A checklist of birds in agricultural landscapes of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract

We carried out a survey to prepare a checklist of birds across agricultural landscape of Aligarh district, Uttar Pradesh, India. 146 species belonging to 49 families of 17 orders were recorded. Maximum numbers of species belong to the families Accipitridae and Muscicapidae (10 each). 29% of the recorded species have a decreasing population trend while that of 12% of the species is unknown. Only one species (Egyptian Vulture) is endangered according to IUCN, while the number of near threatened and vulnerable species is six each. We ranked the species according to their encounter rate and found that only three species are abundant while 72 of them are rare. The present study is expected to give direction to future studies on various aspects of avian ecology across agricultural landscapes.