Riverine bird communities are closely linked to aquatic prey dynamics, yet quantitative assessments of bird–prey interactions in Himalayan rivers remain scarce. We quantified trophic interactions between river-dependent birds and their prey in the Sindh River of the Kashmir Himalaya using a bipartite ecological network approach. Field observations conducted between December 2023 and November 2024 recorded 1,323 feeding interactions involving 10 bird taxa and 12 prey categories. The network exhibited moderate connectance (0.67) and a distinct modular structure comprising four trophic modules representing ecologically distinct foraging guilds. Nestedness analysis indicated moderate nested organization (NODF = 33.98), whereas network temperature and checkerboard scores suggested partial dietary segregation and compartmentalization. Extinction simulations revealed greater sensitivity to the loss of highly connected species than to the removal of weakly connected taxa, indicating that trophic connectivity is maintained by a subset of broadly interacting species. The observed network architecture reflects both resource sharing and trophic partitioning within a heterogeneous mountain river ecosystem. Our findings provide one of the first quantitative descriptions of riverine bird–prey network structure in the Kashmir Himalaya and demonstrate the value of ecological network approaches for understanding trophic organization in high-energy fluvial systems.
Haq et al. (Mon,) studied this question.