Salim Ali At 130, The Orphan Who Became The Birdman Of India (Picture Credit – Britannica)
\n\nThe sparrow should have been ordinary. A small boy in Bombay had brought it down with a toy air gun and might have forgotten it by evening, but a streak of yellow on its throat did not belong there. Puzzled, the boy and his uncle took the bird to the Bombay Natural History Society for an answer.
\n\nAt the society, W.S. Millard, its honorary secretary, identified it as a yellow-throated sparrow. Then he did something that would change Indian science. He opened the society’s collection of stuffed birds to the curious boy, and Salim Ali, born 130 years ago today on 12 November 1896, never looked at a bird in the same way again.
\n\nSalim Ali was the ninth and youngest child of his family. His father died when he was a year old and his mother when he was three, and he was raised by his maternal uncle, Amiruddin Tyabji, and his aunt, Hamida Begum, in Bombay. His path to ornithology was anything but direct. As a young man, he spent several years in Tavoy, in Burma, looking after the family’s mining and…
Original source: https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle
