Dr Ravi Sankaran is something of a legend in ecological circles, especially for his work on birds that are found in the most challenging landscapes that nobody bothered to study. But also because he was known to push boundaries, often at great personal risk, and encouraged others to do so. Fondly called the Indiana Jones of Indian conservation, Sankaran worked in the most primitive conditions for eight years in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to document its endemics. On these islands, he remains a memorable figure. The Nicobarese from Chingen Village, a settlement along the coast of Great Nicobar that remains deeply suspicious of mainlanders, fondly referred to him as Chidiya Babu. Under his supervision, K Sivakumar went on to pursue the first-ever doctoral study on the Nicobar Megapode which, two decades later, is the only detailed work on the bird.
Later, when I return to Delhi, I watch Sivakumar’s online lectures and speak to him over a Zoom call. Dressed in a clean-pressed, buttoned-up blue shirt, thick-rimmed glasses, tamed hair and a trimmed moustache, Sivakumar comes across as someone who enjoys the comforts of a routine and an office. Fortunately, by now, I know better – ornithologists are closet adrenalin junkies. “Dr Sankaran was ready to risk his life for birds,” he says. “I couldn’t have found a better guru.”
Sivakumar had grown up in a small town near Pondicherry and secured a degree in microbiology from a local college. He had never lived away from home, or spoken any language other than Tamil and English, and knew nothing about wildlife. And yet, a job advertisement in a local newspaper looking for someone to work on endemic birds in the remote Nicobar Islands caught his fancy. “I was in search of a challenge, something exciting,” he recalls. “I wanted to travel the furthest, do something nobody had done before.” Sankaran, who was known to be a fine judge of character, had found his match.
The year was 1995. On the very first day, after they landed in Campbell Bay, Sankaran and Sivakumar walked for 35 km or 14 hours, with ration and luggage on their backs, along a damaged road to reach Galathea Bay. “For hours, I did not see a single human being. I remember spotting coconut trees and thinking that if I don’t find food, I might be able to survive on those,” he says. For the first four nights, while they constructed a “camp” – a straw roof, suspended on areca palm wood poles – Sankaran, Sivakumar and Jugloo slept on the open beach, under mosquito nets that were a flimsy defence against the monstrous sandflies.
On the eleventh day of their visit, Sankaran came down with malaria and walked 35 km back to admit himself to the only hospital on Great Nicobar in Campbell Bay. Sivakumar was left alone with a much younger Jugloo, a first-time field assistant with a penchant for disappearing for weeks, especially when he got his hands on undiya, a tribal rice beer. And yet, there was something that made him stay, perhaps the enigma of the megapode – “I couldn’t believe that such a small bird could build a nest larger than me!”
The mound nest is the core of the megapode universe. A solitary male must charm a female before the pair can embark on building a nest or securing a spot on an already existing mound. The construction involves the careful selection of materials that are mostly found only in very specific habitats – where deciduous forests line the shore. Clay-like soil that is neither sandy nor loamy is mixed with corals, shells, rocks and leaf litter to construct a mound.
Around four pairs use the same mound and form overlapping territories around it. The picture becomes clearer as I see some of Sivakumar’s sketches. (“Dr Sankaran had advised me to not carry a camera to the field. There was no need for unnecessary distractions,” remembers Sivakumar, who turned to sketching the bird and its nest mound.) With the mound at the centre and a quadrilateral for every megapode territory that intersects at it, the diagram looks like an asymmetrical, lopsided pinwheel. During the breeding season (February–May), the site turns into an arena. Megapodes are highly territorial. Twice a day, every morning and evening, the pairs show up to stake their claim. The male climbs the mound and sounds a territorial call – a chuckle and a croak. “As if to say, ‘I am here, this is my mound’,” says Sivakumar. There is an unspoken agreement among the couples – one doesn’t show up when the other is there. On most days, a call is enough to ward off intruders, but on rare occasions, a challenger shows up. Fights erupt. Solitary males chase females to win them over, and males battle to capture the fort. I see Sivakumar’s hand-drawn sketches of megapode fights. It’s all legwork – the first line of attack targets the feet, then a flying kick to the chest, and if matters get out of hand, a severe blow on the head settles the duel.
Once the pairs are committed to each other, they mate, and the female lays a clutch of 2–3 eggs. For at least seven weeks, the megapode pairs regularly visit their burrows to check on the eggs. They inspect the mound to keep the temperature at about 33°C, perfect for incubation. If the temperature drops, they add more leaf litter to the mix. If the temperature rises, they dig pits to release the heat. Their close monitoring of the mound’s heat gives the megapode family the name ‘temperature birds’. About seven weeks later, the eggs hatch and the chicks dig themselves out of the mound to emerge in the most mature condition of any bird. They can run, fly and even hunt on the same day. No parenting, or parents, required.
For three and a half years, Sivakumar was privy to this exceptional avian drama. Until Sivakumar’s research, the Nicobar Megapodes were assumed to be strictly monogamous, but he saw pairs split, find new partners and then reunite several breeding seasons later. On some days, things got ugly. On one occasion a male tried to forcibly mate with the female from another pair. The chase and fight lasted for 45 minutes, while their respective partners stood, calling incessantly in vain. “Even in the mid-90s, the megapode’s habitat was being taken over by locals for agriculture, leaving the birds little room to build mounds. Without a mound, a male has no chance to win over a female. Perhaps, this was the reason megapodes were trying to mate with already paired females,” says Sivakumar.
Fieldwork often wrapped up by noon, and Sivakumar spent the rest of his day watching the rarest creatures only found on the Nicobar Islands – Robber Crabs, Nicobar Treeshrews, Great Nicobar Parakeets and sea turtles. Many kept him company. At some point, a snake moved into Sivakumar’s open hut, and he tiptoed around it for weeks. More than once, a Green Sea Turtle chose to build a nest on the bare floor of his hut. “Galathea is the closest thing to paradise,” he says.
But surviving paradise needs reckless courage that flirts with death. The first time Sivakumar got malaria, he walked 35 km to Campbell Bay, as his mentor had done within two weeks of their arrival, and admitted himself to the same hospital. Over three and a half years, he’d have to do it six more times. “You reach the hospital, rest, have ample coconut water and return to the camp,” he says casually of his malaria cure drill.
As the years passed, things improved. The forest department lent him a tarpaulin sheet to cover the straw hut. Sivakumar arranged for a kerosene lamp, with fuel just enough to light up the hut for 30 minutes every night. He made new friends in Chingen and learned to roast freshly caught fish over a wood fire.
Excerpted with permission from ‘In Search of the Last Megapodes’ by Radhika Raj in The Search for India’s Rarest Birds, edited by Shashank Dalvi and Anita Mani, Juggernaut.
