The ‘stork sisters’ are saving one of India’s largest and rarest birds

Known locally as hargila, the threatened Greater Adjutant stork has found a champion in an unlikely place: the Harglia Army, a group of about 20,000 rural women in India turned conservationists. Since 2014, the women have worked tirelessly to give the storks a desperately needed reputational revamp. 

Once reviled as filthy, adjutants prey on fish, frogs, snakes, rats, and smaller birds like ducks, rummaging through landfills looking for carcasses (hargila translates to bone swallower). Its feeding habits cemented its reputation as unsanitary, a perception that led to a rapid population decline of the adjutant, one of the world’s largest and rarest storks. Native to India’s floodplains in Assam and Bihar, in 2023, it was recently listed as “near threatened” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Though its population remains fragile, it is increasing.

That’s due in large part to the Hargila Army and its founder, wildlife biologist Dr. Purnima Devi Barman who saw the Greater Adjutant differently. Barman says she fell “deeply in love” with the birds.

“My grandma first introduced me to them in our village paddy fields, where they would flock,” she recalls. 

Barman, who won the Whitely Gold Award in 2024, an international grant given to recognize major contributions to conservation, has made protecting the storks her life’s mission. Under her guidance, and the help of the Hargila Army, the adjutant’s numbers have quadrupled in Assam to more than 1,800 birds. 

The crux of Barman’s conservation efforts has been to win over the local communities to find the acceptance for the greater adjutant. It was a complicated process since the birds were disliked by local villagers. The Great Adjutant are colonial nesters, choosing tall canopy trees for about five to six months to nest. They litter the ground beneath the trees with their droppings and the food waste they bring back to feed their chicks. 

“The villagers would rather cut down the trees in their backyards than have such birds in their midst,” says Barman.  

“I befriended the village women in ‘Naamghar’ or temples, who were until then mostly confined to their kitchens,” Barman recalls. She organized cooking competitions and collective prayers for their children’s well-being while educating them on the importance of hargila as ecosystem cleaners. 

She also revived Assam’s rich weaving tradition and, with loans from state agencies, procured yarns and looms. The hargila weaving center opened in 2017, where the women learned to weave fabrics with the motifs of the bird that were then made into stoles, traditional Assamese towel and dresses, bags, and cushion covers. Their products were sold at local markets and online stores, more than doubling the region’s average monthly household. Her “entrepreneurial vision” using conservation to improve women’s economic status earned her UNEP’s Earth Champion award in 2022.

In collaboration with state departments, the Hargila Army is protects nesting trees, putting up nets around them for the safety of newborn chicks, as well as monitoring the nests. They even organize baby showers to celebrate their arrival and also spread awareness through advocacy programs in villages and schools.     

Hargila devotees in the Indian state of Bihar

In addition to the Hargila Army’s work in Assam, the stork has also seen population growth in Bihar, where it was first detected in 2006 by Arvind Mishra, an ornithologist who has been documenting the underexplored avian diversity in the region for more than 30 years.

He first saw about 42 juveniles of greater adjutants in May 2006 foraging on the sandbars of the River Ganges in the state’s Bhagalpur region. “During the same year in October, I was thrilled to find two of these unusual-looking birds nesting atop a large silk cotton tree in the nearby Ganges floodplains,” Mishra says. 

In 2007, he and his team found 16 more nests with 78 individuals, but little was known about the Greater Adjutant then. Still, it spurred him “to strive for their comeback with the help of local villagers.” 

Today, the local communities have become devotees of the bird. They worship it as the incarnate of Garuda Maharaj, a Hindu deity often depicted with wings, who is the mount of Lord Vishnu, one of the religion’s major gods. Mishra took the help of local priests to strengthen community beliefs that Garuda’s arrival in their villages is a symbol of good omen and that disturbing them or their nests can bring calamities. 

The Greater Adjutant population is still fragile, but growing

Both Barman and Mishra are thrilled by the growing number of adjutant nests. In 2010, Barman remembered having recorded only 28 nests in Dadara, Pacharia, and Singimari villages in Kamrup district; today, there are more than 252. While the three villages continue to hold the storks largest global population, their colonies are also growing in Assam and Bihar. Mishra, who began his conservation journey with just two nests in 2006, has recently documented 650 individual storks in 20- 25 hamlets in and around Bihar’s Bhagalpur district.

Meanwhile, pointing to newer conservation challenges, ornithologist Gopi Sundar, cited a recent study on the tissue analysis of greater adjutants in Assam that found traces of plastic, toxic chemicals, and heavy metals in the intestines of their carcasses. “These reflect on the changing habits and ecology of the bird,” he says. 

Though Barman and her Hargila Army have successfully rehabbed the storks’ reputation, its habitats are still threatened. Conservationists worry that farmers may fell the storks’ large nesting trees to expand their agricultural activities. The wetlands are being filled up by the ever-increasing population and new development projects. 

Development, Barman says, is “challenging for the breeding and nesting of the species.” As solutions, nurseries of nesting tree species and their plantations are underway near the breeding sites and existing wetlands in both Assam and Bihar.

Over the next few years, Mishra aims to stabilize the population of Greater Adjutant storks in Bihar by monitoring and conserving their newer scattered breeding sites in neighboring districts with the help of local communities. Barman plans to scale up her conservation work by involving more students and youth and reaching out to Bihar and Cambodia through community-driven programs. She is working to increase the global population of greater adjutants to 5,000 by 2030 and double the number of Hargila Army members. 

“The real success of conservation lies in the cultural transition that it brings among the local communities to accept and co-exist with the species, and such community conservation models can be replicated for other threatened bird species worldwide,” says Barman.