Talk:Hamsa (bird)

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There is also another page named Hamsa (Hindu mythology) and that deals the subject from the point of Hinduism. --Bhadani 12:32, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Since you created this new page Hamsa (Hindu mythology) today, shouldn't you rather incorporate your text in the Hamsa bird article? The title "Hamsa bird" is certainly not exclusive of Hinduism. PHG 13:10, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Swan or goose controversy

@Nyanatusita: I have reverted your changes, because they were based on blogs/unreliable sources such as birding.in, the dynamicnature.com, etc. Furthermore, your claim that "Its rarity in India is also indicated by there being no photographs and sightings of swans in India on birding websites such as Migrantwatch.in (17.11.2015)" violated WP:OR policy of wikipedia. Lack of a photo posted on some website as a basis for deriving new conclusion on what Hamsa is and is not, or was and was not, is prima facie original research. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 11:43, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

This section includes a reference to the work of someone named Alex McKay, but doesn't give any indication of who that is. The disambiguation page for that name lists MANY people named Alex or Alexander McKay. Is it one of them or one who isn't on the list? --JDspeeder1 (talk) 13:29, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Flags with Hamsa

Since Commons owns a http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Flags_with_hamsas page, is it the same bird (and is it really fictional) ? Then some flags could be added to the 'Contemporary usage' section here. Thanks for your expertise --methodood (talk) 06:46, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Restoring several sources and text per WP:NPOV

@Shyamal: I found some of your edits to this article unconstructive and inconsistent with the community agreed guidelines such as WP:NPOV. Allegations in your edit summary such as "cherrypicked" etc with false claims of "northwestern edges" seem inappropriate. The summary and sources you removed clearly mention swan and include a map of the subcontinent where those swan migrate to. This, per the source, is an area that is near the historic Himachal Pradesh+Punjab region, as well as a significant section of south Pakistan. That is not northwest edge of the Indian subcontinent, you falsely alleged in your edit comments. I have therefore restored that content. I welcome you to explain and discuss your concerns. Let us collaborate and improve this article within the community agreed guidelines. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 19:16, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

The reliability of K N Dave (or his predecessor Raghuvira) for ornithological identification is not considered high, particularly because he does not state why he makes the identification, the relevant characters in Sanskrit or even the verbatim sources and the provenance of Sanskrit source material. If the relevant Sanskrit source was indeed geographically traced to originate within the distribution zones of the species claimed, then there is indeed sufficient rigour in the claims. As for reliable sources of current distributions (not considering vagrancy which unfortunately gets a lot of weight in birding literature - like the Pong Dam sighting that you use as a form of proof) one can refer to http://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/whooper-swan-cygnus-cygnus/distribution http://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/mute-swan-cygnus-olor/distribution - for something to be culturally significant, it needs to be easy for readers to relate to a species. Incidentally, there are no swans breeding in Mansarovar. The breeding birds there are indeed bar-headed geese. As for inferring past distributions of these swans, there is currently no scientific technique with any known measures of reliability to elucidate them. The rather loose statements citing bird "fieldguides" and popular writing including Peter Scott, the late Paul Johnsgard, Grewal et al. do not demonstrate rigour or care for accuracy. Vogel incidentally was being very kind to consider the ascribed filtering of milk and water as a possible clue to considering the flamingo (although its filter feeding was, historically, a much later discovery, at least as far as the written scientific record goes) Shyamal (talk) 04:40, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Shyamal: Wikipedia is not a place for OR and WP:Synthesis, your personal soap / prejudice / wisdom / opinion / ignorance / experience / beliefs. Nor is it a place to allege as you do above, falsely may I add, "pong dam sighting (...) you use as a form of proof". Is there a scholarly source for your "Vogel was being very kind ..." claim? Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 06:39, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I am sorry, I am unaware of the idea that talk pages need to follow all the Wikipedia policies. All I was offering here on the talk page was a commentary to help you understand the edits (deletions) I made in the past. As for the comment above on Vogel's suggestion that it could be a flamingo on the basis of the filtering metaphor is definitely something that would favour the idea that knowledge of flamingo biology was very advanced in India. Regarding ["cherrypicked" etc with false claims of "northwestern edges"] you may check the distribution maps given above (the IUCN maps are developed with consultation from specialists across the geography and therefore independent, reliable, and a tertiary source) to see why vagrant records do not constitute claims of being in the core distribution range. Paul Johsgaard source that you note as being removed is a very rough map to use at a global scale and not really appropriate for use for claims on fine distribution in the Indian region. The same holds for Peter Scott. The editor who added it was evidently adding a strong POV slant to support swans (contra geese) and not taking into account what is really known. I have not seen Grewal's book and the specific source but "Grewal, Harvey and Pfister, in 2003, identified large swaths of northwestern India and northeastern Pakistan particularly Kashmir and parts of south Pakistan as winter habitats of mute swans." definitely looks like a misinterpretation of a map and those in fieldguides tend to be just rough indicators. I would actually claim that whoever wrote that original paragraph was in fact running afoul of WP:SYNTH, WP:OR, WP:RS etc. I would encourage anyone interested in reliable source on Indian ornithology to examine sources like - Ali, Salim; Ripley, S. Dillon (1978). Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, together with those of Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Volume I. (2 ed.). Delhi: Oxford University Press. pp. 134–138. Here are some extracts from those pages:

• Cygnus columbianus bewickii - "three records from Pakistan and one from Delhi ... otherwise extralimital."
• Cygnus columbianus jankowskii - "very rare straggler in severe winters ... only three records - Baluchistan, NWFP and one from Kutch."
• Cygnus cygnus - "Very rare straggler in sever winters. Less than a dozen occurrences ... on in Nepal in 1829, the others in the present century in NWF Province... Latest record of three birds on Chenab at Timmu (Jhang district, W. Pakistan), December 1953..."
• Cygnus olor - "Very rare straggler in severe winters. About a dozen specimens in all have been taken within our limits sporadically during the last hundred years (the last in 1911), chiefly in West Pakistan - N. Baluchistan, Sind, the former NW Fronter Province, and Punjab."

Interested readers who are looking at this talk page debate may also find more recent syntheses on swan distributions in the region in P.C. Rasmussen and Anderton's two volume work on the Birds of South Asia. I will note also that captioning Raja Ravi Varma's painting (made in 1899) as "Hamsa talking to Damayanti in Hindu mythology" is subtle POV. It is an artist's rendition, not a depiction of facts, although his paintings have reified the popular notion of hamsa as a swan. I have however not made any bold OR or SYNTH claims in this regard but merely edited the caption to note the fact that it was in fact made by Raja Ravi Varma (for which the Commons metadata can be examined as a source). It is generally known that Raja Ravi Varma was trained in the European tradition and may have been inspired by depictions of Leda - but that is just for anyone wanting to examine it in more detail. I do not think what I said in the edit comment should need citations. Shyamal (talk) 08:35, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Shyamal: While admitting that you have not seen a cited source, you are sharing your feelings with "definitely looks like...". That is inappropriate. The problem with OR and soapy discussions on the talk page is that it is typically unhelpful in improving the article! Thank you for citing the Salim Ali source. His first publication, "The Book of Indian Birds" was published in 1941 where it is unclear how well-resourced, extensive and thorough his surveys were given the very impoverished conditions and the poor-infrastructure in India-Pakistan-Bangladesh before 1950. The 1970 multi-volume Salim Ali source is more recent, yet reads similar to his earlier book in many parts. Your quotes do not say that swans have never ever been spotted in India, it just says that in their survey Salim Ali and Dillon Ripley reported it "very rare" (we can add this to the Vogel para). This article already cites a more recent book published in 2008 on "ducks + geese + swans in India" also by Oxford University Press. Whether a bird is common, rare, very rare or extinct in the 20th or 21st century, does not necessarily preclude or affect an idea, concept, mythology and historical iconography found in Buddhist, Hindu and Jain literature and arts. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 09:43, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I do not think I ever said or tried to preclude the suggestion that hamsa = genus Cygnus (swan), I am only trying to put the weightage right - for something to be embedded in culture it needs to be reasonably commonplace not something that has been recorded a countable number of times in more than a century (one needs to be able to read between the lines or know something about bird distributions to understand the rarity when people write about it eg1, eg2 (DO EXAMINE THIS IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN IT)). Now as I noted earlier, there is of course a possibility that the bird was formerly common in India (that situation has been examined and considered very plausible in Egyptian art and faunistic representations as well) - but it does demand that people (authors and their sources) demonstrate evidence carefully and for editors like you and me to evaluate the quality of that evidence (Not everything that is in print is equal). The bar-headed goose actually looks nearly all white unless you use binoculars or get really close to them (rather impossible normally in the wild) but it occurs commonly enough in winter to be incorporated into culture. What I cited is indeed the multi-volume Handbook (second edition) which is in NO WAY COMPARABLE to the Book of Indian Birds (which is really meant for absolute lay-persons who were never aware that more than 1000 bird species existed around them - even if it covers only a small sample) even if it is by the same author. This is exactly the problem of understanding what a reliable source is for a given area of specialist knowledge - I am afraid it does require a bit of editorial understanding / specialist knowledge (even if you do not like it or if the community has said no to credentials) to understand what reliability means in that field. In terms of reliable sources, the Handbook simply trumps all that has been used on this page as sources for bird information. And NO, it absolutely does NOT restrict itself to what was seen in their limited surveys - it is a COMPREHENSIVE review of ALL the literature known until that point in time when it was published. The only more recent work along those lines would be Rasmussen and Anderton's Birds of South Asia (I unfortunately do not have their second edition of 2012) - but you are welcome to make a request for the relevant material at WT:BIRD or WP:RX and someone will locate the contents for you. [Just an aside - I actually do happen to know personally the authors Bikram Grewal, Otto Pfister, Asad Rahmani and some of the others you cite, and I would encourage you to contact them if you want an independent commentary. I am happy to provide you their email ids if you wish.] Shyamal (talk) 10:46, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Incidentally Salim Ali is unambiguous in his identification Shyamal (talk) 13:41, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Dr Raghuvira ... With varying, often dubious, success he identifies some 250 Sanskrit words with known species of Indian birds. Some of his conclusions, however, are distinctly far-fetched. Classical Sanskrit literature occasionally makes specific mention of bird migration, as, for example, the migration of geese (hamsa) - wrongly rendered as 'swans' by many commentators - to Lake Manasa (Mansarovar). The poet, Kalidasa, a close observer of bird behaviour, described the migratory habits of two species of geese, Raj-hamsa (Bar-headed) and Kadamba (Greylag) as accompanying the rain clouds on their way from the Vindhyas to the Himalaya.

Shyamal: We already summarize Ali's view in that Azad Memorial Lecture (fwiw, one must ask if such invited lectures get the critical peer review before the lecture is given). No need for personal emails. We must rely on published, quality scholarship. You claim above, "something to be embedded in culture it needs to be reasonably commonplace", which I read as "something to be embedded [over 2000 to 3000 years] in culture it needs to be reasonably commonplace [in 20th and 21st century CE]". That is strange OR. Do you have a scholarly source that discusses this assumption / claim? or a source for birding data pre-17th century Indian subcontinent or pre-10th-century or earlier? Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 14:07, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

In your own way you have actually struck at the root of problem. For 2000-3000 years people talked to each other about hamsa - they knew what they were talking about. Then we had people translating it into English - and then some orientalists came up with fanciful ideas like "swan" - and to reify this into popular culture we had western-trained artists like Raja Ravi Varma painting such pictures as the Hamsa and Damayanti which were apparently extremely popular in the early 20th century particularly in Hindu calendars. It is thanks to these influences and the lack of critical reading that we are here. Obviously what I state here is original research that you are welcome to be critical of and dismiss. Now you ask about peer-review of lectures. I like that idea but let us just apply that fairly to the work that you use rather a lot - K.N. Dave - that book is certainly not peer-reviewed and well one can even question the qualifications of the author as regards knowledge of birds. I am going however to generous and accept that he knew his Sanskrit (despite poor scholarly methods such as annotation, footnoting, sourcing, and provenance examination as well as obvious and rampant errors such as "सारस is again a Swan in रामायण ." p. 430). To avoid these tangential discussions, I note a few specific issues on the article:

1. The entire paragraph which goes from the logic of swans have occured in India (TRUE) to therefore - hamsa _can be_ a swan (TRUE) - rather than to note that it _could be_ swans but that they have been extremely rare in the last two centuries (FACT but making no implications) - as given in the most reliable sources on the topic.
2. "The Sanskrit and Pali languages, both have alternate words for goose such as Jalapada, Dhamara, Cakragki, Majjugamana, Shvetagaruta and others." - I am not able to see the logic of this claim - there are multiple words for many things - and why should that identification of goose be any better reasoned?

(ps) Census Study of Ducks, Swans and Geese from High-Altitude Wetlands of Pakistan (Nazir, Malik and Shah (2018); Quote: "Banjosa Game Reserve had the most diversity with 41% of Mute swan, 10% of Lesser White-fronted Goose and 32% of the Northern Shoveler"; Banjosa Reserve and Lake are in the contested part of Kashmir, about 10 miles west of Poonch (town) at the de facto border of Pakistan and India). Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 16:46, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Excellent, now let us just examine the journal website - https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/jbm/editorialboard.html - list of editors - Chairman Dr. Afsar Mian jbm.brc@gmail.com - interesting - an institution "Center for Bioresource Research (CBR) Islamabad/ Institute of Natural and Management Sciences, Rawalpindi (INAM)" that cannot afford an email domain. Editors: Dr. Fakhar-i-Abbas Director - same email as before jbm.brc@gmail.com - ok - another editor - Dr. Thomas P. Rooney - Professor also same mail id jbm.brc@gmail.com but from Wright State University, USA - so there is a Rooney - but no longer at Wright State University - https://people.wright.edu/thomas.rooney - Let us see the advisory board - Dr. Gray J. Galbreath Professor Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA - well, good luck finding that professor; Dr. Jan Schmidth-Burbach Director World Society for the Protection of Animals - oops, there is a "Jan Schmidt-Burbach" with an organization called World Animal Protection. Well, I can continue - but I think I can repeat that it takes a bit of knowledge to understand what "reliable" sources means. I would challenge your idea that Wikipedia does not need "your personal soap / prejudice / wisdom / opinion / ignorance / experience / beliefs" - Wikipedia works (when it does) because it actually does need your experience, your beliefs, your prejudices, your wisdom and your opinions, but all clearly understood and communicated :) Shyamal (talk) 17:33, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

That source is merely a placeholder to weigh against some you have been linking above. I, for one, would not add any of these to this article. Thanks for agreeing that last 2000-3000 years and Indian texts on hamsa are important, or "you have struck at the root of problem" as you put it. We should not impose bird sighting reports from the 20th or 21st century to create a one sided view about those 2000-3000 years. Once again, do you have any scholarly source for birding data pre-17th century Indian subcontinent or pre-10th-century or earlier? Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 17:58, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I am not sure I understand your claim. A fake journal article with an abstract reading "Banjosa Game Reserve had the most diversity with 41% of Mute swan, 10% of Lesser White-fronted Goose and 32% of the Northern Shoveler." - 41% of what? the global population? - nope, it just does not cut it as any form of decent scholarship. I am not sure I understand the purpose or the requirement of your pre-17th century "birding". "Birding" was a recreational activity starting in the late 19th century at best in any part of the world. There is material on fowling based on interpretations of some Greek texts but I doubt there is any relevance here. Shyamal (talk) 05:21, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Ok, I had a look at the relevant Grewal, Harvey, Pfister page and can see that "identified large swaths of northwestern India and northeastern Pakistan particularly Kashmir and parts of south Pakistan as winter habitats of mute swans" is absolutely untrue. There is no such statement in the book. This is a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of a small map in the book which has a little bounding region of the handful of historic occurrences. Here is what the map caption actually says "Winter vagrant mainly to Pakistan but also northwest India. Other two swan species have same rare status. Also occurs in Europe east to Central Asia and south to N Africa. In Europe and other temperate areas there are many feral populations in urban areas and it is common in bird collections" - I would suggest removal of that entire line unless you want to note the rarity of swans in the region. Incidentally - anyone more interested in the topic should also check other sources like this note - on the Annam (naturally not meeting RS for Wikipedia purposes) as well as commentaries on Kalidasa like this one Shyamal (talk) 05:37, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Also had to recheck what Dr Johnsgard (who died last year) actually wrote - Map 10 shows a map of the wintering zone of the mute swan extending along the southern part of Pakistan and in text briefly mentions "northwestern India". Nowhere does it really support the idea that it goes to the northwestern Himalayan region - "has stated that mute swan (Cygnus Olor[sic]) do migrate to northwestern Himalayan region..." - given the scope of the book it does not deal with India much. Now if anyone knows a bit of bird biology would realize that crossing the Himalaya is an exceptional feat (esp. for one of the heaviest flying birds) that swans would have trouble with. This again is a misquotation of the source. Shyamal (talk) 06:01, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Also checked Sir Peter Scott's work - it is a reprint of a 1957 work - much older and outdated than the second edition of Ali and Ripley (1978) which is being noted above as being out-dated.

Anderton, J. C. (2005). Birds of South Asia. Volume 2:Attributes and Status. Smithsonian Institution and Lynx Edicions. pp. 68–69. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |DUPLICATE-author1= ignored (help) Relevant extracts:

"Swans. Three species, all winter vagrants."

"Mute Swan Cygnus olor: Occurs: Winter vagrant to NW, in past apparently in flocks; rare in open inland waterbodies. [Breeds naturally C Asia, wintering to SW Asia, widely introduced]."

"Whooper Swan Cygnus cygnus Occurs: Winter vagrant to NW."

"Bewick's Swan Cygnus bewickii Occurs: Winter vagrant to NW."

Summary - nothing to support claim that they are regular winter migrants - as claimed using Johnsgard and Peter Scott. Shyamal (talk) 06:34, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

References

Shyamal: This is not an article on "Birds in 20th and 21st century India", or "Remarkable feats of Himalayan birds", etc. I ignore all your related links and websites and papers with your own qualifiers like "naturally not meeting RS". This is an article about Hamsa, a concept in Buddhist, Hindu, Jain texts over 3000 some years. I agree with you that the language in this article should closely reflect the sources. I looked at Grewal, Harvey, Pfister again. I would welcome revising the wording, with or without a map similar to it. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 11:15, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Sarah Welch - IT was you who made the allegation that I had introduced "false information" - I was pointing out the amount of misinformation being introduced in the identification of the bird (I have not cared to find out who did it). It is up to you to choose between good and bad sources (like a hamsa) - you may choose to ignore and fill the article with unreliable sources and push fringe POV as you wish to do - I just noticed that Dave himself noted the rarity of swans even citing Hume for the information on the distribution to the northwest of the region - all of which was stated by you above to be false information. I find your comments above, frankly, inane. Bye. Shyamal (talk) 11:36, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Wujastyk's addition

@Wujastyk is spot on, when he added, "Some have criticised Vogel's view as being over-reliant on artistic representations from south India and Sri Lanka, where the white swan is rare." In the next edit, he added the Jataka tales phrase. This has to be Jataka 502, and likely in the Pali canons (likely the minor anthologies of the Canon, such as Khuddaka-Nikaya). If we can find and cite that, it would improve this article. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 20:00, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

For someone berating editors that they should rely on just published sources and have no subject-matter expertise - accepting an uncited claim as being "spot on" hardly counts as fair. Let us examined the paragraph that lacks logical connectivity:

Some have criticised Vogel's view as being over-reliant on artistic representations from south India and Sri Lanka, where the white swan is rare. Paul Johnsgard, in 2010, has stated that mute swan (Cygnus Olor) do migrate to northwestern Himalayan region of India every winter, migrating some 1000 miles each way. Similarly, the British ornithologist Peter Scott, in his Key to the Wildfowl of the World (1957), states that northwestern India is one of the winter migration homes for mute swan, the others being Korea and Black Sea. Grewal, Harvey and Pfister, in 2003, state that the Mute Swan is "a vagrant mainly in Pakistan but also northwestern India" and include a map marking their distribution. Asad Rahmani and Zafar-ul Islam, in their 2009 book, describe the three species of swans and thirty-nine species of ducks and geese found in India.

In order for this to be logically coherent, assuming that a reliable source for the first claim will eventually be found, is that subsequent claim would be THAT the swan is NOT rare outside of south India and Sri Lanka (so as to support the proposition countering Vogel). [If that is based on citations, it would be perfectly acceptable] What follows however is a series of three citations that merely mention note occurrence of the bird somewhere on the Indian subcontinent. One source is misquoted - Johnsgard states that they occur on the northwestern India (not much to do with the Himalayas as claimed). Sir Peter Scott's book was among the first attempts at a fieldbook that demonstrated his art work more than anything. It was first published in 1951 and then as the "coloured key" in 1957 and reprinted again later. Scott was merely interested in waterfowl breeding an no subject-matter specialist will cite it for any such distributional information. Rahman and Islam is actually ok as far as a source, HOWEVER, unless it had a logical connection to the counter-position it makes little sense. I have checked indeed checked the relevant pages of Rahmani and Islam - they do indeed describe the species and note nothing significant other than the extreme rarity within the region over two centuries. Now it appears that you do not like Ali's Handbook, nor Rasmussen & Anderton - and I find Dave's scholarship of poor-quality - but remarkably even Dave agrees that the species is too rare and offers a logical speculation which you too seem to accept. I find this paragraph adding nothing except a logically incoherent bunch of statements. Hence marking the entire paragraph as non sequitir. Any reasonable editor should be able to see the problem and either delete the mass of needless wordiness or to fix it appropriately. Shyamal (talk) 12:05, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

References

Plural?

I know next to nothing about Sanskrit, but a very tiny bit of research has taught me that Sanskrit forms plurals with different inflections. That can be represented by diacritical marks in English, but diacritics aren't very common or well understood to English speakers. Would it be incorrect to use "hamsas" as a. plural, or do we just use the same word for singular and plural? What is the policy? --JDspeeder1 (talk) 13:51, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

I doubt there is a chance of a policy there considering that both Himalaya and Himalayas are in use. I do not see a problem with using Hamsas for the plural, at least in English writing. Shyamal (talk) 14:48, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

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Rename it to Hansa

It should be renamed to hansa as it is pronounced as hansa RamaKrishnaHare (talk) 17:06, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

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