Exploring Upper Siang: A Story of Wildlife, Community, and Conservation

A haze of clouds blankets the sky above an ongoing cricket match. A fielder dives to block a four as my gaze shifts between the match and the immense Eastern Himalayas rising in the background. Roughly 1,200 m above sea level, the field is perched on a flat, wide outcrop of the hills in Gobuk, a village in the Upper Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh populated by members of the Adi tribe. Pauses in the commentary (provided in Adi and, occasionally, Hindi) are filled with the buzz of cicadas, the distinct “where’s my chuki pepper” call of the lesser cuckoo, and the faint gushing of the Yammeng River in the valley below. The Yammeng is a tributary of the Siang, a river that begins its journey in the Tibetan Himalayas as the Yarlung Tsangpo and winds eastward to enter India near Gelling. This river and its many tributaries carve through some of the richest landscapes in the Eastern Himalayas before flowing into the plains to eventually become the mighty Brahmaputra.

It is mid-May, and I’m in Gobuk for the first edition of the Siang Biodiversity Meet organised by the Epum Sirum Welfare Society, a local NGO working on conservation and livelihoods. Planned as part of a budding nature-linked ecotourism initiative in Upper Siang, this meet brings together nature enthusiasts from across the country to document local biodiversity and enjoy the hospitality and culture of the Gobuk community. In collaborating with the people of Gobuk to set up homestays for visits such as ours, Epum Sirum hopes to incentivise nature conservation in this landscape. 

As with most other tribes in the region, hunting has formed a crucial part of Adi sustenance and culture for generations. However, this practice has proved unsustainable in recent times, with access to weapons such as guns drastically raising the success of a hunt as compared to traditional methods. While hunting in Gobuk has reduced considerably in the past few years due to a ban placed by law as well as by the local community, it continues to happen covertly, especially during the annual Adi festival of Aran. Children also use catapults to take down birds and squirrels — a habitual pastime they pay little thought to and one they don’t even truly recognise as hunting. The impact these practices have had on this landscape is tangible. Surveying birds around Gobuk is purely an exercise in identifying their calls as they have become so strongly accustomed to shielding themselves in the foliage.

Off the highway leading to Gobuk is a trail that meanders past cultivated land into forests. Along this trail, we run into a pair of mithun, local cattle reminiscent of the wild Indian gaur. While mithun are bred by locals for their meat, they serve an entirely different purpose for our little group of butterfly watchers. Butterflies rely on the process of mud-puddling for their daily sustenance, i.e., they find a mineral-rich patch of mud, faecal matter, or even an animal carcass, and unfurl their proboscis to slurp up nutrient-rich fluids. And here in the Northeast, mithun urine-soaked mud under a fair bit of sunlight forms a great mud-puddling patch for several species of butterflies. Swordtails, bluebottles, jays, puffins, and a myriad other butterflies swarm such sites along with bees and hummingbird hawkmoths. We spend the next few days butterfly-watching where the mithuns have been — the spots easily identified as fermenting, slate-red pools in the mud.

The last two days of the meet are spent in the Ramsing range of Mouling National Park, a protected area spanning roughly 480 sq km. Its undisturbed nature is immediately evident from the behaviour of the birds who call from open treetops, largely unbothered by the presence of gawking humans. Minivets, rosefinches, and nuthatches frequent the bare tree visible from the forest department’s quarters. A pair of black-winged cuckooshrikes alight on a distant tree and tend to their chicks. Even the ever-elusive green cochoa allows us to catch more than a glimpse as its shrill call swings through the air.

While butterfly-watching here is hindered by a steady blanket of clouds and rain, we stumble upon something rather spectacular on a late morning walk: an Asian glass lizard. I’ve dreamt of seeing this lizard for quite some time now, partly due to its brilliant orange-yellow body with bright blue stripes, but mostly because it has no legs. Despite a rather obvious lack of limbs, it continues to lay claim to the title of “lizard” because of its external ear openings and movable eyelids (key traits absent in snakes). Our group runs into these lizards lounging on the path on more than one occasion — heartening evidence that quite a few are in the area.

The Upper Siang landscape hosts an unparalleled range of India’s biodiversity along with communities committed to its preservation. After the cricket match at Gobuk, we make our way across the field to the primary school, a building adorned with vivid wall paintings of local wildlife and traditional Adi attire. Besides attending their usual classes here, the students also participate in a nature education programme initiated by GreenHub India known as “Green School”. Joyshree Gogoi, a GreenHub fellow, explains that this programme aims to transform children’s perspectives towards nature by encouraging them to connect with natural spaces through fun activities such as art, games, documentary screenings, and nature walks. Joyshree and her colleagues, Tahaj Hussain and Apping Libang, are now training women from local self-help groups to conduct these activities, thus facilitating the Gobuk community to lead their own Green School programme. Such community-led initiatives provide immense hope for conserving this landscape’s flora and fauna, much of which is yet to be discovered. Perhaps, with time, the birds of Gobuk will find it safe to sing in the open as boldly as they do within protected areas.