The Year of the Thrung Thrung Karma

Thrung Thrung Karma

Our world is full of bird-whisperers. They wander alone, sometimes they are followed by the likes of me – often with a camera – to listen and watch and be amazed by their art. I follow Phurpa who walks a few yards ahead of me, his hands behind his back signalling me to stop or follow, talking to birds. His presence conjures birds from nothing. It is not a cheap trick, for hidden in his skill is a learning we need to take heed of: in this world of whisperings, habitats disappear in front of our eyes; birdsong lost to machines crushing stones and digging sand and felling wood; everything is being concretized or paved over – bird nests and bird bones. Following him into the mountain valley, I stumbled upon a bird among birds in a place among places in a year of years.

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Act I. The Sedge

A river takes birth in a glacial lake somewhere beneath Chiumo and Nyegi Kangtsang, two of the tallest peaks of the Eastern Himalaya. It flows between ragged wind-swept snow-dusted pine forests, forming valleys in the foothills where birds sing no song for half the year and for the other half to no human ears, and as it flows other rivers emerging from the mountains find their way to join this one, forming a network of veins full of life.

Mount Chiumo and Nyegi Kangtsang

Many have tried to trace the origins of these rivers – that of Brahmaputra is legendary, some making it their life mission to understand what Brahmaputra is, how and where it flows, and whether it is truly one river. There have been efforts to map the tributaries of the Brahmaputra as well, every effort to know what it is and where it flows from, long before satellites could photograph Earth’s terrain. In these vast, unexplored places, the British pursued the opening of the East Himalaya to the world through maps and collection of animals as specimens.

Fire-breasted Flowerpecker

The world was young then, and by that, I mean the ancient world was not marred to feel haggard. No bird nor butterflies nor any creature had a name in the common language. The people called them in their tongue, knew where they lived, when they arrived, and what their arrival meant. The birds were not afraid of man, and man revered birds in prayer and song and the trees that dotted the gompas watched upon the vales.

The Gompa

From the dzong the valleys looked far away, and from the valleys the dzong looked larger than life. The birds flickered in and out of view as one tried to picture the stone-walled dzong on the shoulder of a mountain like a piece of immovable mark of man. The gompa and the dzong, features that were more recognizable on a blank slate, helped many explorers draw lines connecting them and pointing to them on a piece of paper.

From the mountain tops to the valleys, humans have formed the most intricate bonds with nature. Hunting and foraging, pastoralism, slash-and-burn cultivation, and settled agriculture, thrived within the mountains. A time of uttermost equilibrium between man and nature, if one were to ask. In the mountains, both these places show a steep altitudinal difference, and with this change comes the variety in the knowledge of nature, from as little as a bird that lives in the snow line dotted by pines, the deciduous oak forests, and the deep and dark valleys. I say equilibrium because there is evidence for it.

Orange-bellied Leafbird

The animals here were so unfearful that it shocked the explorers from another world. Bailey, on his quest to find what makes Brahmaputra in the most difficult terrain of the eastern Himalaya, said, ‘I had even been able to kill a blood pheasant with a stick.’ This fearlessness, this trust in human parlance, was holy. Yes, man hunted and sustained on meat and developed a culture on curing meat and leather to survive the biting cold and dark days. And man revered the coming of the Thrung Thrung Karma to the valleys of the Himalayan foothills every winter.

To find this valley was to find Pemako. A century ago, two British explorers explained it in the passing as an ‘unfordable’ valley meeting a major river of the mountains, somewhere beneath Mount Gori Chen. While the snow-capped peaks are not visible from here, the waters carry the colour and the cold of the glaciers, and unexpectedly open into a valley broad enough to farm. Here, of the handful few places in the Eastern Himalaya, the tall Thrung Thrung Karma, as winter freezes the entire Tibetan plateau north of the Yarlung Tsangpo, fly in. Their arrival is quiet but most anticipated.

Small sedges – units of families – arrived in the valleys of the Eastern Himalaya, the eastern-most range of the cranes in India as winter visitors. They fly slow for human eye, but fast enough as the winds bear them over the tallest of Eastern India’s tall Himalaya, using their legs as stabilizers. It is quite something to imagine a world they live in, having to take over the great mountains twice each year from the highlands of Tibet draining into Yarlung Tsangpo to the valleys of the rivers draining to the Brahmaputra. Indeed, long before the human parties sought the Tsangpo, the cranes contained the knowledge within their instinct. They had no need for passports long before Bailey wrote his account under the title ‘No Passport to Tibet’.

The valley

They arrived just as the last crop was harvested before winter frost. In the brown stubble along the wide riverbank flowing quietly through the valley, they foraged fallen seeds, arthropods, annelids in the harvested fields and the riverbanks. Their ancient call echoed through the valley, and the old dzongs cherished their presence during winters. Their ancient calls a thing to remember, their joyous dance of coming to the valley a thing to witness. How many generations have been visiting the pockets of the Eastern Indian Himalaya no one has a count of, for it is a phenomenon that has been happening ever since man settled here – and they both found harmony that is quite common between man and crane across the planet where both share the same space.

Reekha

Wherever the riverbank was riddled with large pebbles waded the most unusual of birds that have no name of their own in the common tongue. It is known as Reekha by the Monpa. Reekha arrived from the Himalayan highlands as well, quietly following the river valleys, and probe along the rocky riverbanks for aquatic crustaceans and invertebrates with their long, curved beak. They wade in groups, and despite their quiet demeanour they are swift fliers, squeaking melodiously as they disappear along the other bank, but always in areas where there are pebbles the colour of their wings.

Common Kestrel

Not that the valley was only occupied by the winter visitors. Many birds of a feather lived here year-round – the kestrels and the plovers, the flowerpeckers and the redstarts, the buntings and the accentors, all of them, in addition to the doves of course, called it home. Valleys like these were not uncommon, it was the access that determined how well they were known.

Come spring, the Thrung Thrung Karma flew back to the highlands, up the Himalaya, giving the valley one last glance, whether in hopes of seeing it again, I imagine, or hoping it is the same as it was in the times of its ancestors, I cannot say, for it was likely that they would return with their young ones in tow the next winter.

Act II. The Pair

The river once again squeezes through mountains with a force, through a deep gorge hugged by steep mountain slopes covered in a dense forest. This ‘unfordable’ river can only be crossed on its right bank as one travels southwards, reaching a junction where the river meets another. A cantilever bridge helped people cross the river and take the route to one of the major dzongs of the region.

The dzong then was just eighty houses. ‘The houses had roofs of bamboo matting and they looked strange and rather gay with the chillies laid out on them to dry,’ Bailey had noted. Situated partly on a hillslope and in a narrow valley, it formed a major trade route from the foothill valleys up the many passes to the high-altitude Himalaya. While the Thrung Thrung Karma evaded this valley due to its geography, a house along the river would glimpse a group of Reekha probing the river each winter. Their stay here was supposedly brief, for their destination was farther down the foothill forests where the winters are milder and the rivers flow in a vast expanse.

The forage trail

The road was walkable year-round, but not motorable for the longest time. The forest was full of fruits – wild kiwis, persimmons, rhododendrons, and the paths wound through oak and pine and spruce trees, into groves where no sun shone yet the forests was the darkest green, and on mountain tops that glowed a ghostly white when the frost set in. While forest fires were common, the trees sprung back, and the birds that left no shade to the birds that sang from the top of the tallest tree, always found a place.

Scaly-breasted Cupwing

The flicker of the earthy-coloured cupwing, rarely venturing out of the dark thickets, was heard loud and clear in early mornings. Its repetitive high pitched chibs are no songs, they are a call of claiming the darkest corner of the Himalayan forest understory. Its nature is contrasted by the White-collared Blackbird – a bird dressed for the ball, a throat built to sing, and a persona of a performer. Sharing the same range as the cupwing, the blackbird is the bird of the canopy. Its call, a repetitive belling whistle complements the cupwing’s in an octave.

White-collared Blackbird

Once the lines were drawn on a map, the influx of people grew. First for trade as new routes were discovered and items worth trading multiplied. And second for improved techniques in cultivation leading to an increased output and an increased potential to trade the produce, fruits and crops and sheep. Paths broadened and made way for carts.

I don’t know when the chiselling of the mountains started, but it is certain, from Bailey’s accounts, that the road took the path being trodden by people for centuries, although the roads take easier – and longer – route to navigate the steep mountains. The valleys up the mountains, however, remained outside of the regular influx of trade, and was largely seasonal in nature. In these valleys, the Thrung Thrung Karma continued to visit the empty fields each winter, a pair here and another there. The people continued to be pleased to see their winged guests arrive. And while the winters were slow, the warmer seasons started to see more and more people move through the valleys.

Yellow-bellied Fantail

Bailey, along with Morshead, not only mapped the way to Tibet in search of the Yarlung Tsangpo, but hunted and collected many specimens of birds and butterflies – some new to science. ‘Each new place, each new bird or flower or animal, each trigonometrical point or hypsometer reading was an addition to the sum total of human knowledge,’ he journaled. Except that most of what he collected was already indigenous knowledge, just not world knowledge. Nonetheless, he was particularly after pheasants, and having killed one ‘with a stick’ was perhaps among the first outsider to introduce fear among the birds of the ‘uninhabited’ Eastern Himalaya. Bailey doesn’t talk about Thrung Thrung Karma, possibly because he passed the valley much before their arrival.

The English explorers were not the first hunters. Certainly, they were among the first outsiders excepting mountaineers. Even as the paths expanded to roads and, besides an occasional landslide or two, efforts began to keep them open year-round through rain and snow, naturalists of a feather began going deeper into the valleys. Long after Bailey mapped a path leading to the Yarlung Tsangpo right from the Brahmaputra plains, the first introduction of the Thrung Thrung Karma from the East Himalayan valley is from the 1950s, when a sedge of cranes was found wintering in a valley.

Even then, as now, they wintered in isolated pockets, their association with the valley plains becoming well-known to the naturalists who would flock to see them in modern times. The knowledge of their presence coincided with the rapid development the plains saw – pockets where humans could build were quick to be connected by motorable roads, and human settlements multiplied.

The union of two rivers

Valleys were chiselled and mountain slopes clawed to build shorter roads connecting these riverplains. The dzongs became towns. The people migrated outward and inward, and settlements expanded. The Thrung Thrung Karma habitat of harvested fields and riverplains – its only wintering ground so far east in India – became prime property, and their visits dwindled. A pair or two, rarely three or more, were seen by the end of the 20^th century.

Act III. The Juvenile

Within a century, a dzong of 20 households has grown more than three times and the trade hub of 80 grew 13 times. The riverplains surrounded by mountains underwent rapid land-use change as well. While agricultural expansion did not directly affect the cranes, developmental activities surrounding the rivers had a rippling effect.

River dredging

As houses grew – not merely because of an increase in local human populations but an influx of people as new opportunities opened up – the demand for rocks and sand from the riverbed grew. Rivers were dug-up for stone quarrying as mountains were dug-up for road-widening. Incidentally, while this resulted in destruction of habitats, a niche-specific bird of the higher Himalaya found a spot to winter.

Phurpa stopped as cars swept past us on the small road along the ‘unfordable’ river of yore. Here, as Phurpa scanned the ochre bones, a bird flew in from down the valley and perched vertically on the escarpment: a ridiculous combination of slaty grey of the rocks and ruby-red wings. The bare bones of the mountain now visible along the road that was once a pastoralist’s trail that Bailey took, are the wintering grounds of the Wallcreeper.

Wallcreeper

It probed the nooks and crevasses in the rocks with its long beak and distinctly slender head. Using its wings to press against the vertical cliff to maintain balance, it used its unusually long curved talons to take hold of the smallest creases in the rocks. It probed around oblivious to my awe-induced frozen form, seamlessly fluttering and climbing up the wall loosening pebbles that turned into small landslides. In the higher Himalaya where cliffs make up a considerably higher proportion of available niches, the Wallcreeper is home. In the lower Himalaya where forests dominate the hillsides, it is the roadside cliffs – a manmade geographic feature – that provide it winter a home.

The Long-billed Plover in a plastic-riddled river

With the road newly paved for seamless flow of the traffic, the Wallcreeper and I barely escaped a small but dusty landslide that blocked nearly half of the road. I wondered if it was the Wallcreeper itself that probed crevasses a little too much, leading to a cascade. Perhaps not, but the effect that us humans have had on this ecosystem is in motion, even as our understanding of Thrung Thrung Karma advanced, and the romanticism of the bird in the valley symbolised by erecting a monument at the mouth of the valley.

Thrung Thrung Karma along the inching roads

The roads served more than just trade. They opened up the discreet valley plains tucked in the mountains to the world – explorers, adventure-seekers, and plain picknickers thronged to the valleys. Valleys well-connected with high human-density areas saw an influx of people seeking escapades away from the routine. It’s not the traditional wood-and-mud homes turned to stone-and-concrete that stressed the environment, it is the hotels, resorts, and the government-pushed homestays that sprang up along rivers and farmlands that increase demands for land and resources.

Demand for natural resources such as gravel and sand from rivers

The valley where sedges of Thrung Thrung Karma flocked saw such a quick change that they abandoned that place. They started homing-in other similar valleys, but these too were invaded. In the heart of the mountains where the glacial rivers slow down to the beat of the human heart, the sound of excavators, stone-crushers, and backhoe loaders resounded.

Thrung Thrung Karma against a newly built homestay

The Thrung Thrung Karma live alongside these new constructions now – red-roofed homestays that would once seem out of place in these valleys are embedded in their shrinking wintering grounds. Fences expand into the farmlands not to keep cattle out of farms but to privatize common lands for commerce. The Reekha, too, abandoned its rocky riverside feeding sites, even as some tolerate tourists flocking into their habitat as resorts and homestays invade the riverbanks.

Thrung Thrung Karma

When Phurpa and I visited one of the valleys where the bird is supposed to visit each year, we were greeted by only one juvenile who probably made its only second journey. Where were its parents, I know not. Last year, a crane was attacked by a dog in a valley not far from this. The individual would never be able to fly, it is said. What happened of its partner, I know not. What would happen of this juvenile, will it pair in the highlands of the Himalaya, near Yarlung Tsangpo, I know not. Will it abandon this valley in search of greener valleys, I know not. The monument at the mouth of the valley now lies in ruins, the head of the statue of the Thrung Thrung Karma is missing – an omen for what’s to come, I know not.

When I asked Phurpa if the Monpas from all the valleys ever got together to discuss the potential threat to the habitat of the revered Thrung Thrung Karma, he mentioned that what a particular village does with its community land is not the business of another village. A homestay caretaker kindly asked us to maintain distance from the bird, and we obliged, only wondering if they realise they are eating into its habitat each year to cater to the demands of tourists. When we climbed up the farmland where the juvenile bird fed, we greeted an old man carrying a load of harvest upon his head who lamented that there’s only one visitor when there were many once.

Bailey's trail

The Thrung Thrung Karma and the many birds are very much a part of the valley even today. This is not an ode to them, but it is not an optimistic tale either. What Bailey left behind is not merely a trail for adventurers to follow, he set in motion that which the very people of the valleys should have decided for themselves. And while he cribs and cries in his account of his passionate search for the valley of the Yarlung Tsangpo, he lays bare their Pemako.

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Mount Gori Chen

Phurpa whispered to the birds, and I, awestruck, merely watched – often from the eyepiece of my camera – and said nothing. For a bird-whisperer, there is little left to see, pockets of sunshine in clouds of soot. Realising this, while I cherished seeing the Thrung Thrung Karma beneath the Gori Chen, I am unable to celebrate the year of the crane knowing well the last vestiges of its hidden wintering abodes are being rampaged by my own kin. Not long after I saw the lone Thrung Thrung Karma feeding in the barren paddy field, a sedge visited in a valley not far from here suffering the same symptoms. It’s an epidemic not specific to one valley, mountain, or plain. What’s the point of labelling them?