The village of Mangalajodi along the northern bank of the Chilika Lake (one of the six Ramsar sites in Odisha) is classified as an Important Bird Area (IBA).
But this wasn’t always the case. For generations, the villagers hunted the birds: grey-headed swamphen, black-winged stilt, red-wattled lapwing, whiskered tern, little cormorant, glossy ibis, and little egret, among others.
Around the 1990s, the birds faced a dual threat. Along with the locals’ poaching, the neighbouring restaurants too had begun to spot an opportunity in the birds and featured them on their menus.
Tempted by the money they would earn by hunting down the birds for the restaurants, the locals laced the vegetation with furadan, a hazardous pesticide.
Thousands of birds fed on the plants and dropped dead overnight. Their corpses were sold in the meat markets of Odisha.
But, in 1998, a non-profit organisation ‘Wild Orissa’ stepped in.
Their advocacy led to poachers turning into skilled naturalists, wielding their knowledge of the birds towards the latter’s protection.
Tourism led to an uptick in their business. Within two decades, poaching was eliminated, and the birds began making a comeback to the wetland.
A lesson in conservation, Mangalajodi now welcomes over 300,000 wetland birds.
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