If a pair of Malabar Grey Hornbills consumes 90,000 fruits and 17,000 insects in a year, all supplied from the nature, imagine the quantity of food consumed by birds and the capacity of the nature across the globe, said Ramesh K. Badiger, a forest watcher at the Kali Tiger Reserve in Uttara Kannada district.
ADVERTISEMENT
He was speaking at the second day of the lake conference organised by Alva’s Education Foundation and Wetlands Research Group from Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, on Friday at Moodbidri.
Mr. Badiger, originally a nature lover, has been working at the Kali Tiger Reserve. He studied the routine of a pair of Hornbills for 267 hours in 28 days and documented it. Every alternative day, he used to stay in the forest from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., watch the activities of the birds, including their movement, bringing food etc. The forest has also been the real laboratory and a university, he told the audience at the conference.
During the day, 83 students studying from classes 6 to 9 from urban areas and 45 students from rural areas, 21 researchers and teachers, 32 students from class 10 to 12 and 38 students from undergraduate, postgraduate and research attended technical sessions and some of them presented papers.
Under the International research presentation, Nikolay Filatove from Russia spoke in virtual mode on the impact of climate change and man-made impacts. He said because of the increased tourism activities in Russia, majority of lakes in the country were polluted with micro plastic waste. Plastic waste menace thus has a wider impact on all other kinds of water sources, he said.