New Delhi: Chiuluan 2, an Amur falcon named after a village in Manipur’s Tamenglong district, is halfway across the world in Mozambique right now. It took him five days of nonstop flying from Maharashtra, crossing the Arabian Sea, to reach Somalia on 21 November. He has persevered across Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique too over the past two weeks and will only rest once he reaches his summer home of Johannesburg.
Hundreds of Indians, among them scientists, wildlife ecologists, government officials, and most importantly, the people of Chiuluan village, have followed Chiuluan’s flight to South Africa. They’re the protectors of Amur falcons in their region, and thousands descend on their villages in Manipur, Assam and Nagaland every winter as a stopover between Siberia and South Africa.
Chiuluan 2 is the second falcon from the Chiuluan village, and the ninth falcon in Manipur, to be geotagged by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) as part of its Amur falcon tracking project.
“The reason we have a second bird named Chiuluan is because of the peoples’ persistence,” said Supriya Sahu, an IAS officer from Tamil Nadu who has closely followed the Amur falcon project. “It is a testament to their commitment to the birds’ well-being.”
Yet barely a decade ago, this was not the case. The Amur falcons, native to the Amur River in Siberia, used to be regularly hunted across Manipur, Nagaland, and parts of Assam whenever they’d stopover in the winter. In 2013, the WII started its first falcon tracking project in Nagaland, and since then it has taken years of awareness campaigns, tracking projects and working with the state forest departments for the local communities to not only stop hunting the avians but actively protect them, too.
Several historical factors including monsoon patterns, the availability of termites, and trade winds over the Arabian Sea coalesce to make northeast India the best stopover for these Amur falcons. ThePrint explains their 22,000-km long intercontinental flight.
The Amur falcon story
Each time as November rolls in and the Northern Hemisphere’s winters begin, the Amur falcons leave their breeding grounds in Russia, China, parts of Korea, and Japan to make the transequatorial journey towards their summer haunt of South Africa. This route is interrupted with one major stopover for the birds – in northeastern India.
“For centuries, birds from across the world converge in Nagaland and Manipur to rest and refuel before heading off to South Africa again,” explains Suresh Kumar, scientist at WII who leads the falcon tracking project. “And this stopover is important because their journey after this is most often unbroken. So it’s the last stop they have before they reach Africa.”
Despite the extensive habitat of Amur falcons and their bulging numbers (over 1 million), little was known about their behaviour, and especially why they stop in Northeast India.
Apart from Nagaland and Manipur, there’s no evidence of large-scale hunting of these falcons anywhere else in the world, which is why they remain categorised as ‘Least Concern’ in IUCN’s Red List. Kumar said that when his team in WII began their tracking research project in 2013, their twin goals were to conserve the species as well as find out more about them.
“Why would they stop in northeast India even with the threat of hunting? If they’re terrestrial species, why would they cross the Arabian Sea rather than take a land route to South Africa? Why do they all arrive in India only in a few weeks in November?” Kumar listed out the questions they started out with about the falcons.
Over a period of 10 years, the WII team captured and geotagged 17 different Amur falcons across different villages in Nagaland and Manipur, targeting regions that were major hotspots of these birds. The first geotagged bird was Pangti, named after a village in Nagaland where the large-scale hunting of these birds was first brought to notice publicly.
Following news reports, the Forest Department of Nagaland acted swiftly in inviting WII and the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), an international body on migratory birds, to work together for the falcons’ conservation.
“The answer to why the birds come to Northeast India is one word – termites,” says Kumar, who recently co-authored a paper on how 85 percent of the diet of the Amur falcon consists of termites which are abundantly available in Nagaland and Manipur right after the rains.
In a paper published in the Journal of Raptor Research on 13 June, Amarjeet Kaur, lead author and Kumar’s colleague wrote how isoptera or termite remains were found in the regurgitated pellets of food near Amur falcon nests in northeast India. The authors used over 1,400 samples of pellets from five different sites in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland and termites were the main food choice of all the Amur falcons there. The reason too is evident, according to Kumar.
“The birds have an almost 6,000-km long journey ahead of them, and just like humans stock up on protein before hitting the gym, so do birds,” he laughed. “Termites are the best source of protein for them, and northeast states in India have just had their rainy season end in October so they’re teeming with these insects.”
The insectivorous raptors take two to three week long breaks in their northeast Indian haunts and fuel up on insects. According to the study by Kaur and Kumar, a million Amur falcons can go through more than a billion termites in 15 days. This also explains how they’re able to then fly almost non-stop until they reach Somalia, helped a little by the trade winds over the Arabian Sea.
From hunting to conservation
Over the last decade, experts like Kumar, Kaur, and Nick Williams, former head of the CMS Raptors MOU Coordinating Unit, wrote extensively about how the factors that draw Amur falcons to northeast India and then across India towards Africa predate anthropological phenomena like hunting.
“The birds know that northeast states have ripe soil for termite growth, they know when the trade winds over Arabian Sea favour their travel, and they know exactly how much energy they need to make the flight,” says Kumar, adding that Chiuluan 2’s flight might seem surprising to us but is part of a well-oiled pattern followed by these birds for centuries.
The increased hunting of Amur falcons in some places in Nagaland and Manipur was partly due to the loss of agricultural land and need for subsistence by some farmers in the early 2000s, according to a paper written by Williams in 2013.
Since the practice had not gone on for long enough to bring about a change in the migratory patterns of the birds, the Nagaland forest department decided to nip it in the bud and involve local communities in helping protect the birds instead.
“It is a success story that should be emulated everywhere,” says Sahu, who has followed the case since her days serving as additional chief secretary of Environment, Forests and Climate Change in Tamil Nadu. “The fact of the matter is that no conservation project will succeed unless the locals are involved.”
Kumar agreed. After their first phase of the tracking project in Manipur ended in 2022, they were again invited by the Chiuluan villagers in 2024 to carry out a second phase of the project. Chiuluan 2 and Guangram, both currently in Africa, are the products of this new phase.
“Now even if an Amur falcon is caught in a net or injured accidentally, you know the people will rescue and release it,” says Kumar. “The people know India isn’t the birds’ final destination, and they will ensure they will treat our avian guests well and send them on their way.”
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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