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As a boy in early-1900s Bombay, Sálim Ali shot a sparrow with his air gun. It had a yellow patch on its throat, and neither he nor anyone around him could name it. His uncle sent him to the Bombay Natural History Society, where the honorary secretary W. S. Millard identified it as a yellow-throated sparrow, showed him the Society's collection of preserved birds, and lent him books. That act turned a casual shooter into a lifelong ornithologist.
Indian ornithology before Ali mostly meant collecting and classifying museum specimens. His training in Germany convinced him that the real open questions were about how birds actually live: behaviour, breeding and ecology. Those questions can only be answered by patient observation in the field. This shifts the unit of knowledge from the labelled skin in a drawer to the living animal in its habitat.
While living at Kihim on the coast near Bombay, Ali spent long periods watching baya weaver colonies. He found that males weave the hanging nests and that females inspect half-built nests and choose among them. He also found that a male may build several nests and take more than one mate. His resulting paper showed that sustained observation by one person could answer behavioural questions that museum study could not.
With no government post, Ali proposed systematic bird surveys of individual princely states, including Hyderabad, Travancore and Cochin. Each ruler or state paid the field costs in return for a documented inventory of its own avifauna. Each survey used a standard method of collecting, recording and publishing. Added together, these patron-funded regional studies became the baseline for mapping the birds of the whole subcontinent.