Females have a pale, white underside with streaks. Cover the key birding sites in the Khonoma area, the Naga Hills and foothills of the Patkai range on our three-center tour. Two satellite-tagged Amur Falcons have been tracked on their migration route, clocking up some 29,000 km in the process. We asked them, are the falcons here? For the next hour, the falcons would rise from the roost in a great tide, enveloping us in a chaos of wings and movement, then settle back down again until the air was empty. Hot water, instant coffee, and tea were waiting for us at 3:00 a.m. when we climbed stiffly from bed. The Amur was long lumped with the very similar Red-footed Falcon of western and central Eurasia. The Amur falcon is a small raptor of the falcon family that breeds in Siberia and Northern China and migrates to winter in Southern Africa. The completion of the Doyang Reservoir also created the site for what may be the greatest concentration of raptors in the world. For Pangti as a whole, the end of falcon-trapping meant foregoing about 3.5 million rupees annually, a huge sum in such a remote, cash-strapped area, especially because many people used that money to pay their children’s school fees. And I wanted to learn more about how a shocking conservation tragedy had, in a very short time, become a stunning conservation success. We covered the last half-kilometer on foot, still walking in silence, passing beneath tall elephant grass and arching bamboo. The primary beneficiaries now are guides like Nchumo; landowners like Nchumo’s uncle, on whose land the watchtower sits; and families like the Tsopoes who had enough extra cash to invest into creating homestay operations. They also found that local fishermen, stringing their nets among the roost trees, were killing an estimated 140,000 falcons in just one 10-day period during the peak of the migration—-plucking the carcasses, smoking them over open fires to preserve them, then selling the birds in larger towns for badly needed cash. enjoys sharing stories about nature and is currently a Post-Doctoral fellow at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science. It has one of the of longest migration routes of all birds — doing upto 22,000 km in a year — from eastern Asia all the way to Southern Africa and back. The Naga, with their torn nets and flooded fields (and being the good Baptists that most of them are), couldn’t help but see all of this, simply and literally, as manna from heaven. It was cool, with a light breeze and no stars, but soon I could see the silhouette of a 40-feet-tall wooden watchtower, newly built for visiting birders, which rose against the slightly lighter sky as we emerged along the edge of the lake. That’s when I first heard about the massacre,” Bano Haralu recalled as she poured us some illicit wine, Nagaland being an officially dry state. Amur falcon feeding mechanism : The Amur falcons feed mostly on insects, mainly mid-air. Initially birds were thought to use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, but there is increasing evidence that their sensory abilities allow them to navigate by smell, and by variation in light levels. Photos: Seshadri KS Amur Falcons (Falco amurensis) are one of 69 species of raptors in India. The Amur Falcon is a fascinating migratory raptor. There was a constant drone in the air, and a monotonous chatter of birds. The Amur falcon is a small raptor of the falcon family. As we would learn in the days to come, the bare bones of that story are basically correct. The small birds hardly put up a fight and were no match for the skilled poachers. Mrs. Tsopoe brought the evening meal from their dirt-floored kitchen—delicious pork that had seasoned for weeks in the smoke above the open cooking hearth, pots of sticky rice and dhal, long beans, and steaming boiled squash. In Asia, the Amur falcon can be found around the Amur river region, in southeastern Russia, northern China and eastern Mongolia, sometimes all the way east to the Korean peninsula. Along with Abidur and our drivers, with me for the trek was my friend Kevin Loughlin, owner of Wildside Nature Tours, who was exploring the feasibility of bringing American tourists to Pangti to see the falcons. The sky was abuzz with what from a distance appeared to be a gigantic swarm of bees. But slowly, we have understood. Conservationists started eco-clubs for children in Pangti and surrounding communities and gave “Amur Ambassador Passports” to those who pledged to protect the birds. Yet within a year or so, the community decides to embrace protection and preservation; the killing grounds become a sanctuary, the trappers become guards and wardens, and residents of the village prepare to welcome birders. Baptist ministers were persuaded to preach pro-falcon sermons and conduct special church services, and villagers were given “Friends of the Amur Falcon” buttons. But the story stuck with her, and two years later, in autumn, she and her colleagues from Bangalore-based Conservation India returned to investigate. “Maybe…what? In the case of Amur falcons, it was education that helped the birds fly safely through India, but there is no guarantee that the falcons will receive the same level of protection in other parts of their journey. As the day progressed, the sky remained overcast. Although the greatest spectacle in pangti was the morning liftoff, one evening we returned to the roost area at dusk, hoping to see the falcons come in for the night. Still, the hunting was affecting their population, which had declined over the years. We climbed to a roofed platform just barely large enough for us, and waited. Later, in Pangti itself, “We saw birds in almost every home,” she said. funded by donors like you. For hours, we fishtailed and jolted along a rutted, muddy, single-track road through the low mountains, nervously watching the sun slide lower and lower. The news, and gruesome videos of the killing, catch fire online and ricochet around the globe. I struck up a conversation with one of them, Ulhas Anand, and discovered we had several mutual birding friends from his time living in Philadelphia. Prof. Bernd-Ulrich Meyburg, the Chair of the World Working Group on Birds of Prey, and his team satellite-tagged 10 Amur falcons in South Africa as part of a ground-breaking attempt to track their epic migration. In the process, they also undertake the greatest over-water crossing of any bird of prey, traversing as much as 2,400 miles of the Indian Ocean. Amur Falcon © Shutterstock Abu Dhabi, 10 November 2020 - In October each year, communities in the mountainous parts of Northeast India, gather in anticipation of the arrival of a small grey bird, the Amur Falcon, which annually migrates over 30,000 km. The people of Nagaland are a Tibeto-Burmese culture who lead a subsistence lifestyle—one that until recently included the mass-trapping of Amur Falcons. Every year, the small, resilient birds make the daring voyage from breeding grounds in Russia and China to winter in southern Africa. Photo: Seshadri KS. “It was overwhelming, you know. Instead, hour after hour we’d seen little in the air except a few swallows. Although Pangti is far from the tourist track, we were pleasantly surprised to find we weren’t the only visitors. News of this poaching made a global splash and international conservation organisations upped the ante to ensure the birds were not harmed at their staging site in Nagaland. This should be just a highway of falcons,” said Abidur Rahman, a young ornithologist from the neighboring state of Assam and our guide for this trip. The story of the incredible Amur Falcon migration stopover in Nagaland, India, broke to international news in 2012. By all accounts, the skies should have been alive with lithe, sickle-winged Amur Falcons, pausing here on their epic migration from eastern Asia to southern Africa. If they’re to survive, they must top off their tanks before they leave land. “Another amazing trip with Rockjumper. But Bano Haralu and others are glad there’s a road to Pangti, and they wish it was nicer. The Amur Falcon has one of the longest raptor migrations, but is also unique because it supposedly flies a long distance over the sea. Amur falcons travel up to 22,000 km in a year, this being one of the longest migration routes of all birds The Amur Falcon (Falco amurensis) is a complete, long distance, trans-equatorial migrant. #Due to the annual migration of one million Amur Falcons in this region, which of the following has earned the nickname of the "Falcon Capital of … Northeast: Amur Falcon Mega Migration and More. For that, Kevin needed willing guinea pigs—me; Catherine Hamilton, a California bird artist whose participation was underwritten by Zeiss Sports Optics; and birders Peter Trueblood of California and his cousin-in-law Bruce Evans of Maryland, who thanks to a visa snafu would be joining us the following day. Taking our cue from the falcons, we headed back for breakfast. Humans have always been fascinated with understanding the migration of birds. Mohali – 160062, Punjab, United States But as the daughter of a decorated government official and a noted social activist, she knew how to get results. Male (left) and female (right) Amur falcons vary slightly in appearance, with females displaying a mix of black and white plumage on their chest. The monsoons, which usually end in September, had continued for week after rainy, flooding week through October, their southwesterly winds holding back the migrant falcons coming from the northeast. In fact, Pangti and its neighboring villages agreed to abandon the hunt in surprisingly short order. Sir — Given that World Migratory Birds Day was just a few days ago, it was fitting to read that, according to the findings of the Wildlife Institute of India, Amur falcons — the long-distance migratory birds that are known to have one of the longest migration routes, covering around 22,000 kilometres — have started arriving here. But nothing like this,” he said, gesturing to the multitudes of falcons emerging from their roosts. The campaign managed to stop the hunting of the falcons. These images were taken at their wintering grounds in Kruger National Park, South Africa. Except for the chirping of frogs and the hushed voices of our guides below, there was no sound save for a dry rustle that I took to be the breeze in bamboo. Mr. Tsopoe introduced us to two young men, whom he said would be our guides in the morning. “I witnessed a massive swarm of these little falcons flying into the South African town of Cradock to roost for the night,” one commenter wrote on YouTube. IT C-7 KMG Tower In some areas, wind turbines, pitted as green energy, are set up in critical habitats causing injury to and, death of birds. © RoundGlass 2020, India And even with incentives, there is no guarantee that people will make the best long-term decisions. I cannot believe that they are slaughtered like this in India. Combining the two sites would be an ecotourism no-brainer, if the travel time between them was a couple of easy hours on a well-paved road instead of the bone-grinding, eight- or nine-hour marathon that travelers face now. That was the stick, but in the months that followed, conservationists presented the carrot to village leaders as they described the global migration of the falcons—and the worldwide revulsion expressed at the slaughter in Nagaland. At this same time of year, just after the monsoon, there is a great stirring underground as countless subterranean termite colonies prepare for the mating season. Binoculars revealed what our eyes alone could not yet see—that the dimly lit air was filled with tens of thousands of falcons, rising in the gloom like a dense insect swarm from their roost a few hundred meters away and spreading out overhead. Worse, the skies around us were largely empty of birds—which was more than a typical birding-trip disappointment. As interest in the Amur Falcon spreads throughout northeast India, reports have emerged of other major roost sites in neighboring states such as Assam and Manipur—and local movements in those places, as well, to end hunting and to protect and celebrate the raptors. Bellevue, WA 98004. None of this obscured the fact that the community had taken a financial hit when it suspended the hunt. “I don’t know. But I do wish I could eat one!” He laughed nervously. Hundreds of plucked falcons, skewered through the head, hung smoking over fires; hundreds more, alive, were jammed into zippered mosquito nets that functioned as holding cages until they, too, could be killed. We were near the convergence of a great inrushing of wings and movement, coming from all points on the compass, like a black hole drawing everything toward itself. The forested, gently crumpled Naga Hills looked lovely in the late, buttery light, but we’d been repeatedly warned to be off the road before dark given the risk of bandits and armed insurgents in this remote and troubled corner of northeast India, not far from the northern border of Myanmar (Burma). Today, bird migration is in crosshairs with development. It also happens to be my favourite bird. Ali & Ripley (1987) and Naoroji (2007) both noted that the birds fly across China to India and Bangladesh in the first stage of their massive flight across the ocean to Africa. They travel in tremendous flocks, often with large numbers of Lesser Kestrels, and on their wintering grounds in southern Africa they gather by the hundreds or thousands each night in traditional, communal roosts. The flock in the sky was about 100 feet tall and 200 feet wide, and our conservative estimate of their numbers was around 1.5 lakh. Photos: Derek Keats –CC BY 2.0. It seems Amur Falcons have always stopped off in northeastern India during migration to feed on termites, but the completion of the Doyang Reservoir in 2000 dramatically altered the situation, for both the falcons and the local villagers. The former trappers and hunters formed the Amur Falcon Roost Area Union, which posted guards, certified guides, and worked with the landowners of the roosts to build viewing towers like the one we’d visited. The males are dark gray above, paler below, with elegantly contrasting white wing linings and a splash of bright rufous on the thighs and undertail coverts. And so in late October and early November, the migrant falcons pause for some weeks in Nagaland. The Amur Falcons are birds of prey, about 28-31cm and weigh around 100 grams. “So…way more than a thousand,” I said at last. They had survived the day, only to take to the air again the next morning and prepare to make a long over-sea journey across the equator into Africa. Hiking down to the reservoir, we passed trails pushed through the dense vegetation—the paths of wild elephants, perhaps the same ones we’d heard trumpeting across the lake that morning. Like many avian species, Amur falcons ruffle their feathers to retain body heat through the night. The raptors breed in southeastern Siberia and northern China, and migrate in millions across India and then over the Indian Ocean to southern Africa before returning to Mongolia and Siberia. Although the Naga live in hilltop communities, their terraced fields, orchards, and rice paddies lie primarily in the valleys—in the case of Pangti, along the narrow flood plain of the Doyang River. Every year, huge flocks of them fly south, from North China, Siberia and Russia (where they breed) to southern Africa for the winter. Initially we felt let a little down, for there were hardly any falcons in the skies and all the ‘fruits’ on the tree were gone, but around 4.40 pm, when the sky began to darken, we saw a distant flock of falcons approaching. Photo: Seshadri KS. Flying thousands of kilometres from their breeding grounds in northern China and eastern Mongolia, nearly a million Amur falcons, a small grey bird of prey, regularly descend across northeast India for nearly a month in October to feed and rest before continuing their journey to southern Africa. Of course, the reality was a bit more complicated—and less morally simplistic. RoundGlass Sustain is a media-rich resource on India’s natural world. Poachers would suspend their fishing nets on long poles and unsuspecting falcons would fly straight into them and get tangled. Conservationists worried that they may begin to avoid this place entirely, thus having to stopover at areas with suboptimal conditions for roosting and food availability. In barely more than a year, the villages made a hard transition with serious economic consequences, giving up the income that falcon meat represented—partly because it was the right thing to do, and also because they’d been told by conservationists that tourism could make up the loss. The villagers suffered a double blow, he told me—first they had lost much of their best farmland for the dam, then the trapping was taken away. New Delhi: Flying thousands of kilometres from their breeding grounds in northern China and eastern Mongolia, nearly a million Amur falcons, a small grey bird of prey, regularly descend across northeast India for nearly a month in October to feed and rest before continuing their journey to southern Africa. We saw four. Together they convinced the tribal elders that the falcons needed to be protected, and the elders agreed. Former poachers became protectors, and began hosting birdwatchers like us in their village homes.
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