This story originally appeared in Reasons to be Cheerful.
At a landfill on Majuli, which is said by many to be the world’s largest riverine island, a cluster of ungainly birds peck at garbage.
Here, on the river Brahmaputra in the northeast Indian state of Assam, these animals stand over four and a half feet tall, bald and with a strange orange pouch on their necks. And while it’s fair to say they would probably never win an avian beauty contest, the greater adjutant storks (Leptoptilos dubius) play a crucial role in Assam’s wetlands by consuming decaying organic matter, helping in nutrient recycling and promoting ecosystem health.
Just as I get the storks into my camera frame, a local woman asks curiously: “Why are so many people suddenly interested in these ugly, dirty birds?”
She’s right. Few birds are as celebrated or as integrated into Assamese life today as the greater adjutant stork. It wasn’t always this way. Once a thriving species, they used to live in large colonies across Assam. By the nineties, however, deforestation of the tall trees in which they nested, and a growing fear of the big, flesh-eating birds, saw the storks — once so prominent that they featured on the port city Calcutta’s (now Kolkata’s) coat of arms — practically disappear from the landscape.
“We used to chase them away, pelt them with stones … everyone thought they would bring bad luck!” says 37-year-old Pratima Kalita Rajbongshi, a subsistence farmer.
But in 2007, they found an unlikely protector in a young Ph.D. student, Purnima Devi Barman. When her research revealed that greater adjutant storks were at the edge of oblivion, with only 800 to 1,200 adult birds left globally, she was alarmed.
“I realized that if we didn’t do something, there may not be any storks left by the time I completed my thesis,” she says.
The issue she faced is that no one she encountered liked greater adjutant storks. The Assamese call them hargila, which means “bone swallower” in the local language. They are scavengers and tend to nest in colonies on top of trees, and wherever they nest, the ground underneath becomes a stinky mess of bones and poop. Locals regarded the presence of this scavenger bird as a curse, often cutting down their nesting trees and chasing the storks away.
Barman, who had just become a mother to twins, remembers witnessing a tree felled with nine nesting chicks inside, which distressed her deeply. “When I picked up the chicks from the fallen nests and felt their heartbeat, it felt like the beating hearts of my own babies,” she says. Some died in her arms. “I cried while people jeered at me, and that was the day I decided to put my Ph.D. on hold in order to start a community-led conservation campaign to save the storks.”
The question was, how to break the societal prejudice against the hargila? “My own reaction to those fallen chicks had come from my womb,” says Barman. “I realized I had to get others to connect to the birds in the same way.”
Barman’s idea of weaving the wellbeing of a species into the religious and cultural fabric of the community has several parallels. In a habitat of the pangolin in the Indian state of Maharashtra, conservationists established an idol of the scaly mammal in the local shrine and even started an annual festival to celebrate the services it provides to the community in preying upon agricultural pests.
Similarly, traditional houses in rural Kerala often protect patches of sacred groves to provide a safe place for snakes, revered in the local culture. And in Delhi, legends of a powerful sadhu (holy man) believed to protect Mangar Bani, a forest on the city’s outskirts, have ensured that it has remained unscathed by population pressure and the real estate boom that has engulfed most of the surrounding green area.
Being Assamese herself, Barman began linking the hargila to local rituals and ceremonies. “I’d hold traditional baby showers whenever I found a stork’s nest with eggs in it,” she says. At first, attendance was poor, but the ones who showed up helped sow the seeds of change.
“I went out of curiosity when my own baby was just one month old,” Rajbongshi says. “The same ceremony had been performed for me barely months ago. I looked at the hargila babies, and they were just as vulnerable as my own infant.”
To cement this emotional, maternal connection, Barman went a step further. She sang local wedding songs to celebrate the breeding season, and encouraged women to say special prayers for newly hatched hargila chicks in temples during festivals.
She even managed to encourage the use of the stork, with its unique neck pouch, as a motif in their traditional woven dresses, mekhala chadors and gamochas.
It was only after this that Barman began talking about the vital ecosystem services the stork provides. Some remained unconvinced. Others, living in repressively patriarchal families, found it difficult to leave their homes unescorted to attend Barman’s meetings. So she devised socially acceptable activities like cooking contests to draw them out.
“At these contests and meetings, I’d make them play a game called the Web of Life, which made them realize how our destinies are inextricably linked with our entire ecosystem,” Barman says.
By 2008, Barman had managed to gain enough of a following that she started the Hargila Army with about 400 women. They monitored nests, rescued fallen chicks and advocated with local officials to help protect the birds. Through village-to-village drives, the women began raising awareness about the positives of the ungainly stork and dispelling superstitions about it.
Jump forward more than a decade, and as the pandemic took hold, Barman realized that in a region plagued with poverty, battered by disasters and marked by outward migration, the long-term sustainability of the project would require economic incentives as well.
Karabi Das, 35, joined the Hargila Army in 2020. Until that time, she says, she would see the bird, but had “never felt any love for it.” A chance meeting with Barman, and the sight of a hargila nest up close, changed that.
Not only did Das volunteer for the village-to-village program, she joined the weaving unit and began weaving the hargila into stoles, mekhala chadors and gamochas. These products, sold in domestic and international markets via the Hargila Army’s retail platform PashooPakshee, raised funds and spread awareness about hargila conservation beyond Assam.
“I now earn about Rs 10,000 (US$110) a month, depending on how much I’m able to weave,” Das says. “Who’d have thought that, one day, a bird we once considered a harbinger of bad luck would give us a livelihood?”
42-year-old Lavita Baishya received a free sewing machine and training in tailoring through the Hargila Army. “Through the village-to-village program, I’ve met and trained over a hundred women interested in setting up their own tailoring businesses,” she says.
By 2023, the stork was moved from “endangered” under the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) classification to the less serious “near threatened” status, and estimates indicate the global population of the bird to be at least 3,180, with approximately 1,830 in Assam, 600 in Bihar and 750 in Cambodia.
From 27 in 2008, the number of nests has risen to over 210 in Kamrup district, Assam, now declared an Important Bird Area.
The Hargila Army now numbers 20,000, and its members report many improvements in their lives.
“I’ve become so much more confident, and everyone in the village respects me as a Hargila Army member today,” says Das.
Baishya’s daughter is studying to be a doctor, and she says that her association with the Hargila Army has shown her how important it is for women to be financially independent.
The recognition has spread globally, too. In 2024, Barman received the Whitley Gold Award — a prestigious international prize recognizing effective, grassroots conservation leaders in the Global South. She plans to use her prize money to add at least 10,000 women to the Hargila Army and increase the stork’s numbers to a more robust 5,000 birds by 2030, by expanding operations in the east Indian state of Bihar, as well as in Cambodia.
This is critical as the IUCN says that the greater adjutant stork, with a current global population of between 1,360 to 1,510 mature individuals, is entirely conservation dependent, and states that “any weakening of protection or reduction in conservation effort could lead to future declines.”
“There’s a lot that the hargila has taught me,” Barman says. “It is resilient, it is strong … but most of all, its resurgence has convinced me that human emotion is a powerful tool of change. Appeal to people’s emotions, and we can change the fate of entire species.”
Feature image credit: Apotnis/Wikimedia Commons
