Some wheat hybrids developed in India's agricultural universities are exceptionally good at keeping birds away
SCIENTISTS at Delhi's Indian
Agricultural Research Institute (IARI)
have identified five wheat varieties
developed in agricultural universities
and institutes that are resistant to
damage by birds, especially parrots.
However, these varieties failed at
pre-release trials and breeders are
now trying to incorporate the bird-
resistant property into other high-yielding wheat varieties, say
ornithologist R K Bhatnagar and
entomologist Vijai Shankar Singh.
Birds tend to damage crops from
sowing to sprouting and from grain-setting to harvest. Parakeets are a particular nuisance, because unlike
other birds that pick only on the
grains, they prefer to carry the entire
wheat cob to their nests. Of 14 parakeet species found in India, 10 cause
"excessive depredation", says Bhatnagar.
"They bite off more than they can
chew and the damage caused by
them is greater (than that from other
birds)," agrees Singh. In some cases,
parakeets have destroyed upto 80
per cent of grain of the best known
high-yielding variety of wheat,
Kalyansona.
However, Singh and Bhatnagar
found that some wheat varieties from
Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi
and Punjab were extremely "resistant" to the birds and lost only
between 2 and 12 per cent of the
grain. Close scrutiny of the structure
of these bird-resistant varieties
revealed that the plants had short
peduncles - stems between the
uppermost leaf and the wheat cob.
The scientists postulate that the top
leaf obstructs the bird in its attempt
to get at the cob.
The length of these stems in the
five bird-resistant varieties is
between 4 cm. and 8 cm, compared to
15 cm in the Kalyansona. The scientists found that other varieties with
large losses to parakeets also had
longer peduncles.
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