A small bird rested in a 10-year-old boy's hands. It looked like a house sparrow, except for one detail that refused to fit what he knew: a patch of yellow on its throat.

The bird had been brought down by a toy gun, one of many childhood games played by boys of that era. But instead of putting it aside, the child kept looking at it. Why did it look different? What bird was it?

That question would become the turning point of a life that would change the way India understood its birds.

The boy was Salim Ali.

Born on 12 November 1896 as Salim Moizuddin Abdul Ali, he was the youngest of nine children. His father died when he was barely a year old, and by the time he was three, he had lost his mother too. 

Orphaned at an early age, Salim and his siblings were brought up by their maternal uncle, Amiruddin Tyabji, and aunt, Hamida Begum, in Mumbai.

Years later, India would know him as the "Birdman of India", the ornithologist whose work transformed bird study from scattered observations into systematic science. But that journey began not in a forest or a laboratory, but with the curiosity of a child who simply wanted an answer.

The bird that became the starting point 

Unable to identify the........

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