Song of the Magpie Robin, Zafar Futehally, Shanthi Chandola, Ashish Chandola, Rainlight Rupa; Rs.500, Pages 197 2018 has been declared the International Year of the Bird by National Geographic, BirdLife International and more than a hundred conservation organisations. From this year, efforts will be intensified to celebrate and protect avian species around the world. To mark the International Year of the Bird in India, Rupa — the well-known Delhi-based publishing house — has fittingly reprinted the autobiography of Zafar Futehally, whose life-long odyssey to document and protect India’s birds and their habitats is chronicled in his own words. The magpie robin, a common songbird in danger of extinction, is closely associated with him. The life of Zafar Futehally was spent in the shadow of Salim Ali. A distant cousin of the great birdman, Zafar married Laeeq, Salim’s niece. Admitted into the family circle, he naturally fell under the mesmeric spell of the older man and took up ornithology as his life’s mission. But unlike Salim, Zafar had a day job in his brother’s engineering company, a filial relationship that fortunately enabled long absences from work for birding trips. Salim Ali is nationally renowned, but his protégé, Zafar Futehally, is equally prominent in birdwatching circles. This book is Zafar’s autobiography, reluctantly written at the behest of friends. The self-effacing Zafar gave in at the age of 92, and his memoir is the last literary effort of a prolific author who was encouraged and urged to write about the country’s abundant avian species by his mentor Salim Ali. Annoyed by a journalist’s essay about the magpie robin in The Times of India which was full of howlers, Zafar wrote a column called Birdwatcher’s Diary for ToI. It ran for 30 years, perhaps the longest innings ever of a newspaper columnist. Zafar was the longest serving honorary secretary of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), functioning also as one of the co-editors of the society’s journal through the 1960-70s. Those were turbulent years, marked by political rifts and rivalries within the society, but Salim and Zafar were able to restore administrative and financial stability. It was in those decades under the influence of BNHS and Futehally’s ToI column that the Central government initiated action on conserving India’s dwindling wildlife, propelled by Indira Gandhi’s redoubtable firmness. Her ardent championing of wildlife conservation causes is splendidly documented in the recently published Jairam Ramesh’s Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature (2017). Perhaps the individual who had the greatest influence on her and provided data for her decisions was Salim Ali, if one were to judge by the number of references to him in the index of Ramesh’s book. But Zafar’s interactions with Madam were influential in their own way. Perhaps the best known event on wildlife conservation to date in India was the 10th General Assembly of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1966, which was organised by Zafar, then vice president of the IUCN. Indira Gandhi accepted his invitation to inaugurate the assembly and…
