A partial census, kept badly, over twenty one years

I started keeping a notebook in my second year here, mostly because a class six student asked me how many kinds of bird lived in the valley and I did not know, and found that intolerable. Twenty one years later I still do not exactly know, which I have made peace with. What I have instead is eleven notebooks, a great many arguments settled and unsettled, and a fairly clear sense of what has changed. What has increased: rosy starlings, in numbers that would have astonished me in 2004. Black kites, which have followed the roads in. Bee-eaters, marginally. What has thinned: the sparrows, everywhere, as everyone already knows. The nightjars, which I now hear perhaps four times a season where I used to hear them most warm evenings. What has held: the hoopoes. Stubbornly, delightfully, exactly as many hoopoes as there have ever been, walking about the playing fields with that ridiculous crest like they own the place, which of course they do. The notebooks are in the biology room and anyone who wants to see them is welcome. Several of you are in them, incidentally. There is an entry from 2009 that reads only "A. Ghosh, class 8, insists the flycatcher is nesting near the tank. A. Ghosh is correct."