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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/stork-sisters-saving-a-species-on-the-brink>
"At a landfill on Majuli, which is said by many to be the world’s largest
riverine island, a cluster of ungainly birds peck at garbage.
Here, on the river Brahmaputra in the northeast Indian state of Assam, these
animals stand over four and a half feet tall, bald and with a strange orange
pouch on their necks. And while it’s fair to say they would probably never win
an avian beauty contest, the greater adjutant storks (
Leptoptilos dubius)
play a crucial role in Assam’s wetlands by consuming decaying organic matter,
helping in nutrient recycling and promoting ecosystem health.
Just as I get the storks into my camera frame, a local woman asks curiously:
“Why are so many people suddenly interested in these ugly, dirty birds?”
She’s right. Few birds are as celebrated or as integrated into Assamese life
today as the greater adjutant stork. It wasn’t always this way. Once a thriving
species, they used to live in large colonies across Assam. By the nineties,
however, deforestation of the tall trees in which they nested, and a growing
fear of the big, flesh-eating birds, saw the storks — once so prominent that
they featured on the port city Calcutta’s (now Kolkata’s) coat of arms —
practically disappear from the landscape.
“We used to chase them away, pelt them with stones […] everyone thought they
would bring bad luck!” says 37-year-old Pratima Kalita Rajbongshi, a
subsistence farmer.
But in 2007, they found an unlikely protector in a young PhD student, Purnima
Devi Barman. When her research revealed that greater adjutant storks were at
the edge of oblivion, with only 800 to 1,200 adult birds left globally, she was
alarmed.
“I realized that if we didn’t do something, there may not be any storks left by
the time I completed my thesis,” she says.
The issue she faced is that no one she encountered liked greater adjutant
storks. The Assamese call them
hargila, which means “bone swallower” in the
local language. They are scavengers and tend to nest in colonies on top of
trees, and wherever they nest, the ground underneath becomes a stinky mess of
bones and poop. Locals regarded the presence of this scavenger bird as a curse,
often cutting down their nesting trees and chasing the storks away.
Barman, who had just become a mother to twins, remembers witnessing a tree
felled with nine nesting chicks inside, which distressed her deeply. “When I
picked up the chicks from the fallen nests and felt their heartbeat, it felt
like the beating hearts of my own babies,” she says. Some died in her arms. “I
cried while people jeered at me, and that was the day I decided to put my PhD
on hold in order to start a community-led conservation campaign to save the
storks.”
The question was, how to break the societal prejudice against the
hargila?
“My own reaction to those fallen chicks had come from my womb,” says Barman. “I
realized I had to get others to connect to the birds in the same way.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
