A wing & a prayer

SAVING THE BIRD

Day breaks early in the world’s busiest desert. A herd of goats driven out at dawn grazes in the distance, bells tinkling from their collars. Flocks of short-toed larks and sparrows dart between the thorny khair trees. Off the main road a pack of wild dogs feasts on the body of a gazelle taken down overnight. Griffon and cinereous vultures wait silently in the wings.

On the top of a nearby ridge stands a lonely silhouette of a giant bird overlooking the morning rush. It is close to 4 feet tall with its beak tipped resolutely upwards at an angle of 45 degrees.

Slowly, it turns to face the rising sun, its white breast stained pink by the light and puffed out to its furthest feathers.

He (for it is evidently a male in full display) takes deep gulps of dry desert air to fill a pouch beneath his throat and begins a bellowing mating call.

An otherworldly sound like the muffled blast of a bugle echoes out across the plains. “Such a magnificent creature,” whispers the man sitting next to me with his binoculars trained on the same sight. And then, almost in the same breath, “It is so sad.”

In the local Marwari dialect of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, they call these landscapes jood — hills unfit for crops where only grass and bushes grow — and the bird that roams here, the joodawan.

When the first British explorers arrived hundreds of years ago, they mispronounced it ‘godawan’, and then in the mid-19th century an Irish ornithologist named Nicholas Aylward Vigors gave it the name still used today: the Great Indian Bustard.

In the modern era, this usually comes prefaced by ‘critically endangered’. For its decline has been catastrophic. The bustard has been extirpated from 90% of its former range across India, with fewer than 250 birds left in the wild.

As recently as the mid-1980s, that population stood at around 1,500. The bustard, which is the state bird of Rajasthan, is now among the world’s top 100 endangered species, and the Thar Desert is its final refuge.

It is impossible to listen to the lone male’s morning call for a mate and not hear a lament.
The man with the binoculars next to me first witnessed a bustard displaying in 2003, and it changed his entire life.

Prior to that moment, Pramod Patil was a young medical student with some of the best grades in his state and the prospect of a glittering career.

But he fell in ‘love’ with the bird and decided, against the wishes of his family, to devote himself to ensuring its survival.

Even across the 77,000 square mile environs of the Thar Desert, which stretches between India and Pakistan, the issue revolves around space.

The desert is the most densely populated on earth, with its swathes of grassland where bustards once thrived used by nomadic herders to graze sheep and goats.

While the older shepherds recall the birds walking alongside them, snapping up insects, lizards and snakes flushed out by their livestock, modern life has disrupted this ancient rhythm.

Price of development

Since securing independence from Britain in 1947, India has embarked on one of the world’s largest irrigation schemes in Rajasthan, stemming from the 400-mile-long Indira Gandhi Canal, leading to far more intensive farming and grazing. The Indian side of the desert alone is now degrading at a rate of more than 30,000 acres of productive land annually, and advancing on New Delhi by 0.3 miles a year.

The construction of power lines and huge wind farms in recent times has hemmed the bustards in. Dr Patil recalls with sorrow in his eyes finding the body of one snarled up in electric cables.

There have been previous attempts to arrest the decline, such as establishing breeding enclosures, but none like that which the 32-year-old has implemented. He is using his medical training to act as a de facto doctor for the desert nomads, who receive almost no healthcare provision.

In return, he requests they report any bustard sightings and reduce the grazing range of their flocks. Dr Patil is also helping to establish anti-poaching teams and volunteers, who assist with GPS mapping of bustard sightings, dead or alive.

His work is pioneering, not least as he is the first to get through to herders typically distrustful of any outside interference.

Last year, he was one of eight winners of the Whitley Fund for Nature Awards — launched by the British philanthropist Edward Whitley in 1994 and known as the ‘Green Oscars’ — and awarded £35,000.

No bird so emblematic of a region anywhere in the world has ever come this close to being wiped out. Yet, even as we watch our morning bustard during 30 minutes of marvelous if unreciprocated display, Dr Patil refuses to countenance its extinction.

“I trust the instinct of the birds,” he says. And what about trusting human instinct? He pauses as he lowers his binoculars. “Well, less so.”

This affinity with animals started young for Pramod Patil. Born in Kolhapur, a small city in the western state of Maharashtra, Pramod, his older sister and younger brother were raised in a middle-class household by his father, a chemistry professor, and housewife mother. One of his earliest memories is of an elephant being paraded down their street each Sunday to collect money for the local Hindu temple.

“I was fascinated and used to put a 1 rupee coin into his trunk,” he says. “I would fight with my parents for that coin. They told me it was useless and that I should go and buy some toffee instead.” The back of the house looked out over a patch of open grassland, upon which India’s ubiquitous cattle grazed.

Patil would sit spotting the lapwings, sparrows and vultures that settled between the beasts and occasional troupes of monkeys marauding through the tamarind trees.

During his teens, his bedroom became a rescue centre for animals, much to his mother Ranjana’s dismay. On one occasion, she was dive-bombed by a juvenile barn owl living in his wardrobe.

On another, a sloth bear he had saved from street performances tore Patil’s bed to shreds and bit his shoulder, requiring a barrage of anti-rabies injections.

Despite his youth, he also gained a reputation in his neighbourhood as the person to call when a snake was discovered.

For a brief spell during his first year at medical college, he kept a nine feet reticulated python he had rescued in a sack in a cupboard while waiting to rehome it.

“We lived with it for one week,” he says. “It already had a bulge in its stomach so was in a fed state, but at night it used to make a lot of noise, hissing, and always managed to get out of the cupboard, even though the door was partially locked. Every morning, we found it lying on the floor. My roommate would go crazy.”

It was also as a boy that Patil first fell under Sir David Attenborough’s spell, although for years growing up without the internet he did not know to whom the mellifluous narration of the wildlife documentaries he adored belonged.

The pair first met during last year’s Whitley Awards ceremony and, during his acceptance speech, Patil announced to the packed room, “Sir David Attenborough is my most favourite human being on this earth. Thank you so much, sir. I love you and I mean it.”

Grinning at the memory, he also shows me a selfie he took of the two of them. “When I met him, I told him his voice had made me mad. He said, “You were already mad; my voice just triggered that.”’

In that photograph, as in person, Patil cuts a sophisticated figure. He speaks beautiful flawless old-fashioned English.

When not in the desert, he lives in Mumbai, working in the offices of the Bombay Natural History Society, which was founded by the British in 1883 and supports his work today.

He says his first real exposure to India’s poverty only came at the age of 23, when he finished his medical studies and started a 1-year internship at a government hospital.

“That was a life-changing experience,” he says. “I worked with HIV patients, criminals, beggars. I remember everyone who died. You’re trying to save them but you can’t do anything. It created in me this empathy towards all sections of society. If I hadn’t done that, I would be a different person today.” However, even working in such a demanding environment, Patil found it impossible to ignore the call of the wild.

During night shifts monitoring patients on the intensive-care ward, he sketched grassland birds, and, in particular, Great Indian Bustards.

Any free time would be spent travelling to the sanctuary where he had first seen a male bustard displaying on August 15, 2003, and where the bird left its powerful mark.

“I love its stature and how it always walks proudly with its head in the air,” he says. “It has this silent but very powerful personality.”

The opportunity to devote himself to its salvation came in 2013, when the RSPB and BirdLife International established a project to try to halt the decline.

Patil — who by then was studying a post-graduate course in physiology — made the decision to abandon medicine.

His parents, he says with a wry smile, still haven’t forgiven him. He remains single, living a ‘weird nomadic life’ like the male bustard itself.

The irony, of course, is that since moving to the desert, the doctor has never had so many patients. At first, Patil received short shrift from the deeply conservative herders — until he suggested he could assist with their health.

He is also launching workshops making hessian bags bearing the bustard’s image, to provide employment for women in the community who are normally culturally required to spend their days caring for children at home.

“It’s my philosophy that if you are very clear on your ultimate objective, then you have to try all ethical ways possible. People should respect you and get something out of it in return.”

He makes his daily rounds between the jhobas (mud huts) in a battered pick-up truck so lacking in suspension that the desert roads judder its very frame.

Our first stop is to see 4 brothers who tend the family flock of 100 sheep and share a hut surrounded by mounds of animal dung. The eldest, 22-year-old Mire Khan, invites us to sit, and Nazir, 11, and Alaf (who cannot remember his age) rush off to prepare chai. Their father, who lives in a nearby village, suffers from diabetes and the boys show Patil the blood-thinning medicine he has wrongly been taking.

Illiteracy is rife among the herders. “We used to see the birds around the farm in flocks of 10 at a time, but we haven’t seen any for two-and-a-half years now,” Khan says with a shrug when the conversation moves on to the bustard.

An hour’s drive away, across vast drifting sand dunes studded with khejri trees grazed by roaming camels, lives 80-year-old Musa Khan with his wife, Misri, and 6 grandchildren. Musa has been suffering from chest complaints and when we arrive he produces a handful of pills to inspect.

As we drive off, Patil wonders out loud if he should send the patient to go and get his sputum tested, but then a spiny-tailed lizard darting across our path snaps him out of his trance and he charges off into the sand dunes in pursuit.

We also visit a primary school where Patil speaks to hundreds of pupils about the importance of bustards, and a Hindu temple in a village called Sankhala where worshippers need no reminding of the bird’s importance. In the middle of the floor is a marble statue of the Great Indian Bustard draped with flowers by Mohit and Khushbu Panwar, two young children.

“We pray for our animals and for ourselves,” their father, a 25-year-old wheat farmer called Damodar, tells me.

The day ends long after dark at a jhoba belonging to 55-year-old Bachawa Khan, who is wrapped up against the cold desert night in traditional robes and turban. His family has farmed the desert for 8 generations and reveres the bustard.

“The bird is like our companion,” he says as he serves chapatis and freshly slaughtered goat, which we eat by the light of our mobile phones under a canopy of stars.

“It’s a harmless, beautiful bird — but nowadays that relationship has gone. This is the true bustard land. If we lose bustards, then we lose our pride.”

The bustard’s decline is, in one sense, a simple and sadly familiar tale: there are too many humans taking up too much of the habitat that sustains them. They breed between April and September and will lay just 1 blotchy brown egg on the open ground, which must escape countless competing threats unscathed.

Those odds seem so slim, but refusing to succumb to a loss of hope is why the Whitley Fund for Nature was established. It is led by Edward Whitley, a 54-year-old financier who comes from a long line of conservationists. Whitley says he was moved to begin the awards after the birth of his daughter, Ella. The fund is currently distributing more than £1 million a year, the majority of which is in the form of continuation grants to previous winners.

“I thought about what sort of world she would inherit and, if we did nothing and lost all that wildlife and natural beauty, she could accuse me of being rather neglectful,” he says.
“You’re up against inexorable forces and wherever you look there is bad news. But when you find somebody like Pramod, or one of our other winners, they are so inspiring. To be able to support their work over a period of time gives them a tremendous leg-up.”

The Princess Royal is another key supporter. Since being appointed patron 17 years ago, she has not missed a single ceremony.

We see bustards once more, a few days later, this time in pastureland close to a village where nearby wind turbines scythe through the hot air.

It is a group of three females, smaller than the males with more slender necks, but still possessing the same startling beauty.

With their long legs obscured by the scrub, they move as if floating. The birds spot us watching after what seems like only a few moments and take off with long, languid flaps of their giant wings.

“People say if you think you are going to save bustards you are the most optimistic man on earth,” Patil says, as the last of them disappears from view. “But there are still eggs and we still see the chicks coming.”

He remains convinced that humans and bustards can co-exist in harmony in this landscape once more.

“If not, then my entire life will lose its charm.”


Great Indian Bustard

Ardeotis nigriceps

Population in 2011
250
(Critically Endangered)

Distribution
Rajasthan, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Pakistan