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By:

Vinod Chavan

30 September 2025 at 3:04:23 pm

Birder Cop finds an Australian tagged bird

Latur: G. Thikanna, serving in the Andaman Police Department as an Assistant Sub-Inspector in Communications was posted on one of the most remote and lesser-inhabited islands in the world to complete a one-month tenure. This island lies about 140 nautical miles away from the capital city, far from his family and loved ones in Port Blair. Life there is challenging, with no mobile network and no regular power supply. The only source of electricity is a portable generator that runs for about...

Birder Cop finds an Australian tagged bird

Latur: G. Thikanna, serving in the Andaman Police Department as an Assistant Sub-Inspector in Communications was posted on one of the most remote and lesser-inhabited islands in the world to complete a one-month tenure. This island lies about 140 nautical miles away from the capital city, far from his family and loved ones in Port Blair. Life there is challenging, with no mobile network and no regular power supply. The only source of electricity is a portable generator that runs for about three hours a day just enough to charge communication devices and essential equipment. This was his second visit to the island in 2025. On the morning of June 16, 2025, during a routine inspection of the shoreline, he noticed a small bird moving along with the tidal waves. What caught his attention, however, was that the bird was having some colour tags on it legs. The photographs revealed that the bird had three tags: a red flag leg above the knee and a yellow tag under the knee on it right leg. The left leg had a metal ring. The red flag had a code which read DYM. In March 2026, Dr. Raju Kasambe, ornithologist and former Assistant Director at Bombay Natural History Society, and founder of Mumbai Bird Katta, visited South Andaman for a birding trip by his venture. Thikanna shared his observation and photographs with him. Dr. Kasambe took great interest and asked Thikanna to send the photographs. He identified the bird as Sanderling (Calidris alba), which breeds in the extreme northern parts of Asia, Europe and North America. After studying the shorebird Colour Marking Protocol for the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF) Dr. Kasambe realized that the bird was tagged in South Australia. He informed the EEAF team and Ms. Katherine Leung reverted with the information about the tagging of this tiny migratory wader, which weighs just 40-100gramms. The wader was tagged on 13 April 2025 by Ms. Maureen Christie at the Danger Pt, Brown Bay, near Port Macdonnell, in South Australia. That means the wader had reached Narcondam Island after two months and three days on its return journey back the its breeding grounds in extreme northern parts of Asia. The straight-line distance the bird had flown was an amazing 7472km and it hadn’t yet reached its final destination – the breeding grounds. This is first record of resighting of any tagged bird on the Narcondam Island, as the island remains mostly inaccessible to bird watchers. Interesting, the Island is home to the endemic Narcondam Hornbill, a species which is not found anywhere in the world. Mr. G. Thikanna is associated with the Andaman avians Club which conducted bird watching and towards creating awareness about birds in the Andaman Island. Other members of the club have congratulated him on the great find in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Pakistan an old sinner

Mumbai: The ongoing ‘Operation Sindoor’ has been punctuated by fresh instances of cease-fire violations (CFVs) along the Line of Control (LoC) by Pakistan in specific border areas, as revealed by the Indian Army this week.


The trend is not new and Pakistan has been adept at CFVs with official data showing an average 13 daily breaches of truce during 10 years from 2010-2021.


During that period, the LoC in the erstwhile state Jammu & Kashmir suffered some 14,411 CFVs, with the figures dramatically shooting up after 2014 when the NDA government headed by PM Narendra Modi took office.


The eye-popping data was revealed to Pune activist Prafful Sarda in a RTI reply, showing 593 CFVs during the erstwhile UPA’s former PM Dr. Manmohan Singh’s tenure, and 13,818 under the NDA regimes post-2014 – totaling to 14,411 in 10 years.


Interestingly, the figure of border infringement was just one (01) in 2004 – when Dr. Singh’s government came to power - which shot up to an astronomical 4,645 in 2020.


This was despite the admirable surgical air-strikes in Balakot (Feb. 2019) and the country acquiring a sleek fleet of Rafale fighter jets (July 2020).


As per the RTI reply, the truce violations pertained to the LoC, and the government had categorically refused to divulge details of CFVs along the India-China borders, including specifics like the Doklam deadlock (June-Aug. 2017).


“The government invoked Sec. 8 (1)(a) of the RTI Act, 2005 to deny the Doklam details. The officialdom feels that such disclosure could affect India’s sovereignty and integrity, her security, strategic, scientific or economic interests, relations with foreign states, et al,” Sarda told 'The Perfect Voice'.


Starting with one CFV in 2004, it climbed to 6 (2005), 3 (2006), 21 (2007), 77 (2008), down to 28 (2009), and thereafter kept soaring each year – 44 (2010), 51 (2011), 93 (2012) and 199 (2013), at the fag end of the UPA’s second tenure.


Under the NDA, things appeared bright as CFV dropped to 153 (2014) and 152 (2015), and after PM Modi’s surprise visit to Pakistan to meet and greet ex-PM Nawaz Sharif on his birthday in Dec. 2015, the truce was flouted a whopping 228 times (2016).


In 2017, after Nirmala Sitharaman became Defence Minister, the rumblings on the borders increased with a staggering 860 CFVs – almost quadrupling over the previous year which also saw the Uri attacks by Pakistan and India’s retaliatory surgical strikes.


The CFV’s kept shooting up – 1,629 (2018), 3,233 (2019), and as NDA 2.0 was settling down in office, there were 4,645 truce violations (2020), and 524 (Jan-Feb. 2021) – the last two at the height of the Coronavirus Pandemic when the country remained under different lockdowns.

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