After surviving months of torridly high temperatures, seeing my year's saving spent on sky high electricity bills -- thanks to an always on air conditioner threatening to go off the rails any minute -- the monsoon rains couldn't arrive any sooner.?
Instead of the hilarious MET department, this year I placed my trust in old legends and ancestral tales to track the monsoon rain as it arrived in India. And no, I didn't sing?Raag Malhar or spied on dancing peacocks. I tracked the flight pattern of pied cuckoos.
wikipedia
In case you don't know, a pied cuckoo or chatak has the magical ability to summon rains wherever it goes. In fact, it feeds off rain. Or at least that's what my grandmother led me to believe. The story of how pied cuckoos signalled the beginning of rainy season is one of the oldest stories I can remember from my childhood.
The pied cuckoo is closely associated with monsoon rains in India -- so much so that generations of nature watchers and observers have found a strong correlation between a pied cuckoo's sighting and rain following closely behind. It's given rise to this myth that the pied cuckoo itself summons rain as it flies all over the Indian subcontinent. The bird's legend has even been referenced in the works of poet Kalidasa.
Wikipedia / MD Madhusudan, Scientist-Ecologist, NCF
However, the myth of the Rain Bird or pied cuckoo isn't just the stuff of legends and old wives tales. With the help of technology, it looks like?Google?Earth?and Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) have confirmed what our ancestors have known for long -- they've managed to dynamically track the pied cuckoo's flight across India and link it back to monsoon rain actually being reported on the ground. And there's a strong link between the two.
Parmil Kumar
According to MD Madhusudan, scientist and co-founder at Nature Conservation Foundation, nothing more than a pair of binoculars and smartphone goes into tracking the pied cuckoo's migration across India.
"The data we use to visualise the distribution of the pied cuckoo over time¡ªabout 10,000 records¡ªcomes from hundreds of citizen birdwatchers who participate in a large and open-access global citizen-science project called eBird (www.ebird.org)," he explains.
Using eBird's smartphone app, ?these ?birdwatchers from various parts of the country regularly report their sightings of hundreds of bird species, including the Pied Cuckoo. When large numbers of people participate in such an effort regularly, it becomes possible even to track the timing and progress of bird migration.?
Mr Madhusudan tells me how the NCF uses Google Earth Outreach -- which comes with Google's powerful, large-scale remote-sensing analysis platform -- to link the places where the pied cuckoo was sighted to instances of monsoon rain that followed at those exact spots on the map.
Google Earth Engine was finally used to map nearly 40 years of rainfall data to accurately visualize the spread of monsoon across India, which seems to magically follow the pied cuckoo's sighting across NCF's and eBird's data points. When all that data is fed through a machine learning model, it comes with a simple visualization map of the findings for easy consumption.
"Google has always been interested in big problems," Mr Madhusudan tells me. "When you look at it like that, what could be a bigger or more important problem than the very well-being of our planet?!"
When I ask him about what measures need to be taken to ensure the pied cuckoo legend remains visible for future generations to relish, Mr Madhusudan says, "When enough numbers of people know and care about something, good things¡ªlike ensuring that winged wonders like the pied cuckoo don't get wiped off the face of earth¡ªcan start to happen."