Vetal Tekdi Birding Marathon
Bilingual event site that turns a week of birding into evidence for saving Pune’s last wild hill
- Category
- Website
- Status
- Live
- Role
- Solo build: design, frontend, content, launch video
- Organisation
- Vetal Tekdi Bachav Kruti Samiti (VTBKS)
- Date
- 2026-10-23
- Built with
- Astro, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, Cloudflare Pages, Cloudflare Pages Functions, eBird API, Sharp, Playwright, FFmpeg, Python
The Vetal Tekdi Birding Marathon (VTBM) is a week-long citizen-science event. During Pakshi Saptah (Bird Week, 5–12 November), Pune's birders log every bird they see on Vetal Tekdi. Vetal Tekdi is the highest point inside Pune and has no legal protection. I built vtbm.in for the fourth edition: a fast, bilingual site in English and Marathi. It explains the event and shows the hill's birds and habitats. It gets people to register and log eBird checklists. During the event it shows live sightings from eBird. I also made an 87-second launch video for social media, generated in code.
Problem: Vetal Tekdi is a hill inside Pune city with about 280 recorded bird species. It has faced road, tunnel and construction proposals since the 1980s. VTBM turns birders' sightings into public evidence that the hill is alive. The event grew from 111 species in 2023 to 164 in 2025. All its information was spread across Google Forms, WhatsApp posts, press clippings and spreadsheets. Organiser numbers sometimes disagreed. Most people who walk the hill every day did not know the event existed. Many of them read Marathi first. The fourth edition had 13 days to go, and there was no website.
Solution: I built a static Astro site on Cloudflare Pages that leads people from "this hill is alive and threatened" to "register and log a checklist". - One source of truth: editions, birds, press and gallery data live in typed content collections. Conflicting numbers were settled with the organisers before publishing. - 69 photos from birders went through an image pipeline, each with credit and permission. - Pages: Home, Register, Scoring, Birds, Gallery & news, Save the Tekdi, and Contact. Every page has a Marathi version, with Devanagari numerals generated from the same data. - The bird filters work in plain CSS. A small Cloudflare function serves the last 7 days of eBird sightings, with caching and a backoff so it survives eBird rate limits. - Results mode switches automatically after the event.
Outcome: - vtbm.in went live before the 5 November start. - Every page scores 100 for accessibility in Lighthouse, Performance scores are 86–100 on mobile, and every page is under the 1.5 MB budget. - The site carries 25 bird profiles, 34 gallery photos and 14 press stories, in English and Marathi. - The live eBird strip already shows recent sightings from the hill. - The launch video and 45 s trailer are ready to share on WhatsApp and Instagram. - Participation numbers for 2026 come after 12 November.
- Built and launched in 2 days, ahead of the 5 Nov event start
- All 7 pages in English and Marathi, with language kept across visits
- Accessibility 100 on every page; Performance 86–100 on mobile; every page under 1.5 MB
- Live "seen in the last 7 days" strip from the eBird API, cached in a Cloudflare Pages Function
- Score calculator, habitat and season bird filters, and photo pop-ups, all with little or no JavaScript
- Results mode switches on after the event with one rebuild
- Launch video generated in code: an Earth-to-hill zoom, an original synthesised soundtrack, and an FFmpeg-cut 45 s trailer
Tags: #birding, #citizen science, #conservation, #pune, #event website, #bilingual, #marathi, #accessibility, #performance