The Hindu Business Line : Wild crane chase

Since January the sizeable birding community in India has been aflutter with excitement. It all started when a young university student from Pune reported spotting four Siberian cranes near Palwal, a town near Mathura. Within no time the news had winged its way across birding networks throughout the country.

Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) director Asad Rahmani put out a national alert. The World Wide Fund for Nature in India (WWF) sent a team immediately to the spot. Forest guards in nearby Bharatpur were notified. Not to be left behind, amateur birders from the Delhi bird club flocked to the destination. Over the next couple of weeks, as the most-looked-forward-to winter visitor in India remained disappointingly elusive, mails flew over birding sites on the Net, discussing search strategies. Somebody talked of helicopter surveys, others suggested taking slow-moving trains up and down from Delhi to Mathura (many birders actually did this), some even instituted cash rewards for sightings.

What a lot of commotion over a couple of birds, you might wonder. But the excitement coursing among the scientific community, ornithologists and hundreds of bird watchers is understandable. After all, the last time the endangered Siberian crane was spotted in India was in 2003 at its winter home of the Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur. Many believe that the central population of the graceful cranes that wing their way to India from Yakutia in arctic Russia and western Siberia is now extinct.

As K.S. Gopi Sundar, Research Associate, the International Crane Foundation, and principal coordinator, Indian Cranes and Wetland Working Group, points out: “The last two Sibes were observed nesting in Bharatpur in 2003. They hatched one chick from their two eggs, but afterwards were not seen in India or anywhere else, subsequently leading us to believe that they are not alive.”

A long-distance migrant, the Siberian crane undertakes a tough flight path during the harsh winters, with the eastern population flocking to the Yangtze River and Lake Poyang in China, the western population homing in near the Caspian sea in Iran, while the central population nested at Bharatpur. Indeed, Bharatpur was the only known winter home of the central population of the Siberian cranes, which were the star attractions of this world heritage site.

But since 2003, visitors to the Park have craned their necks in vain for sight of this milky white crane with the distinctive red mask extending from its bill to behind the eye. Although Bharatpur no longer provides a hospitable home for these cranes, what with its shrinking wetlands, dried-up lakes and drought-like conditions, the chief cause for the decline of the central population is because of hunting along its migration route — especially over Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Even as most people had given up the central population as finished, environmentalists have been sounding the alarm bell because other populations too are dwindling rapidly. According to Sundar, “The Western Flock is now down to two birds. The Eastern Flock which has between 3,500 and 4,000 birds now offers the last hope for the Siberian cranes”.

Seen in this light, the news of the sighting in India obviously assumes huge significance. Not surprisingly, Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar’s phone has not stopped ringing since the day he reported spotting the cranes from a train window. The MSc environmental science student from the University of Pune, who is an experienced birdwatcher, was returning by Jhelum Express when he spotted the cranes. “First I saw three cranes with my naked eyes, but I couldn’t distinguish whether they were Sarus or Siberian,” he says. But he quickly whipped out his binoculars, noted down the nearest station (Palwal) and kept his eyes glued on the fields whizzing by. Imagine Hrishikesh’s excitement, when he spotted a pair of Siberian cranes amidst the mustard fields between Palwal and Chaata. And, given that train spotting of birds is his pet hobby, he is pretty sure that what he saw were indeed the Sibes.

Despite returning without seeing the cranes, the bird-watching community by and large is equally optimistic about the presence of the Sibes. Ravi Singh, Secretary General and CEO of WWF India, says, “I believe the boy.” So much so that he has got 1,000 posters of the rare crane printed and is devising strategies to circulate them among the villagers in the belt where the bird was spotted.

Scientists in Russia, Afghanistan, Iran and China — all of whom have a keen interest in the Siberian crane — are also eagerly watching developments. Several theories have begun floating around. Some conjecture that perhaps the central population is not really extinct, after all. As Sundar points out, “The northern-Russian bog-forest landscape is vast and enormously difficult to survey entirely and completely. So, there may be birds of the central population that we do not know about.”

Then again, others theorise that if indeed the Sibes have been spotted here, these could be birds that have been captive bred and released by Russian scientists. As part of their ex situ conservation plan Russian scientists have been raising Sibes in captivity and doing soft releases. As Sundar says: “It may be entirely possible that few of the soft-released birds have learnt the migration route through following other species, or by instinct that is genetically coded, and are indeed travelling to India.”

There is a lot that is still unknown about these cranes, pet subject for research though they have been for wildlife specialists and scientists.

At the time of going to Press, the cranes still had not revealed a second glimpse. But Ravi Singh is still not losing hope and is now spreading the search net wider. “Even when they used to flock to Bharatpur, the birds never remained at one place too long,” he says optimistically.

Let’s all hope it does not prove to be a wild crane chase, but the real McCoy.