Jatinga is a scatter of houses on a forested saddle in the Dima Hasao district of Assam, in north-east India, a short drive from the hill town of Haflong. The ridge sits between 500 and 1,000 meters up, in a gap in the Barail range. For a few weeks in most years, from late summer into autumn, it has hosted an event that the press likes to call the place where birds go to die.
What happens
The pattern is narrow and repeats. It needs a night with no moon, or with cloud thick enough to hide it, sometime between about mid-August and October. Fog or low cloud has to be lying over the ridge, often with fine drizzle, and a wind has to be coming up from the south-west. When those things line up, birds begin dropping out of the dark in the early hours of the night and flying at whatever light is burning: a lamp, a fire, a lit window. They strike walls and poles or flutter to the ground, dazed, and stay there.
The people of Jatinga learned long ago to use this. Pressure lamps were set out to draw the birds in, and those that landed were knocked down with bamboo poles and taken for food. The Key Biodiversity Areas assessment of the site dates the practice to at least 1905 and records nights when hundreds were caught, with around 4,000 birds reported killed in 1997 alone. The victims are not one species. Bitterns, egrets and herons, kingfishers, pigeons and doves, pittas, rails, partridges, drongos, laughingthrushes and woodcock have all been recorded, and most of them are immature.
The investigation
The first ornithologist to put the event in print was Salim Ali, who visited the Haflong area with the naturalist E. P. Gee and wrote it up in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society in 1962. Gee returned to the subject in his 1964 book on Indian wildlife, giving the Haflong bird mystery a chapter of its own. Both found that the captured birds were residents or short-distance local movers, not long-haul migrants. Gee added that the lure worked best as a round glow rather than a directed beam such as a torch.
Similar events turned up elsewhere. In late 1976 two zoologists from the Zoological Survey of India’s Shillong station visited a hilltop building at Lunglei in Mizoram, whose bright lights killed some 300 to 500 birds each September and October on overcast, foggy nights. The species were again local ones, and the authors admitted they could not say why non-migratory birds should fly into lights at one place and one season. A 1984 newspaper report described a visit to the area by Dr. Sengupta of the same Survey, and the Bombay society’s Humayun Abdulali later compared the Assam reports with a holiday camp at Malshej Ghat in Maharashtra, where resident birds were also crashing into lit buildings on a windy, exposed edge of the Western Ghats.
The longest study was published in the Indian Forester in 2001 by Kalyan K. Gupta, who watched the ridge for five seasons. He counted about 50 of the district’s 200-odd bird species among the arrivals, with eight species making up three-quarters of the records, and found that most were sub-adults.
The explanations
Two ideas dominate, and they overlap. The first is weather. The south-westerly wind is funnelled through the gap in the Barail range on to the ridge, which also produces the fog. Abdulali argued that strong winds of this kind dislodge ground-loving birds such as doves, quails and rails from their roosts, and that a light is the only reference point they can find; birds swept past it turn back and hit it from the other side. The Assam ornithologist Anwaruddin Choudhury has taken the same line, noting that most birds return to their roosts once the wind drops, unless someone has killed or injured them first.
The second idea is navigation. Gupta proposed that birds moving at night use the moon to steer, and that on moonless nights a strong artificial light takes its place and pulls them down. That fits the timing but sits awkwardly with the finding that many of the birds are local rather than true migrants.
Neither explanation requires anything mysterious, and none involves suicide. Choudhury has called the label a misnomer. What remains open is why this particular ridge, rather than every foggy hill in the region, became the classic site, and how much of the reputation was built by a village that had every reason to keep its lamps lit.
Where it stands
The Assam Forest Department posted guards and built watchtowers, a local birdwatching club was formed in 1982, and an awareness campaign has cut the killing substantially. In 2010 both Choudhury and a senior forest official said far fewer birds were arriving; Choudhury blamed the loss of habitat in the nearby Barail hills to shifting cultivation and development. Visitors still wait on the ridge on misty nights. They now come to watch the birds rather than to catch them.