The Last Stand

On the fringes of Manas Tiger Reserve
Feb 28th

A lovely clear morning underway as we tread on the soft soil of the paddy field, stopping frequently to scan the flat paddies around us through our binocs.  It’s been a couple of months since the harvest, and the stubble, a brittle brown, is interspersed with patches of fresh grass for which the cows will arrive later in the day.
For the moment, there is no one else.  Just us.

And, somewhere in this vast stretch – over a thousand acres of open paddy - is a bird of a species that is teetering on the brink of extinction.  

There is no place to hide as we walk, our banter is muted and we tread with care. Suddenly, Edison, the young naturalist with us, points excitedly and we hunker down and peer.  It’s hard to control my emotion – excitement dominates for the moment, but I know that there’s much more – and I must focus (and not blink).  There in the far corner of this large open country, amidst the stubble, we see a beautiful head on a slender neck of navy blue and a large brown-and-white body.  The Bengal Florican walks with cautious avuncular dignity, a dainty exquisite bird of immense splendour and bearing.  It moves between the stubble, now lost to sight, now back in focus, a single bird of a population that numbers worldwide in the low hundreds.  It is spectacularly beautiful and we watch enthralled.  
And then it vanishes into the stubble as easily as it had appeared.  

Photo: IUCN

We wait patiently for an hour to see if the same bird or others in its precious depleted flock would show up, but we see none.  It’s getting warm now and cattle – dozens of them – fan out across the paddies; the Florican, if it hadn’t earlier, has now moved away.  

It is a silent exit, in more ways than one.  The story of the bird’s decline is familiar and painfully repetitive: hunting and loss of its grassland habitat being principal causes. 

I think of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird on earth, darkening skies as millions flocked across North America.  And of what that extraordinary conservationist and philosopher, Aldo Leopold said:
“There will always be passenger pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights…..They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather.  They live forever by not living at all.”

Those emotions return.  Thrill, yes.  A chill too. Anger that our species could do this. 

And, as with all those moments of great alloyed happiness, there is a surge of ineffable sadness within.  It is the sadness that precedes a requiem, one that, I hope, hand on heart, will never have to be written. 

 
Back in the Maozegendri Eco Camp, Rustom chats with us for an hour exploring conservation options, but he is both wary and weary.  Many like him – the younger gen – have done the rounds, going from home to home in the area speaking of the plight of the Florican and requesting a cessation of hunting and the good news is that those conversations have had some effect.  In one such home, a farmer went in and brought out a Florican egg and handed it over to a bemused Rustom who then placed it under a hen that was roosting.  A Florican chick was the delightful result and he brought it up with care, hoping to reintroduce it into the wild, but one day the door of the cage in which it lived was left open and the bird disappeared.  

You could say with justification and a touch of irony that the stars are yet to align in favour of the Bengal Florican.
…and therein lies a tale of woe.

a time lapse image of the mating ritual of the male Bengal Florican,
taken by the inimitable Ramki Sreenivasan, captures its dance in flight