Words For Birds: The Collected Radio Broadcasts

The ornithologist Sálim Ali has long been synonymous with the scholarship, appreciation, and conservation of Indian birdlife. It is not as well known that he was also the most engaging raconteur about birds. This aspect – the great ornithologist as enthralling storyteller – is most apparent in this, the first and only, collection of all his radio broadcasts.

The thirty-five talks that comprise this book were broadcast between 1941 and 1985 and show Sálim Ali’s exceptional skill as an oral communicator and bird propagandist. He describes the purpose of these radio transmissions: “The object of these talks is really to interest listeners, in the first instance for the healthy pleasure and satisfaction bird watching affords rather than for its intrinsic scientific possibilities.”

The talks cover many topics – bird habits, bird habitats, birds at risk – in an elegantly conversational and informative style. Birds, he tells us, have a crucial place in nature’s cyclic processes; they benefit agriculture; they contribute to the economy in ways we neither see nor fully understand.

While the speaker’s focus is largely on birds, it is also evident that he is interested in all forms of wildlife and contemporary conservation issues. Each talk reads like a short essay. The book does need not to be read sequentially from start to finish – the reader has merely to dip into it at random to be hugely educated and entertained. Hedgehog & Fox series - Ashoka University The royalties from this book go to the Sálim Ali Nature Conservation Fund (SANCF) of the Bombay Natural History Society.