There was a time when you would endure a 12-hour drive from Dehradun airport to reach a remote Himalayan village for a holiday, hoping to escape the crowds at popular spots like Mussoorie. Others seeking even more quiet would trek high up to camp in serene meadows between snow-clad peaks. Sadly, it is getting tougher every year to beat the crowds. However, one local resident is adjusting to survive it.
That resident is the Himalayan monal, a pheasant whose male wears green, blue and copper plumage. It is the state bird of Uttarakhand and the national bird of Nepal. In this piece for the BBC, Rachita Prasad reports on two studies, conducted over five years by researchers in Uttarakhand, that flag how infrastructure and tourism are squeezing the monal’s habitat while rising noise alters how it communicates. Lead researcher Dr Rajeev Lochan says the monal was chosen because its narrow, seasonal habitat range makes it a useful indicator of the wider ecosystem’s health: “If the species is facing issues on this particular landscape, there might be a chance that the ecological disturbances are affecting other birds too.”
The voice finding is the more surprising of the two. In the Kedarnath Musk Deer Sanctuary, Lochan and colleagues Dinesh Kumar Sharma and Anand Kumar recorded more than 700 monal calls across two valleys for a year from April 2023, one busy with tourist traffic (Chopta) and one largely quiet (Madmaheshwar). Birds in the noisier valley produced calls at significantly higher peak frequencies, and shorter in duration, apparently to cut through the low-frequency din of vehicles and crowds. The shifts are subtle enough to need recording devices to catch, and Lochan is quick to narrow the claim: “This does not mean that the species has undergone a permanent or evolutionary change in its vocal frequency; rather, our findings suggest behavioural flexibility in response to different acoustic environments.”
The second study looks at where the monal can live. The team modelled the bird’s suitable habitat across Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh using IPCC-style climate scenarios, and projects that warming will keep shrinking and destabilising it through 2100. As snow melts and vegetation creeps upslope, and as humans encroach on the alpine meadows below, the bird is being pushed higher: “These birds are now slowly moving upwards in the Himalayas as the snow is melting… They are anyway being pushed upwards as their natural habitats in alpine meadows are being encroached upon by humans,” Lochan says. The worry is fragmentation, populations scattered into disconnected pockets, with fewer chances to breed across groups and a rising risk of local extinction.
The habitat model assumes the monal will still need today’s climate set-up in future, which the piece calls a reasonable but not certain assumption. Lochan describes the work as preliminary. Even hedged in this fashion, the signal is worth hearing. The deeper problem, as environmental practitioner Vishal Singh frames it, is one of priorities: “the economic development of the region is not aligned to its ecological integrity.” And the monal, with its narrow range, is only the messenger. Singh’s real warning is that the message is not about one pheasant at all: “if the monal is forced to change both its voice and its address, how are the more sensitive species responding?” Anjal Prakash of FLAME University, a contributor to IPCC reports: “In listening to the monal, we hear the Himalayas asking for space, silence and care.”
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