Birds in West Kameng: Micah has them in focus

“I know almost 450 bird calls.”

It’s a critical skill for Micah Rai. As a photographer in the wild, capturing rare birds and animals on camera is a waiting game, and one in which recognising sounds can make all the difference.

From winged creatures to furry mammals, Micah has shot roughly 300 different species over the years. He recalls one of the most difficult, a bird – Blyth’s Tragopan (Tragopan blythii), of which sightings are very rare.

It was October 2020 and Micah had acquired a Sigma 150mm-600mm telephoto zoom lens. With this powerful lens he was determined to photograph the Tragopan. He tracked the calls of the bird, relentless in his pursuit. “Kaafi din se avaaz toh sunayi de raha tha [I was hearing the call for many days].” For months, the exercise didn’t lead to any photographs.

Finally, in May 2021, once again Micah was following the call of Blyth’s Tragopan through the dense jungles of Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary in Arunachal Pradesh, when the elusive creature came into clear view. He was in position, armed with his Sigma 150mm-600mm telephoto zoom lens on his Nikon D7200. But his nervousness got the better of him. “I got a blurry shot. It was of no use,” he recalls. 

Two years later, near Bompu camp in West Kameng, the still elusive bird, the colour of bright rust with small white dots on its back, came into sight, partly obscured by leaves. This time Micah didn’t miss. In a burst of 30-40 shots, he managed to get 1-2 good photos. It was published for the first time on PARI,  Arunachal’s birds: canary in the coalmine.

Micah is part of a team of locals who assist scientists from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru in their study of the impact of climate change on birds in the eastern Himalayan mountains of West Kameng district, Arunachal Pradesh.

“Folks like Micah are the very backbone of the work that we do in Eaglenest. Working in the field and collecting the kind of data that we need would have been impossible [without them],” says ornithologist Dr. Umesh Srinivasan.

Micah’s passion for birds goes beyond the scientific. He retells a Nepali story about the Blessing Bird. “In the jungle, a man, haunted by a stepmother's cruelty, finds refuge and sustenance in wild bananas and undergoes a metamorphosis into a bird. This colourful nocturnal creature symbolises the enduring and mystical bond between humans and the natural world in Nepali tradition.” Micah says the bird is none other than the elusive Mountain Scops Owl, believed by many to embody the Blessing Bird. Its rarity is the mystical essence of the tale.

While chasing birds in this forest, Micah and others have also had a few close encounters with four-legged creatures, specifically the world’s largest, tallest and heaviest bovine species, wild gaur (Bos gaurus), also called the Indian Bison.

Micah and two friends had come to clear the road of debris after a night of rain. The trio saw the mighty bison a mere 20 metres away. “I gave a yell and the mithun [gaur] began charging towards us at full speed!” Micah laughs as he recounts the story of his friend madly scrambling up a tree while being chased by the gaur; he and his other friend managed to escape and dashed to safety.

He says his favourite animal in the forests of Eaglenest is a medium-sized wild cat called the Asian Golden Cat (Catopuma temminckii), found in the forests of Eaglenest. He spotted the cat at twilight on his way back to Bompu camp. “I had a camera [Nikon D7200] and got the shot,” he says happily. “But I never saw it again.”

Micah was born in Dirang, West Kameng, and moved with his family to village Ramalingam in the same district. “Everyone calls me Micah Rai. Micah Rai is my name on Instagram and Facebook. In documents it’s ‘Shambu Rai’,” says the 29-year-old who left school after Class 5 because, “money was a problem and my younger siblings also had to study.” 

The next few years went by in a blur of hard work – road construction in Dirang and work as kitchen staff at Bompu camp in Eaglenest Sanctuary and also at Lama Camp – in the Singchung Bugun Village Community Reserve (SBVCR).

In his mid-teens, Micah finally returned to Ramalingam. “I was at home with my parents and helping them in the fields.” His family is of Nepali origin and lease 4-5 bighas of land from the Bugun community on which they grow cabbage and potatoes, selling the harvest in Tezpur, Assam, a four-hour road journey.

When ornithologist and Assistant Professor of Ecology at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru, Dr. Umesh Srinivasan came to Ramalingam to study the effects of climate change on birds, he asked around for 2-3 young boys to work as field staff. Micah leapt at the chance to earn a steady income. In January 2011, 16-year-old Micah started work as a field staff with Srinivasan’s team.

He happily acknowledges that his real education started in the forests of Arunachal Pradesh. “I recognise the calls of birds in West Kameng district the most [easily],” he says. His favourite bird is “the Sikkim Wedge-billed Babbler. It’s not much to see looks-wise but I love its style,” he adds, referring to the unique beak of the bird and its eyes ringed with white colouring. A rare creature, it is found only in a few places – here in Arunachal Pradesh, far-eastern Nepal, Sikkim and eastern Bhutan.

“Recently I shot the White-rumped Shama [Copsychus malabaricus] at an elevation above 2,000 metres. This is a strange thing because the bird normally resides at an elevation of 900 metres and lower. Because of the heat, the bird is changing its location,” says Micah.

Scientist Srinivasan says, “eastern Himalayas are the second most biodiverse region on the planet, and many of the species found here are highly sensitive to temperature. Climate change here therefore has the potential to threaten a significant fraction of earth's species.” He says that their work shows that resident birds staying at a particular elevation are now slowly shifting their ranges to higher elevations. Read: Arunachal’s birds: canary in the coalmine.

As a fellow photographer interested in climate change, I watch in fascination as Micah swipes through his phone, showing me images of birds, he’s photographed over the years. He makes it looks easy, but my own experience here tells me that it takes hard work, dedication and unending patience to get the right visual.

The team’s campsite, located at Bompu camp, lies inside Eaglenest sanctuary, a hotspot for hardcore birders across the world. It’s a transient home made of wood meshes and tarpaulin wrapped tightly around a broken concrete structure. The research team is a mix of scientists, an intern, and field staff from West Kameng district. Micah is an integral part of this crew headed by Dr. Umesh Srinivasan.

The wind whips around us as Micah and I stand outside the research hut. The tips of surrounding peaks peek out from under thick garlands of grey cloud. I am keen to hear him speak about his experiences of a changing climate.

“If there is a lot of heat at low elevations, then it picks up fast in the mountain area. The heat here in the mountains is increasing. Because of climate change we also know that the monsoon is upside down,” he tells me. “Earlier, people knew the patterns of the weather. Older people remember February being a cold and cloudy month.” Now in February, untimely rains cause great problems for farmers and their crops.

It’s hard to imagine the serious effects of climate change in the lush forests of Eaglenest sanctuary, surrounded by the trilling of birds, cocooned by towering alder, maple and oak trees. The sun rises early in this eastern edge of India and the staff have been awake since 3:30 a.m., hard at work under a bright blue sky. Large puffs of white cloud sail slowly by.

Under Srinivasan’s guidance, Micah has learnt ‘mist netting’ – a process of catching birds by stretching very fine netting made of nylon or polyester between two bamboo poles fixed in the mud. Once caught, the birds are placed inside a pouch. Gently taking the bird out of the little green pouch, Micah hands the creature over to Srinivasan.

Working rapidly, the bird’s weight, wingspan, the length of its legs is measured in less than a minute. After being tagged with an identification ring on its leg the bird is released. This entire process, of catching the bird in the mist netting, bringing it to the makeshift table, taking measurements and then setting it free, takes about 15-20 minutes. The team goes through this exercise every 20 minutes to half an hour for at least eight hours, depending on the weather. And Micah’s been doing this for close to 13 years now. 

“When we first started catching the birds, it was difficult to pronounce names like White-spectacled Warbler (Seicercus affinis). It was difficult to say because we don’t have the habit of speaking in English. We had never heard these words,” says Micah.

Sharpening his birding skills at Eaglenest Sanctuary gave Micah a chance to travel to neighbouring Meghalaya where he says he saw that swathes of forest had been chopped down. “We roamed around in Cherrapunji [in 2012] for 10 ten days and saw not even 20 species of birds. Then I realised that I wanted to work in Eaglenest because there were so many more species here. We had seen a lot more birds sitting in Bompu.”

“Camera ka interest 2012 se shuru hua [My interest in cameras started in 2012],” Micah says. He used to borrow the camera of visiting scientist, Nandini Velho: “The Green-tailed Sunbird (Aethopyga nipalensis) is a common bird. I started photographing it as practice.”

A couple of years later, Micah started guiding and taking a few tourists on birding expeditions. In 2018, a group from Mumbai – BNHS (Bombay Natural History Society) arrived. He clicked photos of them when asked. Sensing his joy while shooting photos, one of the group members offered him a Nikon P9000. “Sir, I want to buy a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) model. I don’t want the camera you are giving me,” he recalls saying.  

With generous donations from four members of the same group, savings from his field work and bird guiding, “I collected 50,000 rupees and the price was 55,000. So, my boss [Umesh] said that he would contribute the balance.” In 2018, Micah finally bought his very first DSLR, a Nikon D7200 with an 18-55mm zoom lens.

“For 2-3 years with the small 18-55mm zoom lens I used to take photos of the flowers around the house.” Taking close-up shots of birds from a massive distance requires very long and powerful telephoto lenses. “After a few years I thought I should buy the 150-600mm sigma lens.” But using the lens turned out to be difficult for Micah. He couldn’t manage to figure out the relationship between aperture, shutter speed and ISO on the camera. “I clicked such bad pictures,” he recalls. It was Ram Alluri, a cinematographer and Micah’s good friend, who taught him the technicalities of using a DSLR camera. “He taught me how to use the settings and now I only use manual [settings],” he adds.

But only shooting stunning photographs of birds wasn’t enough. The next step was learning how to edit images in the Photoshop software. In 2021, Micah sat with Siddharth Srinivasan, a Masters student, to learn how to edit images in Photoshop.

Soon news of his skills as a photographer spread and he was asked to contribute photos for an article ‘Lockdown brings hardship to birder’s paradise in India’ for The Third Pole, a website dedicated to stories on the Himalayas. “They took seven of my photos [for use in that piece]. I got money for each and felt very pleased,” he says. His steadfast contribution to fieldwork also translated into Micah being a co-author on a number of scientific papers.

Micah is a man of many talents. Apart from being a meticulous field staffer, passionate photographer, and bird guide, he is also a guitarist. Walking into the church in Chitre Basti (also known as Tsering Pam), I see Micah in his musician avatar. Surrounded by three swaying women, he strums his guitar gently, rehearsing a song for the wedding ceremony of his friend, the local pastor’s daughter. As his fingers move nimbly over the guitar strings, I’m reminded of their deftness while gently extricating birds from the gossamer-like mist netting in the forest.