If it weren’t for the existential crisis, I’m quite certain the Great Indian Bustard (GIB) would rather be content in the innate inconspicuousness of its being… feeding nonchalantly on anything that comes across its path, an unfussy eater… preferring the humility of terra firma over the grandeur of the skies… giving slip to the odd wolf or the gluttonous hunter, scoffing at their failed attempts, or vanquishing mortality to their quest, slung upon triumphant stakes…
‘Twas on a whim that we packed our bags to be caked in the beige of Desert National Park (DNP), the sands still dormant in the early February sun, biding their time before the summer inferno would quash any thoughts of daytime recreational wanderings in their midst…
Windmills in the distance reminded one of the recent Supreme Court decision pitting climate action against biodiversity conservation, the quandary staging itself in the garb of human rights, laying bare the inadequacy of Western systems, judicial or otherwise, that posit the human as distinct and superior from nature… and many among the scholastic, having being infected and then disenchanted with this doctrine, now try to posit a relapse to traditional and indigenous knowledge as the cure… when the solution may not lie entirely in either…
DNP feels different from the conventional protected areas in the country… for one, it is not as exclusionary and commercialized as most of the big cat lairs in the country have become… as one of the smallest deserts globally, it serves as a microcosm of the biodiversity of hot arid landscapes… local populations are decently interspersed around pockets of barb-wired enclosures… such mixed-use landscape, even if at the cost of guaranteed sightings, is heartening to see… conservation and conversation coalescing, even if fraught with its unique challenges…
I’m as happy with the sparrows and the larks even if the keystone species are amiss… or at least that is what I tell myself… the first day we headed out in the morning to look for the GIB… ‘twas a decent set of opening acts… plenty of short-toed and bimaculated larks, a pair of sandgrouse and a Siberian stonechat set the stage… the bustards came in a large group, around seven or so, but in a distant corner of a barbed enclosure that made photography challenging…
This is a bird that has many brethren across continents… anthropogenic pressures and land use changes remain a common threat… trophy hunting and the thirst for meat are still prevalent but perhaps not so much… could’ve been the national bird if not for the concern of being embarrassingly misspelt as the rumour mill goes… a valid one, one might say, while pulling the leg of those divided by Lord Curzon…
For all the rhetoric about beauty being in the eyes of the beholder, the physical aspects and perception of it do matter… nowhere is it more true than in the avian kingdom with their myriad, eccentric displays, for sexual selection or otherwise, mostly the former though… even for the sentient observer, the colours, songs, rituals and movements determine the hierarchy basis which one covets and stalks them…
In that sense, the GIB is rather unassuming, with little to write home about… the colours pale, the call more bass than treble, the walk slow and meandering, the flight short and laboured… for this ecosystem, it does enough to scrape a subsistence, but in a manner that is pedestrian at best… not to belittle what is one of the largest and heaviest avians around, but a thought to peruse anyway… would we care this much if the bird weren’t dwindling to the point of disappearing completely…
We had one more sighting that day as the sun went below the horizon, a solitary male soaking in the vista of the twilight hours… the afternoon of the next day was when our luck improved… a group of three males were strolling through the grasslands… lackadaisically pecking at lizards and seeds as their heads kept emerging from and disappearing into the grass… reminded me of Oriental darters when they are in the water and their head emerges out time and again…
The trio kept us engaged for nearly an hour, cutting slow arcs across their sultry canvas… it also turned out to be my first real experience with thermal distortion, which ruined many a photo, particularly those of the bustards…
The bustards get one thinking though… why does extinction matter more than the death of an individual?… especially when we know that it is the status quo… nothing lasts forever after all… and for a species that has all the odds stacked against it – limited skill set, high infant mortality rate, a habitat buckling under anthropogenic pressures – it should be a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’…
Not to say that one mustn’t strive to protect the species… just a notion that we must also be ready to reconcile with the eventual futility of our efforts… there is a level of condescending when we talk about the idea or the process of conservation as it is perused today, coming from the pedestal of Western scientific thought and hence embodying its follies… for one, it tries to establish a relationship based on hierarchies rather than symbiosis or co-existence… as also the assumption that the species in question is unable to fathom the mortal threats… the concept of Umwelt comes to mind… if we perceive the world in our different ways as species, how we perceive life and death, evolution and extinction, may differ too…
Looking at these birds brings such thoughts, as they chug along nonchalantly, aloof to the human hullabaloo about their fate… even if the bird goes extinct, it will do so in its own, subtle way… even if it risks the chagrin of Dylan Thomas, I imagine it would much rather prefer to go gentle into that good night, quietly fading away…
Musing on the Great Indian Bustard, Desert National Park, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan
