A community and its wetlands
Day 11Up early again — and grudgingly, as we were at quite a nice hotel — to head to Janjimukh-Kokilamukh, site of a wetland complex where a CEPF grantee is working to enhance community engagement in protecting the wetland.
We met up with Asif Hazarika of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) this morning for an update on their efforts to set up “site support groups” to get communities involved in the monitoring and management of several wetland areas in Assam. We met him near the site of Misamari Beel, one of the five wetlands targeted by the BNHS project, including five that are outside protected areas.
This site is also home to a long-standing club of bird enthusiasts who have begun working with BNHS to keep closer tabs on the wetland and its species. The club has 25 members. Its secretary is Ananta Dutta, a local school teacher whose school is located across the road and several rice fields from the wetland. Dutta occasionally takes his students out to the wetland to learn about it, and some of the children will help out in January when volunteers at all of the wetlands involved in the project conduct a bird count.
BNHS is working to develop similar groups at several other sites as well, in some cases working with established clubs and in other cases helping to establish them. They hope to make them part of BirdLife’s Important Bird Area network.
The wetland is not part of a protected area, and it is heavily fished. The government currently leases it to a fishing contractor.
The site support groups being established through the project focus on activities like bird monitoring, community education, decreasing encroachment, and mitigating the pressures of fishing and logging. BNHS also is trying to get those outside protected areas some formal form of protection.
After we talk a while with Asif and Ananta, we head off across the street and through the fields to see the wetland. The easy exercise is extremely welcome after days and days of car travel. It’s also an interesting view of the agricultural activity of the area. We’ve come during harvest time, and several people are out in the fields reaping the rewards of a growing season’s efforts.
Such small-scale hand farming is never easy, but these farmers have had the added challenge of marauding elephants. In fact, many of them are exhausted after spending much of the night in their fields trying to protect them from the hungry pachyderms. Apparently they resorted to lighting firecrackers to scare off the animals, among other things. Unfortunately, the firecrackers also scared off some of the birds. As we walk along, we step over fresh elephant tracks in the mud.
Misamari is host a diverse collection of migratory and resident bird species. They’ve counted 188 bird species so far. The local bird club has been around since 2002, and it’s a little uncommon in a land where people spend so much of their time working. Given this level of community involvement, BNHS is looking into converting the site into a community-managed reserve.
Asif tells me that there used to be a lot of wetlands like this in Assam. “Now most of them are gone,” he said.
At the site, though we don’t walk too close to the wetland to keep from disturbing it and to keep from sinking in, we can see from a distance hundreds of birds of varying species resting and feeding around large pools of water.
We’re told that the mud under our feet is sometimes submerged, and is probably still home to plenty of eels. This is not something I care to probe.
On the way back from the site, walking through farm fields, I spotted two women and a man working their fields who seemed especially photogenic, and I asked Sarala if she thought I could take their photo. She kindly stopped and made a polite inquiry, and they happily posed, each armed with a sickle and a handful of harvested rice. The younger woman in the trio then started talking rapidly with Sarala, and Sarala translated for me — she wanted to know what we were going to do to help them. Unfortunately, the best we could offer at that moment was to let them see their images on the digital cameras.
Kaziranga National Park After our visit to the wetland, we return to our old friend the car to move on to Kaziranga National Park, one of Assam’s points of pride, and a World Heritage Site. It is particularly known as home to the Indian rhinoceros and the highest density of tigers of any protected area in the world. It also notable as the spot where I was first introduced to He-Man 9000, a local brew that tastes a lot like Budweiser, but clearly has a winning marketing plan.
So as night settled in, we lodged ourselves at a lodge, enjoyed the He-Man 9000 and watched performers in bright white and red costumes perform traditional dances. Tomorrow we’ll take a morning tour of the park with CEPF small-grant recipient Firoz Ahmed, who has been studying turtles and tortoises in priority areas of the North Bank Landscape in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, including Kaziranga.
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See the accompanying photo gallery on Kaziranga.
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