Competing over icons has become quite a sport in India, but Salim Ali, forever wandering in the bird-lover's secluded memory among fields and woods and slopes, has so far remained untouched. India's pioneering birdman would have been 121 this November. Before he died 30 years ago, he had produced foundational books for the study of birds in India - the Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, written with Dillon Ripley, in 10 volumes, Indian Hill Birds and Birds of the Eastern Himalayas, numerous regional field guides such as The Birds of Kerala, among more - together with numerous articles in journals such as the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. The Society was in many ways central to his development in a period when ornithology was unthinkable as a career. Not that Ali seemed to think of it as one. Birds were all he was interested in - he did not excel in any subject he studied formally - and much of his training came from Erwin Stresemann in Germany. Ali worked under him in the Berlin Zoological Museum and he referred to Stresemann as his guru. His closeness to the Society, which began when he was a young marksman taking lessons in taxonomy from the Western scientists in charge of it, grew after Independence into a relationship by virtue of which he was able to communicate his vision of conservation to the organization. He grew up at a time when hunting as a sport was being paralleled by killing for scientific interest. Although Ali preferred to spend his days in the "peace of the wilderness with birds" far away from the "dust and frenzy of taxonomical warfare", he acknowledged the importance of killing not for sport but for the interests of a nascent science. He even felt that the Indian culture of ahimsa had delayed the beginnings of the naturalist's study; science demanded a practical approach.

Salim Ali led the way not just in the study of birds but also in conservation. He received many honours in later life, and a number of centres and sanctuaries were named after him. He was the leading influence in forming the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary and the Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary, and in saving the Silent Valley National Park. What he may have relished most, though, was the naming of one of the rarest bats in the world Latidens salimalii in 1972, for he laid the way for the study of all nature. In his 120th year, 2016, the melodious Himalayan forest thrush was named Zoothera salimalii, distinguishing it from the raucous alpine thrush after the discovery of significant differences. Salim Ali's name is music still.