Through music and dance, children in Nagaland are championing the cause of the little raptor.
On his way to school this October, 13-year-old Seiminlen saw a ngeikang. He told the school’s eco-club that the first Amur falcon of the season had been spotted. The children gathered outside their school to watch, trying to count the birds, listening to their high-pitched calls. They perhaps didn’t know it, but these children have been at the forefront of bird conservation in the remote, … Read More
While birding with a few friends near Malampuzha dam in Palakkad District, Kerala, I was pleasantly surprised to encounter a group of 30 Amur Falcons perched on high tension electricity wires. At around 1400 hours they descended to the grasslands and started to hunt insects — crickets, locusts and grasshoppers. They were oblivious to our presence and kept feeding on the abundant prey. We were completely awe-stuck by their presence and their hunting.
Until only a few years ago, these … Read More
Of the 69 species of raptors known from India, Amur Falcon (Falco amurensis) was one of the least talked about species till recently. Primarily recorded from northeast India, with a few scattered sight records in peninsular India, the species is generally considered rare. All that changed following a report by Conservation India in October 2012 of the massive large scale harvest of these falcons in Nagaland. Researchers estimated that between 120,000 and 140,000 individuals were being trapped and killed for … Read More
The first Amur Falcons have started arriving in the Northeast, and in Nagaland. The local communities in various parts of the state have been eagerly awaiting the birds in the last couple of years — to welcome them as honoured guests, and to provide them with safe passage.
For the last two years, the Amur Falcon conservation efforts in Pangti and Sungro villages in Wokha district of Nagaland have passed off successfully in a remarkable conservation turnaround. In 2013 and … Read More
Campaign Update 30th October 2013
Great news! The peak migration of Amur Falcons is on, and there have been absolutely no killings reported so far! This remarkable outcome has been the result of a full year of painstaking effort from the Nagaland government (especially the forest department), NGO groups, and most importantly, the local communities who were determined to end the killings.
On the 6th of May 2013, Rajneesh Suvarna, Jitendra Bhatia, Suja Rangaswamy and myself were on the way back from Pungro in Eastern Nagaland to Kohima. We had been in Nagaland for 6 days and had noticed that guns were common and hunting accepted as a way of life. The few local Nagas we met were surprised that we had come all the way to watch birds, and indeed were skeptical that we would have seen any. Our birding experience … Read More
Raptor enthusiasts across the world were overjoyed and relieved to learn that a migratory adult female Amur Falcon (Falco amurensis) finally reached her wintering grounds at Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal again on the 10th of January 2013 after an eventful 14,500km journey from the species’ breeding grounds in north-eastern China which started in mid-October last year.
This bird was fitted by Prof. Bernd Meyburg of WWGBP, the World Working Group on Birds of Prey, with a solar-powered satellite transmitter … Read More
As the ‘Friends of the Amur Falcon’ initiative was underway in Doyang, Nagaland, the NGO NWBCT had parallely set-up ‘Amur Counts’ across a dozen locations in Northeast India. The objective of these counts were to document migratory routes, and roosting areas, as well as potential harvesting sites of Amur Falcons in the entire Northeast. NWBCT is the Nagaland-based NGO that, along with Conservation India, discovered the mass killings in Doyang last year and launched the ‘Friends of the Amur Falcon’ … Read More
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