Famous bird-watcher Bikram Grewal not only relishes the sport but also publishes the fruits of his explorations to produce treaures of information on the flying creatures. He talks to Bindu Shajan Perappadan about the conservation scenario of birds in India. He burst onto the Indian ornithology scene with little warning and quickly earned the reputation of being the "bad boy of ornithology'. Bikram Grewal now a world-famous bird-watcher, author and publisher began as a "closet bird-watcher' and it took a sort of record breaking sale of his book "Birds of India' to be finally accepted as someone who is serious about birds. "As a child I would spend all of my holidays in the forests of the then undivided Assam, from where my mother came. My grandmother Rani Niharbala Barua of Gauripur had tremendous knowledge of birds of that area and she was the first to inculcate this passion that has lasted till today. I was sent to a boarding school in Himachal at a very early age. I was tremendously unhappy. The ethos there was that a person who read a book was a