Salim Ali's Book of Indian Birds Described 181 Species in 1941, His Ten-Volume Handbook With S. Dillon Ripley Was Complete in 1974, and His Appeals Helped Protect Keoladeo and Silent Valley

Salim Ali (1896 to 1987), known as the Birdman of India, wrote The Book of Indian Birds, which the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) first published in August 1941 with 181 species. With the American ornithologist S. Dillon Ripley he wrote the Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, whose first volume came out in 1968 and which was complete at ten volumes by 1974. The BNHS says he was instrumental in getting Keoladeo National Park at Bharatpur protected and in saving Silent Valley in Kerala. The Government of India gave him the Padma Bhushan in 1958 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1976.

A sparrow with a yellow throat

Salim Ali was the youngest of nine children of a Bombay family. The memoir the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) published says he had lost both parents by the age of three and was raised by a maternal uncle and aunt. The BNHS’s own profile says his early interests were hunting and books on hunting, and that he went about shooting birds near his home with a Daisy air gun. One sparrow had a yellow patch on its throat. He took it to the BNHS, where W S Millard identified it as a yellow-throated sparrow (Petronia xanthocollis), showed him the Society’s collection of stuffed birds and lent him books. The Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON) puts his age at about ten. He stayed a member for more than 69 years, the INSA memoir says.

The BNHS says he left college after the first year and in 1919 went to Tavoy in Burma to manage the family’s wolfram (tungsten ore) mining and timber business, spending his free time in the forests. After the business failed he returned to Bombay and completed a zoology degree at St Xavier’s College under Fr Blatter. His application for the ornithologist’s post at the Zoological Survey of India was turned down, which the Society’s profile describes as a gain for the BNHS. The INSA memoir adds that India then had no university or institution that trained scientific ornithologists.

In 1926 the BNHS, which managed the natural history section of the newly opened Prince of Wales Museum, made him a guide lecturer there. He then trained in Berlin under Professor Erwin Stresemann, whom the INSA memoir calls his guru for life. In 1930 he turned to field work with a detailed study of the breeding habits of the baya weaver at Kihim, near Bombay, which the BNHS calls the first serious study of bird behaviour in India.

Two decades of surveys on expenses

SACON’s profile says he offered to survey the birds of the princely states for the BNHS free of charge, provided the Society and the state authorities paid for camping and transport. The INSA memoir describes a career on shoestring budgets that depended on the maharajas and princes, with the BNHS lending only the services of a skinner. Apart from a stint as the Society’s Nature Education Organiser in 1927, it says, he drew no salary until a national professorship in ornithology in the 1980s.

The BNHS lists his pre-Independence surveys: Hyderabad (1931 to 1932), Travancore and Cochin (1933), Central India (1938), Mysore (1939 to 1940), Kutch (1943 to 1944) and Gujarat (1944 to 1948). After 1947 came Orissa (1948 to 1949), Berar (1951), Sikkim (1952 to 1953), Bhutan (1966 to 1969), Goa (1972) and Arunachal Pradesh (1979 to 1982). Siasat reports that the Nizam of Hyderabad commissioned the first of these. It records that the survey met the Great Indian Bustard, whose Thar population is now estimated at about 130.

Books followed the surveys: The Birds of Kutch (1945), Indian Hill Birds (1949), The Birds of Travancore and Cochin (1953, renamed Birds of Kerala in 1968) and The Birds of Sikkim (1962), according to the BNHS. The INSA memoir says each survey had a target. The Hyderabad survey looked for Jerdon’s courser, which one of Ali’s young field biologists later rediscovered in Cuddapah district. Finn’s baya was found again in the Kumaon Terai after more than 50 years. The memoir describes the method as a notebook and pencil, binoculars and an alert mind.

The Book of Indian Birds in August 1941

In 1928 the BNHS issued three wall charts showing about 200 common Indian birds in colour for schools, and planned a book that would reuse the plates. The preface to the first edition says the economic depression cut institutions’ orders for the charts and held the book up. The 1941 edition covers 181 species, each illustrated in colour and fully described. Ali wrote that the plates were in many cases poor as life-like portraits but accurate enough to help identification.

Two choices stand out in the preface. Instead of inches, the book compares every bird with one of eleven familiar ones, from a sparrow and a quail to a crow, a kite and a vulture, so that the spotted dove is described as sized between a myna and a pigeon. And it left out local names, because Ali had found the name garuda applied to a vulture, a hornbill and a green pigeon in different places.

The seventh edition of 1964 covers 256 birds and adds Hindi names wherever available. The BNHS says the book is now in its 13th edition and has been translated into Hindi. R J Ranjit Daniels, an ecologist, wrote in Mongabay India in October 2025 that it has sold over 50,000 copies.

The Handbook he wrote with Ripley

Ripley’s Synopsis of the Birds of India and Pakistan, published by the BNHS in 1961, listed about 1,200 species in nearly 2,100 forms. The introduction to Volume 1 of the Handbook says the authors expected the full account to need ten volumes of about 400 pages each. Ali’s share began with a two-year research fellowship in 1952 and 1953 from the National Institute of Sciences of India to extract material from the literature. A grant-in-aid from the Government of India’s Ministry of Scientific Research paid for the four-colour blocks and for secretarial help, and friends in the United States underwrote the foreign exchange for the artists’ fees, which the introduction says made the project possible. The Handbook was published by Oxford University Press under the BNHS’s sponsorship, with Volume 1 appearing in 1968.

The BNHS describes the division of work this way: Ripley took the taxonomy, Ali the ecology and field observation, drawing on Hugh Whistler’s notes. In his 1971 Hora lecture Ali called the Handbook a revision of Stuart Baker’s Fauna of British India in an improved format. Jairam Ramesh, a member of Parliament who wrote an environmental biography of Indira Gandhi, says she released the tenth and last volume at her residence on 16 November 1974. Daniels counts more than 2,000 species and subspecies in the set.

Bharatpur and the duck-shooting reserve

Keoladeo lies 2 km southeast of Bharatpur town. It began as a private duck-shooting preserve of the Maharaja of Bharatpur, which the 1985 UNESCO nomination summary dates to 1900. Sahapedia’s overview, by the conservation biologist Satya Prakash Mehra, says that after Independence, through Ali’s consistent efforts, the ruler handed the reserve to the Government of Rajasthan. The state notified it as a bird sanctuary on 13 March 1956, on the advice of the National Committee for Bird Preservation, India. The UNESCO summary says the Maharaja kept shooting rights until 1972, that India designated the site a Ramsar wetland in 1981 and that it became a national park in 1982. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage property in 1985, and records 375 bird species in its 2,873 hectares.

Ali knew the place early. Peter Jackson wrote in Sanctuary Asia that a flock of Siberian cranes seen there in 1959 was the first recorded since Ali saw them in 1937, and that Ali went to Bharatpur in 1955 to ring young open-billed storks. By 1971 the BNHS ringing station there was one of its two permanent ones, according to the Hora lecture.

The INSA memoir says his timely intervention saved the sanctuary, and the BNHS profile says he was instrumental in getting Keoladeo declared a protected area. Ramesh goes further and calls Indira Gandhi’s decisions on Bharatpur the direct outcome of Ali’s appeals, adding that Ali persuaded her that India should join the Ramsar Convention. On 7 February 1976 she visited with her family. Ali took them out in a boat, they saw about 60 species, and there were nearly 75 Siberian cranes in the park, Ramesh writes. In the visitors’ book she asked that the lateral road bringing buses and noise into the sanctuary be closed. Ramesh adds that the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 had strengthened protection in the same decade, which also saw Project Crocodile begin in 1975.

Silent Valley and the letters to Indira Gandhi

Silent Valley is a rainforest in Palakkad district of Kerala where a hydroelectric project of 120 MW was planned. S. Gopikrishna Warrier writes in Mongabay India that Prime Minister Morarji Desai gave conditional clearance for a dam in 1978. Indira Gandhi had written to Ali on 2 October 1979, replying to his letter of 27 September: “I share your concern about the Silent Valley.” Ramesh calls her struggle to save it her crowning achievement as a conservationist.

A multidisciplinary committee under M G K Menon recommended cancelling the project, and Gandhi decided on 18 October 1983 to deny permission, Warrier reports. The forest was notified as a national park on 15 November 1984 and inaugurated by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on 7 September 1985. The core area was 89.52 square kilometres, and 147 square kilometres of buffer were added in November 2009.

The INSA memoir counts Silent Valley among the places Ali saved. Others are credited as well. Bittu Sahgal wrote in Sanctuary Asia that Ali and the BNHS, led by Dilnavaz Variava, approached Indira Gandhi directly, that the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad and M K Prasad led the campaign, and that the IUCN opposed the dam. Warrier quotes Ramesh saying that from 1979 her opposition was shaped by Ali and the former diplomat K P S Menon. He also quotes N D Jayal, who says he showed Ali a video of the forest and believes Ali then wrote to the Prime Minister.

Ringing, honours and the last years

The BNHS began a bird-migration study in 1960, after the World Health Organization offered to sponsor one. A new virus disease, Kyasanur Forest Disease, had appeared in Shimoga district of Mysore. The virus was closely related to one centred in western Siberia, where many of India’s migrants breed, so Ali wrote that birds seemed likely to be involved in its spread. The Society netted and ringed birds, latterly with the Smithsonian Institution, and by 1971 it had ringed over 200,000. Ali wrote that searches for the virus in birds and ticks from the affected area had found no positive evidence so far.

SACON’s profile says he saved the BNHS from closure after Independence with funds from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. We found no document giving the amount. The BNHS says he gave the Society everything he had, including the money from the J Paul Getty award, which the Tribune puts at $50,000, and the royalties from his books.

The INSA memoir lists the Asiatic Society’s gold medal, which he valued most because it was the first recognition of ornithology for an Indian, and honorary doctorates from the universities of Aligarh, Delhi and Andhra. It also lists the British Ornithologists’ Union gold medal and the Netherlands’ Order of the Golden Ark. Daniels dates INSA’s Sunder Lal Hora Medal to 1970, its C V Raman Medal to 1979, the national research professorship to 1982 and the National Award for Wildlife Conservation to 1983. The BNHS photograph shows President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed presenting the Padma Vibhushan on 3 April 1976.

Rajiv Gandhi nominated him to the Rajya Sabha in 1985. On 1 September 1985, aged 89, Ali wrote that he was willing “to give myself a trial.” Oxford University Press published his autobiography, The Fall of a Sparrow, the same year. He was taken to hospital on 13 April 1987, and Ramesh writes that a BNHS seminar went ahead with Rajiv Gandhi attending. Ali died two months later. SACON, the Coimbatore centre that carries his name, was established in 1990 as a Centre of Excellence under the environment ministry.

Where the sources differ

The INSA memoir gives his birth date as 11 November 1896. The BNHS and SACON give 12 November. The BNHS calls the Handbook’s span 1968 to 1975 in one passage and ten years from 1964 to 1974 in another, while the INSA memoir, Ramesh and Daniels give 1974 as the year it was complete. The BNHS dates the Getty award to 1975 and the Tribune to 1976. For Keoladeo, the UNESCO summary says it became a national park in 1982, while Sahapedia gives a notification of 26 August 1981. SACON calls the BNHS a 100 year old institution when Nehru helped it, but the Society’s own page gives its founding as 15 September 1883, which made it 64 in 1947.

Ramesh writes that in the 1970s Ali was attacked, particularly by MPs from Communist parties, over his work with Ripley and the Smithsonian, at a time when American institutions were under suspicion in India. How much of Keoladeo and Silent Valley was Ali’s own doing, and how much the work of the Maharaja, Rajasthan’s officials, Kerala’s science movement and Indira Gandhi, is not settled, and no source we found gives the text of his 1979 letter. Ramesh says the exchanges are preserved at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.