Chennai Birdrace 2009
The response to the second Chennai Bird race held on the 25th January 2009 was tremendous, and as usual we were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the participants. 45 teams had registered for the race and 44 teams submitted their log books at the end of the day.The winning team Common House Crow (Arun Kumar, Hopeland, Nina Simon and Raj Kumar) recorded 131 species. The second place was taken by The Great Cormorant (Dr. Badrinarayanan, Ekshikaa S, Durga S and Siddharth Sareen) and they recorded 119 species. The green birding team –Yellow Throated Sparrow (T Murugavel, Valiappan K M, Laxmikanthan A, Harith S) walked away with the third prize recording 113 species! There were more than 5 teams that recorded 100 or more species of birds and 8-10 teams spotted more than 80 species of birds.
A special green birding prize was given to the Iora (Anusuya R, Divya R, Sudha R and Chithra V) who recorded 66 speciesd of birds.
The Southern Grey Shrike was the bird of the day seen on the road from Vedanthangal to Karikili by the Golden Oriole team (Vinoj, Abdul Khader, Joseph and Raja Ramamurthy)
More than 160 species of birds were spotted that day (exact numbers and list will be posted soon).
Updates:
- 23 Jan 10.15 PM: Registration for Chennai Birdrace 2009 is CLOSED.
- Chennai birdlist (pdf)
- Places for birding (pdf)
Race to Spot the Birds in and around Chennai
Madras Naturalists' Society (MNS) along with HSBC and India Bird Races is organising Chennai's Second Bird Race on January 25th 2009.The Bird Race is a dawn-to-dusk event where teams of bird-watchers will spend the entire day birding in and around Chennai (within a specified geographical limit to its outer boundaries). The participants will try and record as many species of birds as possible and learn about the finer points of bird-watching from the experts and the experienced.
Each Team will consist of 04 (four) persons and each team must include a good birder who is familiar with the site's/region's avifauna. You are free to constitute your own team, but must ensure at least one of you is a proficient birder, familiar with the region's birdlife, and who can be the Team Captain.
You need to send a mail to the email-id below to register, giving brief details of whether you will form your own team (in which case you need to include your team members' names) or would like us to form a team for you.
Send email to
and/or 
and register!
For further information do visit www.indiabirdraces.com
Green birding
Teams are also encouraged to do Green birding – that is opting for only mass transport (bus/trains), bicycles or walk to get to various places. There is a prize for the green birding team with the highest bird count. Autos or taxis are not allowed. Please indicate whether you intend to do green birding when you come to register and collect your log books.- You can read about last year's birdrace!
- Take a look at our birding page.
More information would be put up soon. Keep visiting this page!