Two Leaves and the Birds: Notes from Tea Gardens of the Dooars

Late in December of 2021, my train chugged into the small town of Malbazar in the foothills of the Himalayas in West Bengal. The train was packed with tourists headed towards Gorumara National Park or hamlets in the hills around Kalimpong. On their way, many would make a pit stop at one of the dozens of tea gardens lining the roads stretching in all directions from Malbazar. After all, a visit to a tea garden promises gorgeous views and “Instagram-worthy” photos of lush green tea bushes shaded by trees, set against the backdrop of blue-green mountains. It was in these gardens that I carried out my master’s research project on birds.

Malbazar is a prominent town in the Terai-Dooars landscape of northern West Bengal. These tea gardens (production-wise) come second only to the Assam gardens, producing over two lakh tonnes per year — a quarter of the entire national crop! Hundreds of tea gardens paint the Dooars in a coat of green, dwarfing the Gorumara forests. This should be concerning for a region that falls within the Eastern Himalaya Biodiversity Hotspot and, as the name suggests, houses rich flora and fauna. The reason for concern is that a tea monoculture (i.e., a plantation growing a single crop) is not a good wildlife habitat. Tea monocultures are challenging habitats with the regular pruning of tea bushes, intense pest control, high human footfall, and usually little-to-no tree cover. They have even been called “green deserts”.

However, the Dooars tea gardens present an ecosystem different from our go-to image of a tree-less tea monoculture. Since their inception in the late 1800s, tea gardens here have maintained a cover of shade trees with native species. While there is great variation in the amount of shade, the mere presence of this canopy gives wildlife a better chance at using the gardens. A lucky tourist stopping by for a picture may spot the occasional elephant herd serenely walking amidst tea bushes.

But if one is to spend more time, the system slowly unveils its diverse fauna. A bright green bee-eater swoops down to catch an Eterusia moth and takes its place back on a branch of an Albizzia tree (locally called shirish). A white-breasted waterhen ambles atop tea bushes before spotting me and quickly disappears underneath. The air resounds with the parakeet-like shrieks of a pair of large cuckooshrikes. A third individual tries to socialise with the pair but soon turns its attention to feeding on insects from the underside of tea leaves. Perched precariously on the jagged end of a pruned branch, the bird seems at home atop a metre-high tea bush. This is interesting for a species considered a “canopy specialist”, one that prefers foraging high up in the canopy. Not just cuckooshrikes, several other birds in the tea gardens seem to behave unexpectedly.

My research focussed on the variety of birds with different biological characteristics (say, their natural diet and habitat) in the gardens and how the shade trees influence them. But as I spent time there, I found myself drawn to more than the names and numbers of the birds. I was entranced by the way birds were using the novel “resources” that a garden presents. For example, nearly every garden has glue traps set up on the shade tree trunks. These are sheets of brightly coloured plastic wrapped around the trunk and smeared with strong adhesive. The traps would have a motley of insects stuck on and the occasional red feather from a bulbul’s rump. Bulbuls, along with mynas, are common here. They would gather in small groups on bushes under a glue trap. One by one, they would fly up, pick off an insect, and re-join the flock.

Early in February, we chanced upon a golden-fronted leafbird drinking nectar from a tea flower. We later scoured through books and research papers, trying to see if this has been recorded in the past, but found nothing. This opens a new avenue of questioning — of the role tea flowers may play as a food resource, particularly in the blooming season of October-November. Also, people here collect these flowers to make pakodas! The tangled web of life in these human-dominated ecosystems continues to amaze us.

Possibly the most memorable experience for me was watching the humble black drongo. One day, we arrived at a garden to see six men wading through the bushes spraying pesticides, with a tank of chemicals in a backpack-like contraption and six motors running in deafening unison. Our N95 masks did little to fend off the noxious odour. A group of black drongos, however, followed the group a few paces behind. Every once in a while, they would dive-bomb straight into a cloud of fumes and fly off to a nearby perch to quickly devour the insect catch. The behaviour reminded me of seeing a forest fire during peak summer and how drongos flew dangerously close to flames. There, too, they would dive into the smoke to grab insects flushed out by the fumes.

While such observations made for a memorable field season, they also made me aware of how little we know about bird behaviour and their use of resources in agriculture and plantation landscapes. On the surface, it may seem like they are profiting from available resources, but we do not know the long-term health consequences of such behaviour. Will the remnant glue on insects in glue traps affect their digestive health? Will the pesticide fumes affect the respiratory health of drongos? We do not have the answers yet, but it is time to search for them.