On January 26, 2024, I joined the Asian Waterbird Census at Kawal Tiger Reserve without knowing the name of a single bird. I'd signed up through Hyticos - the Hyderabad Tiger Conservation Society - as a volunteer with no field experience and no idea what I was walking into.

The survey ran for three days, mornings and evenings, across six lakes. It's a joint effort between Hyticos and the Telangana Forest Department, and I was there mostly to carry things and ask questions. Our field coordinator, Dr Venkatesh, and the rest of the team knew every bird by silhouette before it landed. I was still learning to hold the binoculars steady.

Common and pied kingfishers, a white-throated kingfisher, knob-billed ducks, spoonbills, painted storks, a snake eagle overhead, plum-headed parakeets, spot-billed ducks, Eurasian coots, moorhens, bronze-winged jacanas, and more I couldn't name even now — that's some of what six lakes in three days actually looked like. What I remember more than any single species is standing at the edge of a lake I'd never heard of, watching birds I'd never seen, and understanding for the first time that this whole world had been running quietly without me.

One afternoon we visited a village inside the reserve and sat with the families who lived there. It wasn't part of the survey, but it became the part I think about most — the other side of a forest I'd only ever thought of as habitat. The people living inside it face their own version of hard, and nobody had told me that before.

The hardest thing to learn that week wasn't a bird. It was that Kawal — a tiger reserve — has no resident tigers in its core or buffer zones. The forest department and Hyticos are doing real work on the ground, and there still aren't any. I didn't understand why, and that not-understanding didn't go away when the survey ended.

I started asking the field assistants questions I don't think they were fully equipped to answer, so eventually I went to Dr Venkatesh directly. He answered almost everything — when the last resident tiger had actually left the reserve, and why. What I took from that conversation was that Kawal isn't one problem. Every region of the reserve has its own version of the same question, and none of the answers is simple.

I didn't understand all of it. I still don't. But I left that week wanting to be useful to the answer, even in some small way — and wanting to see more of the forest than a three-day survey could show me.

That wanting is what got me onto a transect line a few months later. That's a story for another entry.