Conservationists in north east India are working hard to save a big, ugly, smelly scavenger that has fallen foul of expanding villages in the Assam region. Purnima Devi Barman is the woman championing this unlikely animal. By Jeremy Torr.

Kamrup, Assam, December 2020. Imagine an intrusive one-and-a-half meter high bird that poops all over your garden, stinks, eats rubbish and rotting flesh, has no attractive plumage and instead of making a pretty twittering call spends its time grunting, mooing or clattering its bill. Not an attractive proposition? The villagers in its habitat, centred in Assam in northeast India, would certainly agree.

So much so that the traditional habitat of the Greater Adjutant Stork (Leptoptilos dubius) has been severly debilitated by annoyed locals chopping trees down or smoking the birds out of their nests with lit fires – even when they have newly hatched chicks still in them. The mortality rate has become unsupportable.

Sadly, so many trees and nests have been lost recently that stork numbers have plunged to only some 1200 birds worldwide, with Assam the home to about 70% of that number. As a result, the birds are now on the International Union for Conservation’s Red List of Threatened Species. “Nesting tree (availability) is a severe limiting factor for these birds,” says Dr. Purnima Devi Barman, an award winning conservationist who leads a Greater Adjutant conservation project in the region.

However, a significant colony is clinging on in Kamrup district of Assam, south of Bhutan on the Brahmaputra river. It currently sees about 140 nests used each year and is billed as the largest listed colony of Leptoptilos dubius - and that is where Dr. Barman is working hard to save the threatened birds.

“Many traditional nesting trees were cut down by villagers in the last years across many historical breeding colonies in Assam,” she explains. “Some of them were also destroyed due to natural causes. We decided to experimentally try to (build) artificial nest platforms made out of bamboo.”

Barman and her team built and fixed up the new platforms adjacent to an existing nesting location at Dadara-Pacharia – and a pair of storks almost immediately started constructing a nest on it.

“This is the first time in India that such effort was made in situ by constructing an artificial nest platform for any endangered bird,” says Dr. Burman. “The target species started using it as soon as two months after construction, and a female was later seen to be incubating eggs (in it).”

Her passion for the previously untouchable (hargila) birds has spread. A pair of greater adjutant storks has successfully produced chicks in captivity (a worldwide first) late last year in Assam State Zoo.

“So far, we haven’t had any other report of this endangered bird being bred in any zoo or in captivity before,” said zoo spokesperson Tejas Mariswamy. Local people, now much more alert to the intrinsic value of the birds, hold  baby showers for newborn chicks and theatre groups put on plays with stork themes where stork puppets are used to sing and dance and tell ‘stork stories’. 

Dr. Burman says part of her work is to inculcate a sense of ownership and community pride in the rare breed of stork, and to help preserve it – not wipe it out. She says the project also shows that a nesting platform approach could offer a potential solution for other threatened large bird species too; especially ones which are finding it difficult to locate a proper nesting tree in their traditional nesting locations.

“We tried this with very limited resources but now I am confident that we can expand this initiative next year - and many other conservationists can also try it for other endangered species too.”

So from being a reviled, hated and persecuted nuisance, the Greater Adjutant - just one of only 20 stork species in the world – is slowly edging back from the brink of extinction, thanks in no small part to Dr. Burman’s dedication.

“Many people like to work with ‘glamorous’ species like the rhino or the elephant, but I chose the stork,” she says. “This bird had been an integral part of my life; I have wonderful memories of my grandmother narrating interesting tales of them, and singing about them to me.”

With luck, and more of Dr. Burman’s tireless efforts, that tradition will long continue.