On New Year’s Day of 1874, a huge shopping complex was inaugurated with a lot of fuss for the colonial residents of Calcutta. Called New Market, it was conceived due to the Britishers’ disdain for sharing public spaces with Indians. This was Calcutta’s first proper marketplace where the colonialists could shop for Western clothes, shoes, and books. There were florists, vegetable sellers, and slaughterhouses. Thousands of native animals and game birds, caught in the forests and shot in the beels (lakes), moved through the market every day.
Amongst this array of creatures brought in for the Western table, every once in a while, a uniquely coloured bird came through. It had a long neck, a large, brown body and front neck, an antacid-coloured pink head, bill, and back neck. It was striking. Once you see a picture of the pink-headed duck, the image stays with you.
Cover photo: The pink-headed duck was once found in the wetlands of India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. The species is now feared extinct. Males of the species sported striking rosy-pink heads, while females were slightly duller.
The pink-headed duck’s scarce appearance in the market was indicative of the rareness of the duck. “It very seldom comes into the Calcutta Market — rarely should I think of more than half a dozen specimens in a season”, remarked the ornithologist AO Hume in 1879, underlining the duck’s sparse occurrence.
The pink-headed duck was a prized catch to be flaunted in a colonialist’s menagerie. Its rarity didn’t hinder its procurement well into the 20th century. John Alexander Bucknill, a British lawyer and ornithologist, mentions, in the journal IBIS in January 1924, a series of advertisements that appeared in the winter of 1923 in leading Indian newspapers announcing handsome rewards for procuring live pink-headed ducks. One advertisement in The Statesman announced:
Wanted – TO BUY. PINK-HEADED ducks and drakes, Hindi name “Golabi Seer” (not red-crested pochards). Rs. 100 each, delivered sound Calcutta. Apply Box 0649, Advt. Dept., ‘Statesman.’
“Golabi Seer” refers to the male of the species, while the female has a paler pink head, neck and darker bill. Although it was uncommon, notes and records of British naturalists indicate that they thought the duck was fairly widely distributed. Its populations were concentrated in the marshes and beels in Malda and Purulia districts of present-day West Bengal and Madhubani and Purnia districts of Bihar. The duck was also recorded in the Western Brahmaputra Valley, and the northern regions of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab, as well as stray records in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, with a specimen AO Hume collected from Loktak lake in Manipur.
This pink duck has been a source of fascination for centuries. In a recently published book, The Search for India’s Rarest Birds, author and birder Aasheesh Pittie summarises how the earliest known painting of the pink-headed duck was beautifully created by the artist Bhawani Das between 1777 and 1782. Das practiced the Patna Qalam style of painting, developed by merging the ornate Mughal school with European styles of painting. Das was employed by Sir Elijah Impey, then Chief Justice of the Bengal Supreme Court, to paint the flora and fauna of his private zoo. The last acknowledged record of the pink-headed duck in the wild is from Charles M Inglis, curator of the Bengal Natural History Society’s museum in Darjeeling when he shot one in June 1935 in Bihar.
Despite not being seen for over 80 years, pink-headed duck specimens (there are over 80 in museums in India and around the world) continue to contribute to our understanding of its fascinating evolutionary past. The study of a pink-headed duck skin specimen published in the journal The Auk: Ornithological Advances in 2016 found that the pink on the duck’s head is from carotenoid pigments derived from what the bird eats. For instance, flamingos get their pink from the algae and shrimp they feed on. But the pink is a rare occurrence in ducks, with Australia’s pink-eared duck the only other distant cousin of the pink-headed duck to have carotenoid pigmentation.
Another study in 2017 confirmed the hunch that naturalists like Hume, Ali, and Ripley have had for over a century — the overall population size of the pink-headed duck has naturally been low. The study estimates the duck’s population to have been between 15,000 - 25,000 individuals during the past 150,000 years. The reasons for this could be the duck’s inherent biology. It probably was a slow breeder and needed very specific habitat niches to live. The degradation and loss of its habitat to human needs might have been the final nail in the pink-headed duck’s coffin, though its grave was dug by the incessant game hunting and procurement for leisure by colonialists.
Ornithologists suggest that India should officially declare the pink-headed duck extinct. While it would give us closure to mourn and reflect on the loss of a splendid bird, it also leaves behind lessons to learn, only if we as a nation are willing to heed. The pink-headed duck’s enduring legacy might be the push India needs to conserve the duck’s other endangered avian relatives such as the great Indian bustard and Bengal florican.
All illustrations are the artist’s impression of the bird, created for representational purposes only.
About the authors
Vrushal Pendharkar
Vrushal Pendharkar is an independent environmental journalist.
Rabani Bhagat
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