And then there were none

The southwest monsoon arrived late this year in Rajasthan. It was almost August when the first rains hit Bharatpur, washing away the heat of the warmest summer on Earth since records began in 1880. At the Keoladeo National Park, home to more than 350 bird species, the painted storks too showed up with the monsoon to begin breeding. During the summers, these large yellow-billed, pink-tailed water birds would pair up across the sanctuary and surrounding areas in Bharatpur, courting each other with elaborate bowing rituals. The males would choose a nesting site and mark their territory; the female would pick a suitor, the larger the better. Come monsoon, the pairs would return to their nesting sites — blocks D and L in Keoladeo.

On partly-submerged trees, painted storks would set up homes so closely packed together that “it must be miserably uncomfortable to have no elbow room”, wrote British ornithologist Robert Betham in 1904, while observing stork colonies. One would find nearly 30-40 pairs breeding on the same acacia tree in their makeshift nests, taking turns to hatch eggs. Perched on stick platforms, a few feet above water, the tall, slender birds would then guide their chicks through initial rites of passage, teaching them to fly, fish and fight. This year at Keoladeo, however, there will be no such spectacle.

Sometime in October, entire colonies of around 500-700 painted storks abandoned their habitat and left the bird sanctuary en masse, putting the breeding process in jeopardy. In half-a-dozen other areas too, including Sultanpur, Mathura and the Delhi zoo, which are traditional nesting sites for the birds, the breeding has been subdued this year. Sultanpur, which played host to around 40 pairs last year, has seen little nesting. Block D, which the storks abandoned, is also home to other water birds such as spoonbills, egrets, glossy ibises, grey herons and darters. The cormorants and open-billed storks also haven’t been able to start breeding this year.

The absence of breeding sites this season spells bad news for the painted storks, which have been classified as a ‘near-threatened’ species and whose populations have been on a moderate decline. According to a report in a national daily, the painted stork community left Bharatpur when “the forest department allowed dozens of trucks and JCB machines inside the sanctuary. These were engaged to build mud platforms around the storks’ colony, so as to enable visitors to click better photographs of the birds.” However, the construction lasted only a day, says Baney Singh, a guide at Bharatpur, who has been showing visitors around the sanctuary for the last 27 years. “But there’s little chance that they’ll come back this year.”

Could the construction have precipitated the birds’ flight? “Painted storks don’t just nest anywhere,” says KB Singh, a veteran birder and founder of the online group Indian Birds. “Their nesting sites last for generations and I don’t think construction activities would’ve disturbed them. I’ve even known colonies of storks nesting over rooftops in villages,” he says. Bharatpur has been home to the storks for two centuries; the colonies have seen their habitats shrink over time, nearby areas dry up, and the park come up around them, bringing lakhs of visitors each year.

The flight of the birds, it would appear then, was primarily induced by severe water shortage in Bharatpur. Several reports over the last few months have recorded the alarming state of the three main sources of water in these parts — the Panchna dam, the Chambal river and the Goverdhan drain. Built on the Gambhir river, which dried up a decade ago, the Panchna can release water only when there’s excess rainfall. The 17km-long Goverdhan drain originates in Haryana, enters Rajasthan at Bharatpur and finally drains out near Agra in Uttar Pradesh. When the Goverdhan drain became operational last year, it was touted as the answer to Keoladeo’s water woes. But it is yet to release water to the sanctuary this year. Thanks to a deficient monsoon, Keoladeo is facing a deficit of 150 million cubic feet, nearly 30 per cent of its total requirement.

“It’s not the water problem alone, there’s a scarcity of food as well. The quality of water is important,” says the park’s field director Bijo Joy, who, first month into his job, has a PR disaster on his hands. “The Goverdhan drain water needs flushing. It passes through towns and villages, where it gathers pollutants. The Chambal, on the other hand, is too clean. It doesn’t have an abundance of prey for the birds,” says KB Singh. That the painted storks should’ve ditched these parched lands is not at all surprising.

Unlike deep-diving cormorants, painted storks hunt for fish in shallow waters. With their bills half-open, they rock their heads back and forth, occasionally using a wing to pull the fish closer. “Adult storks need about 700-800gm food daily, the chicks require around 200gm. That’s a huge amount of food, which is not available in the water,” says Joy. While in Keoladeo’s 29sqkm area, nearly 40 per cent of the sanctuary is wetland, these regions began to get water only from this November. Abundant in predatory catfish, hunting in these waters has become dangerous for the birds. “Recently, a peacock was attacked by catfish. Even the cormorants are scared to fish now,” says Baney Singh.

This is not the first occasion when birds have fled from Bharatpur. In 2006-07, the state was hit by a serious drought and it wasn’t until two years later that the water birds returned to their breeding sites. While the painted storks may return to Keoladeo next monsoon, the loss of this breeding season remains a concern. “We need to build a stabilised population. The painted storks are on a decline, so breeding should happen every year,” says KB Singh. For the next few months as migratory birds begin to flock at Keoladeo — migration is at its peak here between January and March — the field director’s prime objective is “to keep up the water levels of the wetlands for the birds [residents and migrants] to have a good time. And then, hopefully the painted storks will come back.”

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