On the tail of a tagged Curlew sandpiper

A tagged Curlew sandpiper spotted and photographed by birder Jithesh Babu at Kelambakkam backwaters on April 18, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Jithesh Babu

When a wintering bird doubles back to its breeding grounds to attend to the visceral business of procreation, it becomes essentially “unreachable” for the human friends it has made in its wintering grounds. It is impossible to keep tabs on the bird. One only knows its vast breeding range, which could straddle countries. It would be easier to find a needle in a haystack than trace this bird.

Birder Jithesh Babu is engaged in an exercise of this kind: he is trying to trace the address of a curlew sandpiper (he made friends with, on April 18, 2025 at Kelambakkam backwaters). Jithesh would likely succeed in this effort; he is not playing blind man’s buff. The curlew sandpiper (found in its breeding plumage and likely to be around in its wintering grounds for some more time) is wearing a tag.

A tagged flamingo photographed by birder Jithesh Babu at Pallikaranai marshland on April 21, 2021.
| Photo Credit:
Jithesh Babu

A bird with a tag usually has a recorded history to fall back on. In a couple of days, Jithesh is likely know where exactly the Curlew sandpiper would go. The tagged Curlew sandpiper having crossed his 150-600 mm telephoto lens, he has a photo of the creature, which he has sent to Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) along with a request for information about it. And Jithesh knows what exactly to expect.

Around the same time four years ago — April 21, 2021 — he found a tagged flimingo at Pallikaranai marshland and he wrote to BNHS seeking information, and in response, Tuhina Katti, a scientist with the Wetlands Programme, BNHS, wrote back to him: “From the combination on the tag, it appears to be ‘AAP’. This individual was tagged in Panje, Navi Mumbai (on the outskirts of Mumbai) on 24 September 2018. It was resighted in Chennai in August 2020 and since then it has been resighted in Sholinganallur on a couple more occasions. It is interesting that the bird was still present there in April.”

Jithesh remarks: “As this happened at the height of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the response took some time. Usually, it is prompt with a turnaround time of just two days.”