It started with a few feathers of an Indian silverbill that Esha Munshi had saved from one of her cats during the pandemic, back in 2020. Esha, an architect by training and the founder of the Feather Library, which has just added an extremely rare Sooty Shearwater —the only Indian specimen of this migratory seabird —to its collection, says, “I rescued the bird, but, in fright, it lost a few feathers.” She remembers looking down at the feathers she held in her hands, “smaller than my finger…so tiny and delicate,” and realised that she wanted to know more about them. “I just got curious and wanted to see the flight feathers of all birds,” says the self-confessed ‘bird nerd’, who has been obsessed with birds since she spotted a black-crowned night heron outside the window of her office in 2013.
She searched for more information about feathers but couldn't find it. So, she set the thought aside and returned to her regular life in Ahmedabad, practising architecture and pursuing the Cornell Lab’s ‘Ornithology: Comprehensive Bird Biology’ course, an online certification course focusing on avian biology. She also began working on a project with Cornell, annotating bird sounds to train the AI tool for the Merlin App. “I am a bird sound recordist…was always interested in recording the sound of the bird, and during COVID got this project,” explains Esha, who travels frequently to birdwatch and has spotted more than 1000 of the 1300-odd species of birds in India.
