As a biodiversity conservationist and the founder of Roots Nature Club, Pooja Hemdev Lalwani conducts several workshops with children, who, if anything, are most curious about the birds they see around them. “I often receive messages from the kids or their parents, with pictures taken outside their window, asking me to help identify the birds they were seeing,” she shares. Beyond the parakeets, pigeons, sparrows and crows, many of them knew little or nothing about the avian species in Mumbai’s skies. In the pandemic-induced lockdowns, when people largely remained indoors, allowing birds to thrive in urban pockets, these queries only began increasing. “That’s when I realised that there was no handy guide for kids or even amateur birders to refer to. Field guides [books designed to help the reader identify wildlife] tend to be very technical, and aren’t easy to manoeuvre,” shares Lalwani, who in 2020 began collecting and collating information for a one-of-a-kind pictorial primer to the birds in the city.

Divided into colour codes, Lalwani’s guide doesn’t just throw light on the size and habitat type of each species, but also has fun trivia