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Madhu Behera, who earlier made a living by killing Chilika’s birds, is now the best bird guide around DNA
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A flock of little cormorants DNA
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A boat-ride in Mangalajodi is all you need to spot godwits, pin-tailed ducks and Chinese coots DNA
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My introduction to Chilika lake didn’t really give me a sense of its vastness. Driving down from Bhubaneshwar, I approached the lake from Mangalajodi, a village in the north-west of Odisha.Here, farmlands slowly converge into a maze of shallow marshlands.
My guide, Madhu Behera, took us to a fishing village. The path ahead narrowed down till it became a bund that divided the marshland into two. On one side, hundreds of open-billed storks had flocked together and were feeding in the shallow waters. On the other side was a dense bed of reeds filled with cacophonic streaked warblers. Suddenly, all of them would take off on a mysterious cue, fly around for a while, and land back on the reeds all at once.
Sea of a lake
I stepped into a shaky country boat and prepared my camera for the sights lurking in the distant, misty marshes. Using a large bamboo pole as the oar, the boatman cut through the brackish water, guided by Behera’s instincts.
Behera knew these wetlands like the back of his hand, and could sense where a particular species would be found. He asked me what I wanted to see — godwits, pin-tailed ducks, spot-billed ducks or Chinese coots. I blindly picked godwits because the name fascinated me. In minutes, we were upon a few thousand godwits feeding on a grassy knoll. At the slightest provocation, they would take off, and when they turned in tandem, they created a swirling silver cloud against the deep blue sky. Further down, bobbing in the middle of the lake, it felt like you were in the midst of a sea. Land was nowhere in sight. That’s when you realise just how vast this half-saltwater, half-freshwater lake in Odisha is — it’s 70km long and 30km wide
Unique wetland
Ajit Pattanaik of the Chilika Development Authority explained to me how such a unique wetland was formed. “It was a bay many centuries ago. Over time, tidal waves deposited sand in the bay and created a sand bar with a small mouth, virtually cutting off the bay from the sea and creating a salty lake in the process. From the western side, fresh water comes into the lake from the rivers. And from the mouth of the bay, during high tide, salt water comes in from the sea. This habitat thus became home to a wide variety of freshwater and saltwater species.”
According to Dr S Balachandran, deputy director of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), who has been studying the lake for more than a decade, Chilika is home to about 10 lakh resident and migratory birds of over 250 species. In 1981, it was internationally recognised as an ecologically important wetland.
Then a dual tragedy struck Chilika. On one hand, poaching became the order of the day and even fishermen turned poachers to make a quick buck. On average, 1,000 birds were being shot, trapped in nets or poisoned with pesticides every day. Soon, only a few thousand birds were left.
Around the same time, the mouth of the bay narrowed till it almost sealed off the lake. This decreased its salinity, and freshwater weeds like hyacinth and ipomeas flourished and destroyed Chilika’s flora. It was then declared a ‘Degraded Site’.
That was when a man named Nandakishore Bhujbal entered the scene, and changed the destiny of Chilika.
Bhujbal has something in common with Dr Salim Ali, who describes in his book, The Fall of a Sparrow, how a sparrow that he shot dead kindled his interest in birds. Bhujbal told me about a similar incident. Youth in those parts had to announce they had come of age by flaunting the carcasses of birds they had shot with air guns. Bhujbal too shot down an egret in Chilika that he recalls fell down with a twig clutched in its mouth. The realisation that the egret must have been carrying the twig to make its nest dawned on him, and it created an unbearable guilt that remained with him.
the transformation
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