A bird festival is to be organised at Mahananda wildlife Sanctuary in West Bengal. The festival is first of its kind. It is to be organised by Darjeeling Wildlife Division. The Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary has been identified as an Important Bird and Biodiversity Area.

Important Bird Area

An Important Bird and Biodiversity Area is identified using internationally agreed set of criteria that are globally important for conservation of bird population. The Important Bird Area concept was developed by Birdlife International.

Currently there are 12,000 Important Bird Area spread all over the world. The thresholds of the Important Bird Areas are set by the respective national governing organisations. In order to be listed under Important Bird Area, the site must satisfy at least one of the following criteria:

A1: Globally threatened species

The site should hold population of bird species listed as Critically Endangered, vulnerable or endangered under IUCN red list.

A2: Restricted range species

The site should be an Endemic bird Area. The Endemic Bird Area is identified by the Birdlife International as those habitats that contains restricted bird species that are endemic to them. Around 218 Endemic Bird Areas have been identified by the Birdlife International. Endemic means the species is native to a single geographic location and not found elsewhere.

A3: Biome-restricted range species

The site should hold restricted biome species. The site should form a set of selected adequate representation of all species in that biome. That is, the species living in the site should be endemic and should be found only in that particular biome (not anywhere else in the world).

A4: Congregations

This applies to waterbirds, seabirds and wetland birds. This has been created based on Ramsar Convention.

Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary

It is located in the foothills of Himalayas between Teesta and Mahananda rivers. It was provided the status of sanctuary mainly to protect Indian bison and Royal Bengal Tiger.