Along with Sidney Dillon Ripley he wrote the landmark ten volume Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan, a second edition of which was completed after his death.

Along with his siblings, Ali was brought up by his maternal uncle, Amiruddin Tyabji, and childless aunt, Hamida Begum, in a middle-class household in Khetwadi, Mumbai.

Shooting contests were often held in the neighbourhood in which he grew and his playmates included Iskandar Mirza, a distant cousin who was a particularly good marksman and went on in later life to become the first President of Pakistan.

Millard later introduced young Salim to (later Sir) Norman Boyd Kinnear, the first paid curator at the BNHS, who later supported Ali from his position in the British Museum.

He was sent to Sind to stay with an uncle who had suggested that the dry air might help and on returning after such breaks in studies, he barely managed to pass the matriculation exam of the Bombay University in 1913.

[12] Ali was fascinated by motorcycles from an early age and starting with a 3.5 HP NSU in Tavoy, he owned a Sunbeam, Harley-Davidsons (three models), a Douglas, a Scott, a New Hudson and a Zenith among others at various times.

On invitation to the 1950 International Ornithological Congress at Uppsala in Sweden he shipped his Sunbeam aboard the SS Stratheden from Bombay and biked around Europe, injuring himself in a minor mishap in France apart from having several falls on cobbled roads in Germany.

[13] Ali failed to get an ornithologist's position which was open at the Zoological Survey of India due to the lack of a formal university degree and the post went instead to M. L.

[15] He was hired as guide lecturer in 1926 at the newly opened natural history section in the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai with a salary of Rs 350 per month.

[5][16] He however tired of the job after two years and took leave in 1928 to study in Germany, where he was to work under Professor Erwin Stresemann at the Berlin's Natural History Museum.

Here he had the opportunity to study at close hand, the breeding of the baya weaver and discovered their mating system of sequential polygamy.

[26] Around the same time he discovered an opportunity to conduct systematic bird surveys in the princely states of Hyderabad, Cochin, Travancore, Gwalior, Indore and Bhopal with the sponsorship of their rulers.

Whistler published a note on The study of Indian birds in 1929 where he mentioned that the racquets at the end of the long tail feathers of the greater racket-tailed drongo lacked webbing on the inner vane.

[28] Whistler was initially resentful of an unknown Indian finding fault and wrote "snooty" letters to the editors of the journal S H Prater and Sir Reginald Spence.

I have repeatedly told him that the British Government have no intention of handing over millions of uneducated Indians to the mercy of such men as Salim:...He was accompanied and supported on his early surveys by his wife, Tehmina, and was shattered when she died in 1939 following a minor surgery.

In the course of his later travels, Ali rediscovered the Kumaon Terai population of the Finn's baya but was unsuccessful in his expedition to find the mountain quail (Ophrysia superciliosa), the status of which continues to remain unknown.

I feel strongly like retiring from ornithology, if this is the stuff, and spending the rest of my days in the peace of the wilderness with birds, and away from the dust and frenzy of taxonomical warfare.

I somehow feel complete detachment from all this, and am thoroughly unmoved by what name one ornithologist chooses to dub a bird that is familiar to me, and care even less in regard to one that is unfamiliar ----- The more I see of these subspecific tangles and inanities, the more I can understand the people who silently raise their eyebrows and put a finger to their temples when they contemplate the modern ornithologist in action.Ali later wrote that his interest was in the "living bird in its natural environment.

Gibson, a BNHS member and Lieutenant Commander of the Royal Indian Navy, who had taught English to Loke at a school in Switzerland.

[42][43][44][45] Salim Ali was very influential in ensuring the survival of the BNHS and managed to save the then 100-year-old institution by writing to the then Prime Minister Pandit Nehru for financial help.

[47] Ali also guided several MSc and PhD students, the first of whom was Vijaykumar Ambedkar, who further studied the breeding and ecology of the baya weaver, producing a thesis that was favourably reviewed by David Lack.

He helped in the establishment of an economic ornithology unit within the Indian Council for Agricultural Research in the mid-1960s[51][52] although he failed to gain support for a similar proposal in 1935.

[40] This project partly funded by the PL 480 grants of the USA however ran into political difficulties with allegations made on CIA involvement.

An Indian science reporter wrote in a local newspaper that the collaboration was secretly exploring the use of migratory birds for spreading deadly viruses and microbes into enemy territories.

[56][57] Ali had considerable influence in conservation related issues in post-independence India especially through Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

One of Ali's later interventions at Bharatpur involved the exclusion of cattle and graziers from the sanctuary and this was to prove costly as it resulted in ecological changes that led to a decline in the waterbirds.

As a consequence, he was considered to be part of the Dosco fraternity and became one of the very few people to be made an honorary member of The Doon School Old Boys Society.

[73] The International Jury for the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize of the World Wildlife Fund has selected for 1975 Salim A. Ali Creator of an environment for conservation in India, your work over fifty years in acquainting Indians with the natural riches of the subcontinent has been instrumental in the promotion of protection, the setting up of parks and reserves, and indeed the awakening of conscience in all circles from the government to the simplest village Panchayat.

Your message has gone high and low across the land and we are sure that weaver birds weave your initials in their nests, and swifts perform parabolas in the sky in your honor.

This work began in 1964 and ended in 1974 with a second edition completed after his death by others, notably J. S. Serrao of the BNHS, Bruce Beehler, Michel Desfayes and Pamela Rasmussen.