A month with its parents: what one scholar is learning about the Kashmir flycatcher

In the temperate forests of Kashmir, PhD scholar Peerzada Faizan Fayaz has watched young flycatchers stay with their parents for nearly a month after leaving the nest. It is a rare record for a small, Vulnerable bird that crosses the length of India every year, and about which scientists still know very little.

Fayaz, a wildlife sciences scholar at SKUAST-Kashmir, says this behaviour is rarely recorded for the Kashmir flycatcher. His research into the bird's breeding biology is supervised by Khursheed Ahmad, a professor in the university's Division of Wildlife Sciences, who studies which kinds of forest the species needs.

The bird is about 13 centimetres long. The male is easy to recognise: a rich orange throat and breast set against a dark head and back. The female is much paler and looks pinkish underneath. Pairs nest in May and June and lay three to five pale green eggs speckled with reddish-brown.

For decades the bird was not considered a species of its own. After its description in 1934, it was classed as a subspecies of the red-breasted flycatcher, still its closest relative. Today it stands alone, and it is in trouble. Its breeding range, on both the Indian and Pakistani sides of the north-western Himalayas, has been broken into fragments by timber cutting, clearing for farmland and livestock grazing.

The flycatcher is loyal to its ground. Wildlife biologist Shashank Dalvi has seen individual birds return to exactly the same territories year after year. The habit seems to hold at the other end of the journey too. In the hills of central Sri Lanka, where most of the population probably spends the winter, each bird defends its own patch and comes back to the same spot every day. Victoria Park in Nuwara Eliya is one of the best-known places to find one.

Other birds winter in India's Western Ghats and around Ooty. But the journey between Kashmir and the south remains largely unknown. Ashwin Viswanathan of Bird Count India says the species' migration routes and stopover sites are still largely a mystery. Birds leave the breeding forests in September, reach Sri Lanka by October and start back north in late March. Almost nothing is known about where they stop along the way.

That gap is why Intesar Suhail, wildlife warden for North Kashmir, wants more detailed study of how the bird's breeding ecology may be changing over time. The researchers also see a reason for cautious optimism. The species matures early, and they say this could allow its numbers to grow noticeably, as long as the forests it returns to each spring are still there.