As many as 130 species of birds were spotted by teams of bird lovers in a day-long ‘race’ held in Thiruvananthapuram and Kollam.

The exercise was held as part of the HSBC India Bird Race organised by KeralaBirder, a bird lovers group on the Internet. In Thiruvananthapuram, the race was organised by the green groups ‘Warblers and Waders’ and ‘Thanal.’ The race was also held in Kottayam, Thrissur, Malappuram and Kozhikode on Sunday.

The highest number of bird species — 92 — were spotted from the wetlands of Punchakkari and Vellayani near Thiruvananthapuram. The ‘bird of the day’ — the greater spotted eagle, a migratory bird — was sighted in this area as was the Black-crested Baza (Karimthoppi Parunthu). While 68 species of birds were spotted in Kakkamoola, 62 species were spotted in Arippa in the Kollam-Thiruvananthapuram border area.

Fifty-four species of birds were spotted in and around the Museum complex in the city. C. Susanth of Warblers and Waders told The Hindu here that the sighting of so many birds in wetlands underlined the need to conserve these areas. “It is not common to sight the greater spotted eagle in Thiruvananthapuram. Many migratory birds were spotted during the race today. This shows that wetlands are crucial to the survival of a large number of birds,” he said. The lower-than-expected number of sightings in the Kallar-Ponmudi belt needs to be investigated further. This could be due to some climatic change or damage to the environment, he added.

After the race, the bird lovers — about 80 of them, grouped into a dozen teams — got together at a city hotel to share their experiences. The prize for the best team was given to the group that went to the Vellayani-Punchakari areas. The chief guest on the occasion was poet Sugathakumari.

Though the days of sun drenched hours are gone for a while, the birds of the air are still abundant in the skies of their middle Tennessee homes, including those in Bedford County. Their sonnets of song glide on the autumn breezes as the leaves sail the currents they share with the winged friends.

For the Pyrdum family of Shelbyville, the shorter days and cooler temperatures are a bittersweet time. Not only have the hours of light limited their ability to stay outside, but the frosty mornings have curtailed many of the early morning visits they have come to enjoy with a friend named Lucky.

Lucky is a mockingbird, Tennessee’s state bird, who is indeed very lucky.

This past spring, Darlene and Phillip Pyrdum’s daughter, Karen Pyrdum Williams, was enjoying an afternoon of lawn cutting in the bright sunshine when she noticed something tiny in the grass.

“She and her husband were out mowing when they spotted something in front of the mower,” Darlene began. “She called me excited with a rather unusual request.”

It would seem the tiny newborn had fallen from the nest. Because the nest was obviously too high in the tree to be seen or found, Darlene’s daughter brought her the bird to extend the mother’s touch to the fragile creature, who didn’t even have feathers.

“We couldn’t determine what kind of bird it was at first, because it just had a bit of down but no markings,” Darlene said. “Karen knows I am an animal lover. I can’t stand for anything to hurt.”

She hurriedly prepared a home for the new baby. Using the internet, Darlene learned as much as she could about raising a bird.

“I guess the Lord knew about this long before I even had a thought about it because for some reason I had started raising meal worms about a year ago. That, of course, was the number one food source of this little baby, that had to be fed every hour.”

And thus the process began.

Carefully stowed in a basket of towels for warmth, Lucky the bird began to grow. Soon her tiny basket was too small and a large box became her home, all the while Darlene fed her around the clock.

“As the temperatures warmed and she grew a little, I gradually started taking her outside a little at a time. I was wondering how I was going to teach her how to eat on her own. I was her only mommy. She was big enough to begin eating out of my hand.”

Darlene said the little bird began to be adventurous. At first she would only sit with Darlene on a bench under a tree but gradually found a route to her shoulder and sat there, viewing the world with the protection of her “mommy.”

“I asked my husband to take an old mailbox and make her a home,” Darlene said. “We put it up in a tree, hoping that she might stay in it at night once she was ready to be on her own. It took a lot of persuasion to get him to do it, but he did. Lucky finally grew on him too. I painted the name “Lucky’s House” on the sides of the mailbox. She would sit on the lid, but she never slept in it.”

The Pyrdums let Lucky come and go as she pleased around the house. According to Darlene, the bird had a set time to eat each day, three times a day, having outgrown the continual feedings. She was gradually left outside and allowed to find her way in life without her mommy.

Just as Darlene had found that tapping taught the bird to eat, she also found ways to help her learn to fly.

“I had to be her teacher,” said Darlene. “I took that responsibility and was very proud when she finally flew around the yard. At first she stayed very close to the house and always returned to eat. I would look out and she was be sitting on the back of the bench we enjoyed with her, waiting on her meal worms.”

It didn’t take long for Lucky the Mockingbird to truly spread her wings and fly.

“We noticed by mid-summer that she was getting later in coming back each day,”

Darlene said. “By the tenth week, on a Saturday morning, she didn’t come for breakfast. We looked for her all day to come. Finally late that afternoon, I heard a faint chirp like Lucky’s.”

Hoping that the bird had returned to the “nest,” Darlene looked into a neighbor’s tree and saw the little bird sitting there, among her new friends and family.

“She had made friends,” said the proud ‘mom,’ “with friends of her same breed. I knew that this time would come for her, but only God knew when that time would be.”

Mother Nature soon replaced Darlene, and the little bird joined its peers. Healthy and happy, the little bird that fell from the sky, returned to fly there.

“She gave us joy,” said Darlene of the bird who hasn’t returned to their home. The Pyrdums see several mockingbirds each day and have a feeling that a particular one is their grown up winged friend.

Like the biblical story of Joseph, what was perhaps done by unkind siblings had a purpose that only God could discern.

“If she was pushed out of her nest, I’m sure, in her way, she thanked them,” Darlene said. “She got to live the life of a queen as a bird named Lucky.”

Tina and Studla will be given some time to bond with their newborn – a 247-pound female African elephant – before visitors to the Montgomery Zoo view them outdoors.

The newborn arrived Friday and has not yet been given a name, zoo spokeswoman Sarah McKemey said Sunday. She said the community will be involved in naming her.

She said Tina has been living at the 40-acre zoo for two years and Studla – an African name for stout – is on loan from Lowry Park in Tampa, Fla.

McKemey said Tina had a natural delivery without complications.

“Mom and baby seem to be doing wonderful,” she said. “This is our first elephant birth.”

A veterinarian is close if case a problem occurs, she said.

McKemey said visitors to the zoo can view the newborn through window glass.

“But they’re going to wait until mom and baby bond, then introduce her to other elephants, before going outside,” she said.

The zoo has three female elephants including Tina, who is 23 years old.

The zoo’s elephant facility opened on Nov. 11, 2005 with the goal of becoming a breeding center.

Deputy zoo director Marsha Woodard said the newborn was only the third African elephant born in the United States this year. It will start a new bloodline of African elephants in the U.S., Woodard said, because his father, Studla, came directly from Africa.

Boo Boo the Chihuahua is the world smallest dog.

At just four inches tall, the diminutive dog in Raceland, Kentucky now has the very big title of smallest in the world. The Guinness Book of World Records made it official.

Lana Elswick says her Chihuahua Boo-Boo was born the size of her thumb. Elswick says from the beginning she knew her dog was special, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that she knew just how special.

The Guinness Book now considers the full-grown though petite pet the smallest dog in the world, nearly an inch smaller than the previous record holder.

A Dallas family lost everything when fire ripped through their home around 5:30 a.m. Sunday.

The family was sound asleep when an electrical outlet caught fire in the 2600 block of Birmingham Avenue in South Dallas.

Clifford Brown and his mother Betty were asleep when the fire broke out. Then their family dog Lucy jumped on Betty’s bed.

“The dog woke my mom up,” said Clifford. “Then I heard the boom and thought someone had broken into the house.” He said he knew right away he had to rescue his 76-year-old mother.

“I was screaming and hollering for him, and he couldn’t get through. There was so much smoke,” said Betty.

The smoke and the intense heat made it nearly impossible to reach the bedroom.

“I had to go all the way around and snatch the bar door open,” said Clifford.

“When he jerked the door down, he fell on the sidewalk, and I fell in the yard,” said Betty. “I didn’t think he was going to get me up, but he said, ‘Oh yeah. I’m getting you out of there.’”

Not much was salvageable from the home. Only one picture of Betty’s grandson was saved.

The family did not have home owner’s insurance, but they say they have many family members in the area that can help them.

Early this year, when villagers discovered a huge male tiger trapped in an abandoned well in the largest of India’s tiger preserves, they did a remarkable thing: They concocted a handmade rope-and-bamboo ladder, lowered it into the well and set the big cat free.

And when India’s most notorious gang of tiger poachers showed up in the park and began setting traps, an angry band of local forest dwellers, bows and arrows drawn, ambushed and arrested them. Today many are in jail.

Those are rare acts in India, where tigers are disappearing at an astonishing pace.

A century back, India had 40,000 of the emblematic cats. But five years ago the number was down to 3,700, and today scientists say there are fewer than 1,500, most in scattered small reserves.

Poachers, feeding a Chinese market hungry for tiger skins and bone, have cleared some reserves of the big cats. Incursions by land-hungry peasants and their livestock have eaten away at other parks. Armed Maoist rebels have made some reserves impossible to patrol. And India’s government is considering a bill to hand over two-thirds of national tiger-reserve land to landless peasants. But in Nagarjuna Sagar, a sprawling reserve in southeast India, tigers are holding on thanks to an innovative campaign by local conservationists, who have quit trying to evict villagers and extremist rebels from the park and instead won them over to the tiger cause.

Saving tigers “is more about managing people than managing animals,” said K. Thulsi Rao, an assistant state forest officer, head of biodiversity research at the reserve and the mastermind of Nagarjuna Sagar’s people-friendly conservation approach.

“If you address people’s needs, the rest is taken care of,” he said. “When you make people the partners of management, there is really a lot of change.”

Conversing, conserving

Nagarjuna Sagar, split by the mighty Krishna River, doesn’t look much like a traditional wildlife sanctuary. The park, which encompasses more than 1,000 square miles, is home to a massive hydroelectric dam and a popular shrine that draws millions of Hindu pilgrims each year. Heavy traffic plies paved roads cut through the open forestland.

Perhaps most troubling, nearly 120 small villages lie within the boundaries of the hilly park, including 22 settlements in the reserve’s core conservation area, which under Indian law is supposed to be free of human inhabitants.

When Rao arrived at the reserve in 1994, its forests were full of Naxals, India’s homegrown Maoist rebels. The rebels had recently shot dead one of the forest service’s best rangers and had forbidden others from entering the woods.

Villagers in the park, fed up with a government program that paid them only a third of the value of any livestock killed by tigers, were pouring pesticides on livestock carcasses and poisoning the cats.

Neighbors of the reserve, with the approval of the populist Naxals, were leveling large sections of the woods for firewood to sell, selectively felling the forest’s valuable teak trees or bringing in huge herds of cattle to graze. The reserve’s tiger population, which once topped 80, had fallen to fewer than 40.

Rao, who had a background in ecodevelopment efforts, decided the Naxals were the reserve’s biggest problem.

The new forest officer headed into the woods to talk to them, armed only with 600 slides and a presentation on the philosophical merits of conservation. Told by a Naxal leader that the forest service cared more about animals than people, he argued that if the forest disappeared, the people would lose their livelihood and home.

The next day, to everyone’s surprise, the Naxals issued a ban on woodcutting in the park.

Rao also went to visit woodcutter villages outside the reserve, where rangers had long been greeted by men waving axes. Insisting he would listen to their concerns, he discovered that people hated being treated as thieves, struggled to survive on $2 a day as woodcutters and would have preferred farming but had no water for irrigation.

Calling in local non-governmental organizations and raising development funds from India’s government and international bodies like the World Bank, Rao began paying locals $2 a day to replant degraded forest areas in the Krishna River’s water catchment area and helped them rebuild abandoned irrigation channels. He helped villagers plant new cattle-grazing areas outside the reserve and targeted conservation education programs at the area’s most notorious poachers and smugglers.

In the park’s core, he assured 2,000 aboriginal Chenchu forest dwellers that the government no longer wanted to evict them, but preferred to hire them to monitor the cats’ movements. And he and others persuaded the government to boost its compensation for cattle kills to full market value.

Today, satellite photos show massive regrowth of forest within Nagarjuna Sagar, and large-scale regeneration of grazing land outside the park. The region’s water storage lakes are full for the first time in decades. Tiger poisonings have virtually stopped and political talks with the Naxals are under way.

Sakria Mudavat, 40, a former woodcutter living on the fringes of the reserve, today gets several crops a year of rice, lentils and castor beans from his once-barren land. He earns $125 a month, up from $12.50, enough to put both his children in school.

“We’re very happy now,” said Gamli Bai, 75, a leader of Mudavat’s village. “If anybody comes [to poach], we will stop them.”

Venkataiah, 30, a Chenchu tiger tracker living in a grass and woven bamboo hut deep in the reserve’s teak and crocodile bark forest, also reports seeing tiger cubs on his rounds.

“Slowly, they are increasing,” he says of the big cats, whose numbers today are estimated by rangers to have risen to about 80.

The reserve’s tale is the exception in India, where tiger numbers remain “precariously low,” according to the Sujoy Banerjee of the World Wildlife Federation’s India office. Activists fear the government bill to transfer reserve land to peasants would be a death sentence for wild tigers in the country.

Extending lessons learned at Nagarjuna Sagar may prove difficult given that many of India’s reserves are smaller, even more imperiled and facing crushing pressure from India’s growing population of 1.2 billion.

But learning how to deal with tigers’ human neighbors, everyone agrees, is a crucial step toward saving them.

“Every 10 miles there’s a new problem in tiger conservation,” said John Seidensticker, a leading tiger expert at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park. “You’re never done saving them. You just keep working on it.”