Commonly found avifauna of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

This work was taken with the prime objective to make an inventory of the avifauna of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University campus. A total of 54 taxa of avifauna belonging to 34 families has been recorded in the survey carried out from August 2014 to August 2015. For birding, the campus was mapped into three different habitats viz., Wet land - Paddy Breeding Station (PBS), Botanical Garden and Orchard. Comparison of species similarities between the habitats, revealed 1.75% similarity between PBS and Botanical Garden, 1.81% similarity between PBS and Orchard and 42.85% between Botanical Garden and Orchard. Among the three sites PBS ranks first with the record of more number of species (32) followed by Botanical garden (26) which is closely followed by Orchard (24). Among the feeding guilds, insectivores dominate in species strength (33.33%) followed by carnivores (25.92%), omnivores (16.67%), grainivore (12.97%), piscivores (9.25%) and nectarivores (1.85%). The results of relative diversity (RD) index showed that Ardeidae (RD value = 7.40) was the dominant family in the area.