What two great hornbills can teach us about Goa’s true wild side

One day, Star vanished. Ringo flew from tree to tree. To my eyes, he appeared to be scanning the skyline in search of her. I felt a cold dread. How many places were there for Star to be? Siolim has a handful of dense wooded pockets with old trees, amidst a growing forest of concrete: hotels, villas, shops.

Female Great Hornbill in Siolim (Photo credit: Stephen Menezes)

But the next day, I considered something more hopeful: perhaps Star had young hatchlings to care for. I learned about hornbills’ nesting habits. They are monogamous, and make their homes in the cavities of large trees. Their nests are sealed with mud and excrement, leaving just a slit for food to be passed through. Female hornbills live in these nests for four months, never emerging. It’s the males’ job to find food. A good system. But in all my excitement and hope, I had failed to account for one thing: nesting season was long since over.
And then, Ringo disappeared too.

***

It was Savio Fonseca, a bird guide, naturalist and co-author of Birds of Goa (2016), who first alerted me to the presence of Ringo and Star. “Have you ever seen the great hornbills?” he asked, as we walked down a road in Siolim where they were known to be seen. I told him that I thought I had. He didn’t believe me. “If you had,” he said, “you wouldn’t have forgotten them.”
He was right. And now, I couldn’t stop looking for them.

I spoke to a dog walker with whom I had previously shared joy over “the big birds.” Had he seen them? No, not for a few weeks. I posted the one blurry photograph I had of Ringo on the Birds of Goa Facebook group. I even spoke to a GIS specialist about mapping the remaining wild spaces in Siolim.

But no matter what I did, who I spoke to, or how hard I looked, there was no way to find them. Wherever they were — and I hoped that they were somewhere — Ringo and Star were doing their own thing.

***

Hornbills are farmers of the forest. Their beaks are built for plucking fruits and berries, and in India alone, they are known to eat more than 60 species of fruits and figs. Wild jamun, bitter nutmeg, neem, Nilgiri elm, banyan and karal figs are among the many species that make up a hornbill’s diet, and which, in turn, depend on hornbills to plant their seeds.

Aparajita Datta, scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation who works on hornbill conservation, says one of the reasons hornbills are successful farmers is that they don’t harm the seeds. “The fruit pulp is eaten, and the seeds are regurgitated from their mouths intact.” Datta and her team have conducted studies comparing the germination rate of seeds regurgitated by hornbills to those that have fallen from trees, and for many species, the likelihood of a seed sprouting is much higher when it’s been part of a hornbill’s diet.

Hornbills carry seeds far and wide. Datta says, “They don’t spend too much time at fruiting trees — they move and regurgitate them somewhere further away. “ The further a seed travels from its parent plant, the less competition over resources it faces, and the better its chances are of growing into a full, flourishing tree. By taking seeds to new places, hornbills help forests recover from damage by disease outbreaks, wildfires and deforestation.

They are also massively under threat. In 2018, great hornbills were listed internationally as a vulnerable species, facing a greater threat of extinction . “They’re declining all over the world,” Datta says, “It’s due to forest loss, plantations, the expansion of human settlements, hunting and illegal logging. There are so many reasons.” And this decline has far-reaching consequences.
The presence of hornbills indicates the well-being of the forest. A fall in the number of hornbills means a fall in the numbers and varieties of seeds that are dispersed. This decrease over time reduces fruit and fig trees, which nourish and provide homes for hundreds of other mammals, insects, and birds. Forests nourish humans, too: carbon dioxide absorption, the flow of water and weather patterns are all the work of forests.

Without hornbills and forests, an interlinked system that enables and supports life begins to fall apart.

***

What did it mean, then, for Ringo and Star to be here — in a tiny patch of forest amidst concrete — and then disappear? My panic felt all too justified.

Great hornbills are the largest of four hornbill species found across the Western Ghats. One of the top eight biodiversity hotspots in the world, the Western Ghats support such a teeming variety of life that new species are still being discovered. Goa, commonly known for its parties and beaches, has large areas lying in the Ghats. Siolim, in turn, is located in its foothills: a once-continuous ecosystem with the lush mountains themselves.

A Great Hornbill Pair in Goa (Photo credit: Savio Fonseca)

It can be hard to imagine this.

Goa is undergoing a series of badly planned, top-down changes. Large-scale highway redevelopment projects have cut into local populations, homes and wildlife. Goa’s second international airport has been built on an ecologically fragile plateau, with over 54,000 trees cut for its construction. And Siolim, boasting India’s most popular restaurant on its riverfront, has turned into an Instagrammer’s dream: multi-story villas, private pools, gardens full of non-native, ornamental species.

But not so very long ago, Siolim didn’t look like this. Like much of Goa, Siolim had a dense tree cover with thriving wildlife. A young artist who grew up here told me that as a child he used to regularly spot otters, monitor lizards and foxes in the area.

Today, thanks to rapid urbanisation and real-estate projects, all that remains of that rich habitat are forest fragments, like the one where I would see Ringo and Star. Researchers across the Western Ghats have found that hornbills are sometimes able to live in these small patches. But what does it actually mean to live in a forest fragment?

Shashank Srinivasan, director of the Goa-based Technology For Wildlife Foundation, weighs in. “A forest is not a monolith (of trees). It’s a dynamic interaction of species.” When there are a number of forest fragments across an area, such as north Goa, it means that the “entire diversity (of the ecosystem) is broken.” Srinivasan has a useful analogy: “Imagine (your) house. Suddenly someone decides that the kitchen is separate from your bedroom which is separate from your bathroom. Now when you want to use the kitchen, there’s a transmission line running through it. That’s fragmentation, in a nutshell.”

In Goa, these forest fragments are growing ever smaller. Datta says, “This is the way that bit by bit, people encroach on wild animals’ spaces… Some of these birds have site fidelity, because they’ve been using (these places) for generations. So even though there’s disturbance, even though it’s changed, they will still try to come back and roost here. So, if a place goes, if these four or five birds don’t come here any more… there will be one less beautiful thing. And this is how larger, insidious loss happens.”

As I scan the skies, I feel the full weight of this loss. Of the ways both human and nonhuman locals are in the process of being driven from their homes (the former priced out by unaffordable real estate). This infrastructural development is not for a “greater good”: not for access to electricity, or water, or public transport. All around my home lie gated villa complexes, boutique shops, the same restaurants that can be found in major cities — the very cities that people come here to escape.
Is this the only way to enjoy Goa?

***

Omkar Dharwadkar certainly doesn’t think so. The founder of Mrugaya Expeditions, a wildlife tourism company in Goa, Dharwadkar believes that if done right, tourism can be a way to conserve biodiversity. The first step is for tourists to “opt for businesses or people who value the actual surroundings.” This includes ensuring that locals are the primary beneficiaries of eco-tourism, which then strengthens village-level investment in conservation. Sustainable tourism also involves reminding tourists that they are guests — and should behave accordingly.

He goes on to say, “Whatever activity we do (and at Mrugaya, this can range from birding to night safaris), we see to it that it does minimal disturbance to the wildlife.” This involves, in part, a broadening of what ‘counts’ as wildlife. Tigers are all well and good, but “how,” Dharwadkar asks, “will you convince someone to conserve a dragonfly?”

This is a critical question. I often travel to enjoy time “in nature” — jungle safaris, whale-watching, freshwater swims —but Ringo and Star changed the way I understood what being in nature meant. They filled my neighbourhood and my days with wildness: not an “elsewhere” I had to travel to, but right here, where I lived.

And their disappearance didn’t make the wildness disappear. The brown birds, moths, lizards, bees, ants and fungi, all coexisted with me. These little creatures who have the same right to inhabit Siolim — its hills, trees, mangroves, rivers and backyards — as I do. Human beings have a place in the interconnected web of life, not a throne on the top of a food chain.

There are thousands of people who understand the importance of the ecosystems that make up Goa, and who rely on them for their lives and livelihood. My tryst with the hornbills led me to join citizens fighting to protect these spaces. Just over the last year, folks have been working to keep hotels from constructing walls around beaches, an elite campus from taking over indigenous land, and ill-planned infrastructure projects from tearing through the protected forests of Mollem National Park.

Not everything we are fighting for is as “exciting” as hornbills. But the work of conservation awareness, according to Dharwadkar, is “to connect the smallest species with the biggest. Most of the time it’s one charismatic species that helps you put your point across. It’s spread over a larger area, so you conserve everything else which is linked to it.”

Led by the hornbills’ vast flight paths, we can see that all beings, from the wasp to the banyan to the moss-covered stone, contain a roaring wildness within them. This wildness can be met with the same awe and recognition that the great hornbills inspire. The wildness of ants or leaves is not always photo-friendly, but it’s no less or more important than the tigers and polar bears who tug on our heart strings.

But wait, there’s more.

One day, oblivious to all my efforts and worries, Ringo and Star returned. Out on my evening walk through the orchard, I spotted them in a tall fishtail palm. I stood rooted to the spot with my dogs, drenched in relief, disbelief and tears. Meanwhile, Ringo fed Star a berry. It felt as though that loving, gentle act was for my comfort. But of course, it wasn’t. Nothing they did ever was.

Richa Kaul Padte is an author and editor. Shivangini Tandon is a conservation writer who encountered Ringo and Star. Both live in Goa