The Hindu Business Line : Farewell to flamingos?

SEWRI falls on the Harbour Railway and is not particularly clean, with the smoky churn of heavy truck traffic on the Bombay Port Trust road disfiguring earth and sky.

Slums, including the famed Dharavi habitation, string up stations on the Harbour section, managed by the Central Railway till Mankhurd. A ride from one station to another provides a hurting view of men, women and children living pasted to tin rooms some 10-ft wide . A traveller gets some respite after the train breaks out of Mankhurd towards Navi Mumbai across the creek flowing into the Arabian Sea. Given a chance one prefers not to take the depressing rail ride but one had to make it to Sewri to watch flamingos.

On a Saturday morning at around 8, one made it to Sewri with friend Hrishikesh Chauhan and walked for about 10 minutes down a potted road between resting lorries and the drivers sleeping under them. At the end of a turn lies the dark and muddy Arabian Sea with a few thousand flamingos (mostly the lesser flamingos) feeding in clusters on the mudflats forming an arc along the coastline. It is 10-km long and 3-km wide and is dominated by mangroves, going by details in the guidebook Important Bird Areas in India.

Here the Arabian Sea is a sink, with oil refineries and nuclear installations dumping what they do not want, besides plastic bags deposited by the public. Still they come after breeding in Kutch while some stay back forever. "Despite the high degree of pollution, the area is a winter refuge for thousands of migratory birds from as far as the Arctic circle. They include sandpipers, plovers, gulls and terns," remarks the guidebook.

It was low tide and the flamingos were feeding off the mud floor while waders like sandpipers, curlews and whimbrels were busy near the stone jetty, which acts as an observation point. Hrishi sighted a Brahminy kite atop the mangroves while behind the flamingos one saw neatly arranged rows of gulls. Overhead, the whiskered terns bided their time before diving down for food.

As the high tide started slowly rolling in like an unrolled floor mat, the flamingos head towards the sea where they stay afloat . That's the moment to watch, as acting on some signal, the birds daintily walk on the face of the water, leaving watery trails for powerful cameras to catch before taking off in flashes of scarlet. The air above turns deep pink with the black on the wing borders providing a sharp contrast as they stretch out their legs and neck in a straight line on flight before landing with a low glide on the sea — a couple of kilometres away from where we watched.

One saw them fly in V-formation, in diagonal wavy ribbons and in single file, a point made by Dr Salim Ali. When the tide pulls away they fly back to the mud flats to feast on what the seawaters have left for them.

For a few moments it was a live ad show put up by the flamingos for the magic of life and living. Their vocalisation is harsh; it is something akin to tearing a piece of cloth. But then according to Hrishi, who has walked many forests, "Nature is perfectly imperfect. It has flaws. It mixes a few pluses to a few minuses. There is nothing like a pure plus or a pure minus. And that holds even for pigs."

As Hrishi and oneself were looking around with binoculars, a doctor from the Tata Cancer Hospital joined us, having read about Sewri and the birds in the newspapers. One went to Sewri a second time to watch them for around two hours till the high tides nudged them away from the coast.

On the second visit, a few young locals were limbering up near the jetty. One of them scanned the book on birds by Dr Ali and told us that hoopoes could be seen at the spot. "Saab, ye sab chala jayega (All this will go)," the young man said. He had heard about a 22-km road bridge linking Sewri to Navi Mumbai across the sea. At present roads and railways link Old to Navi Mumbai but the new contraption will cut travelling time by 30 minutes and take the rich of Mumbai a step nearer to Shanghai.

The new Congress Government in Maharashtra wants Mumbai to be Shanghai and the Mumbaikar to be Chinese. The city plans to knock down slums as the poor are a poor ad for India Shining. Only the ruling elite living in Malabar Hill will be in the city and move from one air-conditioned mall to another in air-conditioned cars armed with commandos. In their lingo, flamingos will not exist. So be it.

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