Migratory waterbirds of wetlands of southern West Bengal, India Subhendu Mazumdar, Kushal Mookherjee & Goutam Kumar Saha Mazumdar, S., Mookherjee, K. & Saha, G. K. 2007. Migratory waterbirds of wetlands of southern West Bengal, India. Indian Birds 3 (2): 42–45. Subhendu Mazumdar, West Bengal Biodiversity Board, 10A, Block LA, Sector-III, Salt Lake City, Kolkata 700098, West Bengal, India. Email:
[email protected] Kushal Mookherjee, Prakriti Samsad, 65, Golf Club Road, Kolkata 700033, West Bengal, India. Goutam Kumar Saha, Department of Zoology, University of Calcutta, 35, Ballygunge Circular Road, Kolkata 700019, West Bengal, India. Mss received on: 27.iv.2006. igration is a regular seasonal movement of animals fed fish farms owned by the Department of Fisheries, to ensure the best possible living conditions for their Government of West Bengal. Msurvival. As a rule, it is an innate response of an 2. Santragachi Jheel (SJ) and Saheb Badh (SB) are two large animal population to several periodic changes in the wetlands surrounded by roads and human habitations environmental conditions (Pettingill 1956). Although a common and under constant anthropogenic pressure. However, phenomenon in different animal groups, the most interesting SB (average depth 9.7m) is a larger wetland than SJ and the best studied of all is bird migration. During winter, in the (average depth 1.8m) (Anon 1998). It had less emergent northern hemisphere, several species of birds migrate annually vegetation and floating macrophytes than SJ during the from trans-Himalayan regions and other parts of northern Asia survey. to the wetlands of India. They spend the entire winter at these 3.