A group of youth stays put on the tank bund at a remote Veerannapalem village in Prakasam district all day for a big cause — ensuring safety and security of hundreds of migratory birds that keep date with the village in Parchur mandal every summer.
The village is known not just for the superior breed of Ongole cattle, which the farmers rear with passion considering as equal to their sons.
The avians take shelter on a tree with a large canopy in the midsts of the ‘Kothachervu’ (new water tank) dug during the then NTR regime as the local people take special care to make the migratory birds feel at home during their stay for about six months when they nurture their offsprings before flying away to far away land overseas.
“We refrained from cutting the tree, where migratory birds take shelter,” village Sarpanch M. Sekar Babu says, adding “we have in fact deepened the 12-acre water body without disturbing the tree so that the tank can hold more water even during summer at a time when other parts of the district witnessed severe drought for the fourth consecutive year.”
“At times, the migratory birds leave their young ones, which are not in a position to fly longer distances, in the village itself reposing faith in us,” says a group of villagers enjoying the sorties made by the birds bringing back prey for the younger ones from the wetlands in and around the village.
‘Mother’s place’
Our village is in fact akin to mother’s place for the birds, which comes for nesting and return only when the young ones in position to fly long distances, adds a woman, Ramanamma sitting on the tank bund.
Summer vacation comes in handy for a group of youth constantly maintain a vigil to ward off threats to their special guests from strangers entering the village. Premkumar who pedals his cycle from one end of the water body to the another briefly stopped to say “We will not tolerate anyone harming the birds.”
Fall in number
The avians used to come in 1,000s a few decades ago. The decrease in inflow into the reservoirs across the Krishna in the State after the increase in the height of the Almatti reservoir had a telling effect on the arrival of migratory birds in between 600 and 700, adds a septuagenarian villager T.Hanumantha Rao.
A steady stream of visitors from other places visit the village to enjoy gazing at the migratory birds for hours together, they say and want the government to unleash in full the eco-tourism potential of the birds’ natural habitat and provide facilities for visitors to the village.
