A common merganser bird was sighted for the first time in the Baleswar wildlife division near the Subarnarekha river mouth during the ongoing water fowl census.
The bird is a native to ladakh, Magnolia, Pakistan and Tibet. During winter, it flies to the north Indian rivers, lakes and fast flowing streams like other species of migratory birds. However, it had never been sighted in Odisha before.
“It is a migratory bird of duck family having a size of 66 cm. For the first time, the bird was found in the State. The identification of the bird was confirmed by ornithologists Dr UN Dev and Bibhas Pandab of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun,” said divisional forest officer (DFO) Harsha Bardhan Udgata.
He added that the male bird has a black coloured head and back with metallic green purple gloss, thin neck, pointed red bill and red leg on its grayish white body.
Besides the WII representatives, others who were in the bird count team include Biswajit Mohanty, Ranjit Pattnaik, Jayanta Chandra Mardaraj, Prasant Mardaraj, Anup Kumar Nayak , Subhendra Kumar Bhuyan, Ajay Das, PK Mallick and laxman Pradhan.
The bird census was conducted in two phases, on January 5 and 6 and subsequently on January 15 and 16. As many as 17,864 birds belonging to 59 species were sighted against the previous year’s 6,004 birds, said the report.
The water fowl census is being carried out mainly near the Subarnarekha and Budhabalanga mouths, Integrated Test Range, Chandipur, Risia, Sindhua, Khamkot, Bogalibandha, Parikhi, Rupakhand, Kantiachira and Padmatola areas in Nilgiri. The highest 4,500 little ringed plovers, followed by 1,660 brown headed gulls, 1,500 pallas gulls and 1,000 Asian plam swifts were sighted during the census, the DFO said.