GREEN CARDAMOMS/Gaurangi Maitra
“IN 1900 I was stationed at Dibrugarh, the headquarters of the Lakhimpur district, and soon became well acquainted with this duck. Indeed I had only been a few days in the station when a pair flew over the tennis-courts while we were playing tennis and…”
So wrote Edward Charles Stuart Baker, an officer of the Indian Police Service, in Assam. He is said to have lost an arm to a panther and still continued to play tennis at which he excelled. In addition to being tossed by a gaur and trampled by a rhinoceros, he studied, collected and wrote about Indian birds… five books and 50,000 collected eggs, he still had time to command the Indian Police Service as its inspector general in 1910 and be awarded the OBE in 1920 for distinguished service.
Stuart Baker belonged to those men who travelled for Sircar Bahadur and had time to become an amateur naturalist going beyond the pleasures of shooting for the table and trophy. In winter of 2011, on a bird watching trip to Nameri National Park, we came across two groups of birdwatchers from Maharastra, looking to site the elusive, rare and endangered white winged wood duck or deohans as it is locally known. A particularly harried tour coordinator nearly gave up on two members as untraceable when they yet again disappeared into the jungle desperately trying to sight this elusive duck. All of us at Nameri were only following in the footsteps of the early travellers to Assam.
“All along the foot-hills of the Himalayas there stretches a vast strip of virgin forest, devoid of all cultivation of any sort whatever ,but a good deal broken up by swamps and lakes, some so tiny that the trees almost meet over their black stillness, others so wide and big that there may be miles between their opposite banks. In such places as these, especially where pieces of water of the smaller description are numerous, the wood duck may be sought almost with a certainty of success and on lucky days Mr Burness would return with three, four, or even five birds, having seen possibly twice as many, although the getting of them might have entailed a walk of twenty miles or more. The birds were but seldom seen by him in flocks, generally in pairs, often singly, and never more than five or six birds together. Even in the deepest, darkest woods they were most wary and difficult to approach, and took to flight at the sound of anyone coming within shot…” An account that is valid for anyone wanting to sight the wood duck in its natural habitat, a century and quarter after it was written.
The really telling part from this book by EC Stuart Baker, The Game Birds of India Burma and Ceylon , Vol 1, Ducks and their Allies, is: “A Mr WT Burness, for many years a planter in the Lakhimpur district, was singularly successful in obtaining specimens of this fine duck, although, before being told, he did not appreciate the value of the beautiful birds, and shot and ate them.” Over a century and a quarter, since these tales were recorded, few parameter have changed, except ‘formerly widespread’ in north-eastern India status, has been changed to endangered and limited to very small, rapidly declining, severely fragmented populations.
Yet all is not lost through the efforts of the ‘Birdman of Assam’, the white-winged wood duck has been designated as the State Bird of Assam and one of its remaining strongholds the Dibru-Saikhowa sanctuary upgraded to a national park. Anwaruddin Choudhury is an ornithologist, mammalogist besides being artist, civil servant, photographer and author who has spent has spent more than three decades following the fortunes of Northeast India’s wildlife. From 1997 onwards, his path-breaking work on the white winged wood duck is recorded in many publications.
Let me quote from his 2007 (White-winged Duck Cairina (=Asarcornis) scutulata and Blue-tailed Bee-eater Merops philippinus: two new country records for Bhutan, Forktail, 23: 153): “On 3 August 2006, I observed and video-recorded the first instance of a white-winged duck in the Mathanguri (Matharguri) area (26º47′N 90º58′E) of Manas National Park, Assam, India (Choudhury 2006). The duck was resting by the side of a pool at 17h15, about 30m away from me. The light was good, and with a 10×telescope, I could see its blackish-brown upperparts with metallic green hue. The underparts from breast to flanks were chestnut-brown. The head and neck were white with black speckles. The bill was orange-yellow with black spots, and the legs were also orange-yellow, but paler than the bill. When the bird took flight after about a minute, a large white patch on its wing shoulders (upper wing coverts) became prominent.”
Thus he was able to discover new feeding and roosting sites for the white-winged duck observed which were between 500m and 1km from the India-Bhutan international boundary.
The official website of Assam tourism lists it only in Nameri and Dibru-Saikhowa national parks and the Sonai-Rupai and Dihing wildlife sanctuaries. The wood duck, Asarcornis scutulata, was first put on the world ornithology map by naturalist travellers of all shades and then declared the state bird of Assam. A symbol for a state, whose name once was synonymous with the largest part of the Northeast before its reorganisation as one of the seven sister states. A symbol and its territory endangered by fragmentation and how very odd that human territorial ambitions can capture those whose wings know no political geography. ([email protected])