The Great Indian Hornbill count: Nagaland’s biggest bird census
The bird that names the festival is being counted across Nagaland — and the numbers are a warning.
The great hornbill — the bird whose silhouette crowns Nagaland’s biggest festival — is the subject of the state’s largest-ever bird census, spanning every district.
Early findings are sobering: the birds are concentrated in protected and community forests, and vanish where hunting is unchecked.
The census is intended to make the bird a measure of the state’s conservation health — the hornbill as a pulse check.