The Birds of Heaven
"What is the colour of snow like?" "It is like a white crane."
- Nirvana Sutra
Cranes are ubiquitous in the earliest legends of the world's peoples where they often figure as sentinels of heaven and omens of longevity and good fortune. For their great beauty and imposing size – they are the largest flying birds on earth – they are held sacred in many lands.
The crane family (Gruidae) occurs on every continent except South America but the Genus Grus attained its greatest expansion in Eastern Asia. Of the fifteen extant species, eleven are threatened or endangered by Homo sapiens, either directly through hunting, poisoning or trapping, or indirectly through the despoliation of the earth’s resources and most dangerously its dwindling fount of freshwater.
These elegant birds, in their stature, grace and beauty, their wild fierce temperament, are striking metaphors for the vanishing wilderness of our once bountiful earth; in addition, they function as an “umbrella species” whose protection in the wild also protects a broad range of fauna and flora.
Cranes can be over five feet tall, with broad strong wings eight feet in span and appear well capable of bearing aloft a wispy old-time sage. Cranes are the greatest of flying birds and the most stirring, not less so because of the French horn like notes of their voices, like the clarion calls out of the farthest skies, summons our attention to our own swift passage on this precious earth.
They have marvelously efficient mechanisms in their use of oxygen. Air at Everest’s peak, nearly six miles or eight thousand eight hundred and forty-eight metres above sea level provides only a third of the oxygen at ground level. These high fliers specifically the Demoiselle, Black Necked, Sarus and Siberian cranes, have developed a special respiratory adaptation, such as sacs that hold the inhaled air after it passes through the lungs, then return it through the system before exhalation, providing the bird double intake of oxygen for every breath. They also have high levels of adaptive hemoglobin that absorbs oxygen very quickly at high altitudes.
Perhaps more than any living creature they evoke the retreating wilderness, vanishing horizons of clean water, earth and air upon which their species and ultimately ours depend on for survival.
Rajasthan, India
For hundreds of years as far as memory goes for the residents of the tiny village of Khichan, Rajasthan, hundreds of cranes arrive every winter from Siberia, Mongolia and parts of China to rest here and fly onwards to their wintering grounds. More than 150 years ago, said the mostly Jain villagers here, the king of Jodhpur banned the hunting of these birds. From then onwards started the most fascinating story of community conservation of birds in the world.
I was on a mission to photograph the demoiselle crane (Anthropoides virgo) in the humble village of Khichan in Phalodi subdivision of Rajasthan about 300 kilometres from Bikaner.
The year was 2012.
Since that decree of their king, the Jain community of Khichan, initiated a custom feeding of the birds and today a small safe enclosure of the local school is used to spread sacks of millet and bajra every morning by volunteers for the birds. From early October to March thousands of demoiselle cranes gather here in the sand dunes surrounding the village. Their voices, higher and thinner than that of the larger cranes, is nonetheless audible from far away. Kurrr-kurrj – that’s what it roughly sounds like, and forms the basis of a folk song…kurajo te mharo dekh chhillaryo tal. It speaks of cranes as messengers for lovers…Oh crane, please arrange a meeting with my secret beloved.
It was a freezing and icy winter November, accompanied by blustering winds chilling my bones. I was inside a small makeshift tent hide with a packet of sandwiches and a flask of coffee with my fellow photographer on the banks of the Platte river in Nebraska, mid-west USA.
Sandhill cranes – Grus canadensis – nests across the North American landscape starting from Russia to North Canada and in Alaska. They travel the longest amongst all the cranes – a distance of about 15,000 kilometres from their breeding and nesting grounds in the northern hemisphere to their wintering grounds along the Gulf of Mexico. Along the flyway one group stops over on the banks of the Platte River in Nebraska where during the daytime they feed on post-harvested leftover maize. This gives them the proteins needed for their journey ahead. As night falls they fly back from the nearby fields and rest by the thousands on the braided shallow river obviously seeking shelter from the coyotes who would necessarily have to wade through the river to get at them.
Platte River, Nebraska, USA
Dawn was finally peeping in through the cottonwood trees in the distance and as I prepared to mount my lenses through the gaps in the hide out towards the river – I could sense a spectacle. Thousands of cranes that had been loudly involved in a “broken rattle” throughout the night disabling any hopes of sleep for me, began to emerge out of the pink waters of sunrise in the freezing chill of middle America.
The drama starts soon. As the sun rises and fires up the horizon fifteen to twenty thousand cranes rise in a crescendo of trumpeting. This unison call, “swinging their heads up and down in an arc while performing a musical bell like duet”, is unique among the cranes. Used most commonly in threat displays, it is believed to signify the emergence of the flock from the safety of water.
Their performance begins with loud calls, energetic dances and even food sharing, sometimes seen in males performing to attract a mate. The most unique part of the behavior is a spectacular dance involving hopping, leaping and bowing. Often two or more birds in their synchronized act face each other and bow and dance. The ritual has earned these birds their honorific as ‘Singers of the Sky’.
A truly transcendental experience for me, as I watched this timeless interaction between two divine species, birds that can speak to each other across continents.
Elephant Gold: The Lord of the Grasslands
…… There is mystery behind that masked grey visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.” ― Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born
From 2010 to 2015, a span of six years I have been scouring through the grasslands of Manas National Park in Bodoland Territory bordering the Royal Manas National Park of Bhutan. This protected wilderness area has an impressive collection of laurels – it’s a UNESCO Heritage Site, a National Park, a Tiger Reserve, a Biosphere Reserve, an Important Bird Area and an Elephant Reserve. If that’s not enough, it is also India’s only trans-border National Park with its wildlife criss-crossing between India and Bhutan.
Each spring, the fresh succulent green grasses that sprout, trigger the elephants to travel long distances, down from the hills of Bhutan and even from north Bengal. Their journeys often involve travelling hundreds of kilometres to reach this feeding bowl. Given that each individual adult must eat roughly 150 kg of plant matter and drink 100 litres of water every day, their motivation to undertake such journeys is easy to understand.
But how do they find their way and for how long have they been using these migration routes are questions that encourage elephant experts to search for all manner of clues, including the practice of counting dung piles and monitoring dung decay. Such methods help field biologists to estimate elephant numbers, and discover the food upon which they rely from month to month and year to year. What, for instance, do they eat between May and December, when they are not in Manas? What distances do they cover each day, how high do they climb?
Studying the stretch from eastern Nepal through north Bengal to the Manas Tiger Reserve south of the Bhutan foothills, suggests that a contiguous forest corridor existed not too long ago. Is it possible that some 300 years ago, migrating elephant herds once moved from Nepal through the then prevalent corridors into Bhutan, and then through Manas’ grasslands? Could they have moved even further near today's Arunachal Pradesh?
Lying belly-down on the grass with my camera, I wondered if the herds we – me and my Bodo guide, an expert in elephant tracking - were watching, were indeed descendants of those herds of yesteryear, somehow continuing the tradition of migrating hundreds of kilometres in search of food.
It was the end of winter and spring was knocking as the soft green sprouts of the grassland were popping up – something these long-distance travelling giants were aware of. They had arrived to munch up these succulent green fibrous leaves.
A surfeit of source material exists today to validate the use of elephants as commodities of war and big game hunting in 15th century India. Elephants formed a significant military arsenal in the history of Assam and archival records point to instances of elephants being exchanged as war indemnity between the Mughals and the Ahom kingdom. Could migrating herds along the northern, forested banks of the Brahmaputra have provided armies of yore with combat elephants?
In Elephants: A Cultural and Natural History, Karl Gröning and Martin Saller write, “No other animal has left such a rich and plentiful succession of traces of its prehistoric physical existence over a period of millions of years, nor provided deeper insights into evolutionary processes over the vast span of Earth’s history, as the elephant.”
In the annals of Assam it has been recorded that in 1663, Mir Jumla, the Mughal general, commanded an expedition in Assam, defeated the Ahom army and signed a treaty in Ghilajhariaghat, imposing an indemnity of 15 tuskers and six female elephants. Within one year of this treaty being signed, the Ahoms were forced to send 90 more elephants in three instalments.
The author and pioneering wildlife writer in India, Nirmal Ghosh, in his book Lord of the Grasslands, says that a free ranging herd would typically require about 250 square kilometres of wilderness in which to roam for food. Ghosh’s anecdotal account of the story of a bull elephant portrays an image of how herds moved from Kaziranga in Assam to Arunachal Pradesh and back. Herds also moved to Nagaland and Myanmar along what used to be called the Mikir Hills – known today as Karbi-Anglong Hills.
In 1935, an Englishman named P. D. Stacey, who called himself an ‘Elephant Catcher’, chronicled his accounts of elephant hunting and capture in his book Elephant Gold, published in 1963 from London. His notes provide fascinating anecdotes of elephants and elephant hunting in 19th century Assam.
“In India”, he says, and I quote, “elephants were not always protected as they have been since the introduction of the Elephant Preservation Act of 1879. During the 30s, we were ourselves capturing a very large number of elephants.”
“In fact,” he continues, “by the removal of some 900 elephants in 1934-36 from the forests of the Naga and Mikir Hills, we almost cleaned out elephants there.”
Regarding the elephant herds of the North Bank of the Brahmaputra, he says: “In Assam, it is the North Bank forests with their backs to the Bhutan and Tibet foothills and the isolated Garo Hills which hold out the best prospects for elephant herds remaining up to strength. The same is probably true of the foothills of North Bengal.”
These and other chronicles provide insights into the sheer number of these gentle giants that were enslaved for trade and commerce. Given that elephants seem to have been captured in large numbers annually in the plains bordering the foothills of what was once referred to as NEFA (North Eastern Frontier Agency) and Bhutan, one can reasonably deduce that these were from the same herds that migrated up to the foothills of NEFA longitudinally, from the North Bank forests.
The Morans – a tribe of Dibrugarh and Tinsukia districts of upper Assam – have a history of devoting their lives to the capture and domestication of elephants.
According to a local Moran resident, “Elephants are our cultural property and we have been living together with them since time immemorial. Our ancestors came to this land with elephants.”
Elephants find an important place in the socio-cultural, religious and economic life of the Moran people. Although Morans are reputed elephant catchers, trainers and caretakers, the tradition of rearing elephants, not just as beasts of burden, but also as family members, makes this tribal group unique. The Morans live in close proximity to elephants and from all accounts.
By now the flaming crimson sun was setting in the Manas grasslands and my guide reminded me it was getting too dark for comfort and we should pack up and leave. Tomorrow we have to come back early at dawn to track these magnificent giants as they move out of the woodlands and through the grasslands to their feeding locations.
My camera memory had filled up. The sky had darkened. It was time to go.
“If for company you cannot find a wise and prudent friend who leads a good life, then, like a king who leaves behind a conquered kingdom, or like a lone elephant in the elephant forest, you should go your way alone.” – Dhammapada
