The real story of how women in Assam transformed local attitudes toward an endangered stork and created an unusual model of community conservation.
Wildlife conservation is often imagined as a task carried out inside forests and protected areas. Governments create sanctuaries, scientists study endangered species, forest departments enforce wildlife laws, and conservation organisations try to protect habitats from human interference. The story of the Greater Adjutant stork in Assam challenges that model.
Here was an endangered bird whose survival depended substantially on trees standing not in remote forests, but in densely populated villages. Many of those trees belonged to ordinary families. The birds nesting above them were large, noisy scavengers. Food remains and excreta fell beneath their nests, creating an unpleasant environment around people's homes. Some landowners therefore cut down nesting trees. A law could declare the bird protected. Scientists could explain its ecological importance. But neither automatically answered the question facing a family living beneath one of those trees:
Why should we tolerate the inconvenience of protecting this bird?
In 2007, conservation biologist Purnima Devi Barman began working seriously on this problem in the villages of Dadara, Pachariya and Singimari in Assam's Kamrup district. What developed over the following years was not merely a bird-conservation programme. It became an experiment in changing human attitudes, involving rural women, schoolchildren, landowners, cultural traditions and livelihood initiatives. The women's network that emerged became known as the Hargila Army.
Its story offers a useful case study in an increasingly important question in environmental conservation: can an endangered species be protected over the long term if the people living alongside it are treated only as obstacles rather than participants?
An Endangered Bird Living Among People
The Greater Adjutant (Leptoptilos dubius) is locally known in Assam as Hargila, meaning "bone swallower." It is a large scavenging stork historically distributed more widely across South and Southeast Asia. By the time the Assam conservation programme began, its population had declined severely because of threats including habitat loss, poisoning, poaching, and destruction of nesting trees.
A peer-reviewed study published in Ethnobiology Letters in 2020 described the Brahmaputra valley of Assam as the species' principal remaining stronghold at the time. The researchers estimated the global population then at fewer than 1,200 birds. The conservation problem in Kamrup was unusual because Greater Adjutants nested colonially in tall trees situated within populated villages, and many of those trees were privately owned. That created direct conflict between human convenience and wildlife conservation.
The birds feed on carrion and other animal matter. Food remains can fall beneath their nests along with excreta, producing foul smells. Chicks sometimes fall and die beneath nesting trees. The 2020 study records that some tree owners disturbed the birds or felled nesting trees, either because of these problems or because selling the timber could provide needed income. From the perspective of conservation, cutting a tree meant destroying critical nesting habitat. From the perspective of a household, however, keeping the tree could mean tolerating months of inconvenience on one's own property. The conflict could not be solved simply by telling villagers that the bird was endangered. Something had to change in the relationship between the community and the species.
From Scientific Study to Community Conservation
Purnima Devi Barman initially encountered the Greater Adjutant through scientific research. But conservation required her to work beyond biology. The problem became particularly clear when nesting trees were being felled. Trees could not be protected indefinitely without cooperation from their owners. The conservation programme that began in 2007 therefore adopted a community-oriented strategy. Instead of concentrating only on monitoring birds, the project incorporated education, public outreach, local traditions, livelihood support and capacity building. One decision was particularly significant: the programme deliberately avoided directly paying tree owners cash to protect nests.
Direct financial compensation might have produced immediate cooperation, but the researchers were concerned about creating conservation that depended entirely on continued payments. Instead, programmes were introduced that could indirectly improve livelihoods while encouraging villagers to associate the presence of the storks with community benefit. This represented a different understanding of conservation. The objective was not simply to prevent people from cutting trees. It was to create a situation in which they themselves had reasons to protect them.
Why Women Became Central to the Programme
Women gradually became one of the most important parts of the campaign. Barman and her colleagues organised community meetings and activities through which conservation messages could enter everyday village life. Women were encouraged to participate in programmes involving traditional food, weaving, sewing, cultural events and environmental awareness. From these efforts emerged a rural women's conservation network that came to be called the Hargila Army.
The women were not professional ornithologists. Most did not enter the project with formal training in wildlife conservation. Their significance came precisely from the opposite fact: they were members of the communities in which the birds nested. That gave them a kind of influence outsiders could not easily reproduce. Conservation messages could move through families, neighbourhoods, schools and local social networks. Women could monitor nesting trees, report fallen chicks, participate in rescue efforts, communicate the importance of the species and encourage other residents to protect trees. The programme also connected conservation with economic skills.
According to the 2020 study, 400 women were functioning as tree protectors by that stage, while 1,050 rural women had benefited from schemes designed to develop new skills. Around 12,000 schoolchildren had also received nature-learning and birdwatching opportunities. The significance of those numbers lies not merely in the size of the programme. They show that protecting one endangered species had gradually expanded into a broader form of community participation.
Using Culture to Change Perception
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Hargila programme was its use of Assamese cultural practices. The conservationists understood that scientific information alone might tell villagers that the Greater Adjutant was endangered, but information does not necessarily create emotional attachment. So the campaign attempted to give the bird a different cultural meaning.
Hargila motifs began appearing in textiles produced by local women. Community events incorporated the bird. Celebrations associated with human family life were adapted to the storks' breeding cycle. Women organised ceremonies around nesting and hatching, including events modelled on baby showers. These activities might appear peripheral to conservation biology. In reality, they addressed the central problem. The Greater Adjutant had previously been associated with dirt, smell, inconvenience and, in some local perceptions, bad omens. Conservation required replacing those associations with pride and responsibility. The objective was therefore not merely to increase knowledge about the bird. It was to change what the bird meant.
A 2025 study published in the Journal for Nature Conservation examined precisely this dimension of the campaign in Dadara and Pachariya. The researchers studied how biodiversity communication contributed to public participation and behavioural change, treating communication itself as an important component of conservation rather than merely publicity surrounding it. More recent academic work has also examined the Hargila Army through the lens of women's environmentalism and ecofeminism, particularly the way women reinterpreted cultural traditions and their relationship with trees, wetlands and the storks. The result was a conservation strategy rooted not only in ecological science but also in social behaviour.
Did the Approach Actually Work?
Community conservation stories can easily become celebratory narratives. A more important question is whether measurable outcomes followed. In the Hargila case, the available evidence indicates a substantial change. When Barman began working in the Dadara-Pachariya-Singimari colony in 2007–08, researchers recorded 28 nests. By the 2019–20 breeding season, the same conservation programme reported 208 successful nests. The researchers described the site as the world's largest breeding colony of Greater Adjutant storks. Tree protection showed another significant change.
The study recorded six nesting trees being cut in 2007, another six in 2008 and four in 2009. It reported that no nesting trees in the programme area had been cut since 2010. At the Assam level, the researchers reported an increase from approximately 40 nests to 270 nests over twelve years and recorded about 950 Greater Adjutants during their 2020 survey. These figures should be interpreted carefully. An increase in nests cannot automatically be attributed to one intervention alone without considering ecological and demographic factors. Nor do nest counts, bird counts and estimates from different years measure the same thing.
Nevertheless, the combination of increased nesting, reduced tree felling and sustained community participation provides substantial evidence that the programme coincided with meaningful conservation gains. That makes the Hargila case more valuable than a simple inspirational story. It provides observable outcomes against which the community-conservation model can be examined.
Conservation and Livelihood Cannot Always Be Separated.
One reason the programme is worth studying is that it confronted a weakness common to environmental campaigns. Conservationists can ask rural communities to protect biodiversity while underestimating the economic cost of doing so. Consider a family owning a valuable tree. The tree can be sold. Its timber may help pay for household needs. If endangered birds nest in it, conservationists may ask the family not to cut it. From the family's perspective, the decision is not necessarily between "loving nature" and "destroying nature." It may involve an economic sacrifice. The Hargila programme attempted to respond without simply converting conservation into a cash transaction.
Livelihood initiatives involving weaving, sewing and other skills were integrated into community development. Hargila motifs on handloom products also connected cultural identity, conservation awareness and economic activity. The approach does not mean that every conservation project can—or should—be converted into a livelihood programme. It demonstrates something more fundamental: environmental policy becomes more realistic when it acknowledges the material lives of the people being asked to protect nature. The tree owner and the bird are not separate from economics. Neither is the woman protecting the nest.
From an Unwanted Bird to Community Pride
Changes in behaviour were accompanied by changes in status. Earlier, some villagers viewed the storks as undesirable neighbours. Later, nesting trees and the birds themselves increasingly became sources of community recognition. Public recognition of nest-tree owners was one technique used by the programme. The 2020 study describes, for example, how tree owners were publicly felicitated during community outreach activities. Such recognition changed the social reward attached to keeping a nesting tree.
A tree that had previously represented inconvenience could now represent something rare enough to attract visitors, conservationists and public attention. The physical consequences of having birds above the house had not disappeared. The social meaning of those consequences had changed. That distinction is central to understanding the case. The conservationists did not redesign the Greater Adjutant into a cleaner or less troublesome animal. They changed the relationship between the bird and the people living beneath it.
What the Hargila Case Can—and Cannot—Teach Us
Successful environmental projects are sometimes presented as universal models. That would be a mistake here. The Hargila programme developed within a specific ecological and cultural setting. The storks nested in privately owned trees concentrated in particular Assamese villages. The campaign drew upon local cultural practices, women's social networks and years of sustained engagement. A method that works in Dadara cannot simply be copied into another community with a different species and expected to produce identical results.
There are also broader threats that community enthusiasm alone cannot solve. Wetland degradation, changing land use, waste management, habitat loss and other environmental pressures require policy and institutional responses. Village participation cannot replace government responsibility or scientific conservation. Likewise, women's involvement should not be romanticised as unlimited unpaid environmental labour. If conservation depends on communities, those communities require resources, recognition and meaningful participation in decisions affecting them. These limitations do not weaken the Hargila case. They help clarify what it actually demonstrates. The programme shows that when wildlife depends directly on human-dominated landscapes, social relationships can become as important as biological knowledge. Scientists can identify an endangered species. Law can prohibit its killing. Government agencies can create policy. But when the species nests in someone's backyard, long-term protection may ultimately depend on whether that person believes the animal is worth living with.
A Different Meaning of Conservation
The most important change in Dadara, Pachariya and Singimari was therefore not simply numerical. Twenty-eight nests becoming more than two hundred is significant. The end of documented nesting-tree felling after 2010 is significant. Hundreds of women participating in tree protection is significant. But behind each of those outcomes was a less visible change. A bird that had been treated as an inconvenience became associated with local identity. Women who were not wildlife professionals became conservation participants. Children learned that the large scavenging birds above their villages were globally important.
Tree owners became guardians of nesting habitat rather than merely owners of timber. The relationship between community and species had been renegotiated. That is why the Hargila Army deserves attention beyond Assam. Its story suggests that conservation is not always a struggle to separate wildlife from people. Sometimes the opposite is required. Wildlife and people already share the same landscape. The challenge is to make coexistence socially and economically possible.
The Greater Adjutant did not survive in these villages because people stopped being people. They still had household needs, economic pressures, and practical complaints about the birds. Nor did the birds become less messy. What changed was that conservation began taking those human realities seriously. Purnima Devi Barman's work and the women who became the Hargila Army demonstrate that protecting an endangered species can require more than studying its breeding behaviour or guarding its nests. It can require understanding the behaviour of another species as well: our own. And in the villages of Assam where the Greater Adjutant continues to nest above people's homes, changing human behaviour may have proved to be one of the most important conservation interventions of all.