork-billed kingfisher: Ograbranj
3. * Striated heron (Andaman): Mt. Harriet
4. * Sunda teal: Ograbranj
5. Vernal hanging parrot: Chidiyatapu
6. Violet cuckoo: Ograbranj
7. White-bellied sea-eagle: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet, Ograbranj, Neil Island
8. White-breasted waterhen: Ograbranj
9. White-headed starling: Chidiyatapu
10. White-rumped munia: Chidiyatapu, Ograbranj
11. White-throated kingfisher: Chidiyatapu, Mt. Harriet, Sippighat, Ograbranj
12. Wood sandpiper: Sippighat
13. Yellow bittern: Sippighat, Ograbranj
14. Yellow wagtail: Chidiyatapu, Sippighat

We are amateur birders, and I hardly have a spotter’s eye. The Family spends more time on it. We did our birding in Andaman with Shaktivel, Gokul and Senthil. Shakti guides tours in the Andamans, and his next project is to take a group to Great Nicobar. Gokul is a zoologist, collecting data for a checklist of birds in the Andamans. This will be the core of his Doctoral thesis. During our three days of birding, we met up with Mark Smiles, who is an excellent birder, and guides bird tours in Dubai.

The geology of birdwatching in the Andamans

On the descent into the airport at Port Blair I looked out at an unfamiliar town and got a quick impression of lots of wetlands around it (see the featured photo). The Andaman islands are closer to Thailand than to India, but remain on Indian time. As a result, the sun sets by 5:30 in December. The Family and I did not want to lose this first afternoon on the islands. Shaktivel had promised to meet us at the airport so that we could go birding immediately. It turned out that he’d planned to take us to the wetlands I saw from the air. This is called Sippighat.

It is a wonderful area for water birds. In the first few minutes we had a couple of lifers. But then I noticed that there were trucks dumping mud into the waters in an attempt to reclaim it. Shakti told me that this was farmland until the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake dropped it below the level of the sea. I hadn’t bothered to look at the geology of the Andamans till then. But now it clicked.

We were on an island which sits at the geologically active boundary between the Indian and Eurasian plates. Three or four million years ago, their collision fractured the plates and created the Burmese and the Sunda microplates. This tectonic activity threw up the island chains. The slow subsiding of the extinct volcanic cones has created the wonderful coral reefs which I saw first from the air. Even now, as the Indian plate is sinking under these volcanic islands, elastic strain is being built up in the continental plates.

This strain was partly relieved by the 2004 earthquakes along the Indo-Burman plate boundary. The Andaman islands were repeatedly shaken by enormous after-shocks, each a major earthquake on its own. Sippighat and its wonderful birds (which I will list later) were just the first consequence that we saw. A dry account of the geological catastrophe of 2004 can still inspire awe. A five minute period, almost exactly twelve years ago, shifted the islands downwards by about a meter and changed rice fields into the watery landscape where we now stood.

The calm swampy land glowed in the light of the setting sun. Continental plates shifted catastrophically to create the seemingly peaceful photo you see above: a landscape full of egrets, plovers and bitterns. It would take me the better part of a week to begin to appreciate how much ecological stress persists even today. But this impoverished ecology is much more diverse than what I normally see in Mumbai.