Birdwatching aka birding is a popular hobby and is fairly easy to pursue. All you need to have to start off is a good pair of binoculars or a camera if you want to take snapshots of beautiful birds. Hyderabad is home to a healthy-sized birding community and Ritish Kannayagari, of KMIT, is an avid birder who has been pursuing this hobby for a few years now, after having been introduced to it incidentally.

 "My first birding experience was to Narsapur Forest with a group called DCP Expedtions. I was newly introduced to birdwatching in this photowalk, I had a very basic camera with kit lens and there were other people with swanky equipment, shooting brilliant pictures of birds. That was when I really got interested in birding," says Ritish, who also feels that bird watching is a really challenging hobby, adding, "The hobby needs a lot of dedication and observational skills and also needs you to be connected a lot to the nature."

Birdwatching can also teach a person a lot about nature and ecology. It is a hobby that requires a person to travel a lot and explore wilderness without any fear or hesitation and in turn, it enables a person to know a lot about the behaviour of various animals, the role vegetation plays in animal-life and more.

 "I like bird watching because I love travel and nature. I got to learn a lot about bird behaviour, how different vegetations in nature attract different birds. How each thing in nature is helpful to each other in survival, how different trees help in different birds. How the animals or birds adapt to the changes in environment and so on, shares Ritish, also adding, "It is a hobby that helped me explore my love for travelling and helped me understand various aspects of photography as well, as nature photography is very different compared to other genres of photography."

He learnt identifying birds through two mentors he had in the birding community and he says, "I can now identify more than 200 species of birds and in the beginning, I used to take help of my mentors and also a book called Birds of Indian Subcontinent, to learn how to identify birds."

Having managed to spot and take pictures of rare birds like Hen Harrier, Black Eagle, Lesser Florican, Malabar Trogon, Crested Bunting, Indian Skimmer, Ritish says the rarest bird he spotted was Lesser Florican, which is a critically endangered bird. 

According to him, it is easy for students to start off with birding as you don't really need a lot of equipment to start off, as he says, "Birding will teach you a lot and you can start off without any equipment. It also gives you a majorly different perspective.