Kadalundi-Vallikunnu community reserve rich in flora, fauna
Kozhikode: The decision to declare the Kadalundi-Vallikunnu estuary area a community reserve comes as a happy climax to efforts by nature lovers, academics and bird-watchers to get official recognition and protection for a favourite haunt of migratory birds.
When Forests Minister Benoy Viswom makes the declaration on Thursday, 60 hectares of the estuary area will become a special zone, an ecosystem, with its flora and fauna and heritage structures, that will be protected with people’s participation.
The importance of the estuary as a wintering ground for migratory wading birds has been highlighted since the early 1980s when bird-watchers started visiting the area from September to April every year.
During low tide, the inter-tidal area there is populated by plovers, sandpipers, terns and gulls and a variety of resident birds.
Members of the Kerala Natural History Society Kozhikode chapter visit the estuary frequently and to their delight, have come across birds hitherto unrecorded in Kerala. For instance, sandwich terns (Sterna sandvicensis), rare elsewhere in the country, have been found in good numbers.
P.K. Uthaman and L. Namasivayam were among the early bird-watchers to highlight the importance of Kadalundi. They prepared a provisional checklist of birds and appealed for the establishment of a bird sanctuary.
The first detailed attempt at understanding the birdlife at the estuary was when Deepakumar N. Kurup of the Forest Department took up a two-year ecological study of the birds there while doing his Ph.D.
Several articles on the birds of Kadalundi came in newspapers. A few committees were formed locally, notably the one headed by the then president of Vallikunnu panchayat, U. Kalanathan, which voiced the cause of Kadalundi as a bird reserve.
Dr. Kurup monitored the population of birds visiting the estuary during the winters of 1987-88 and 1988-89 and showed the preferences of birds for the various habitats in the estuary — tidal marsh, retting ground, river bank and tidal mudflat and also their feeding ecology.
Studies have showed that the estuary supported a rich avifauna, with 108 species recorded. Thirty species of shorebirds and twelve of seabirds have been observed. The migrant-resident ratio is 5:2. The winter passage of birds at Kadalundi begins at August-end or the beginning of September and coincides with the waning of the southwest monsoon. Bird populations decrease from April.
Species such as the grey plover, Terek sandpiper, bar-tailed godwit, black-tailed godwit, Temminck’s stint, dunlin, sanderling, eastern knot, crab plover, sandwich tern, masked booby and barheaded goose observed at Kadalundi are either new additions to the Kerala bird list or those recorded sparingly. Though a few species show signs of over-wintering, the entire estuary remain inundated during the monsoon and practically few birds are found from June to August.
Several biotic interferences are prevalent in the estuary, notably fishing, collection of oysters and mussels, defoliation of tidal marsh, mining of sand and lime and retting of coconut husk.
The estuary is under the ownership of Kadalundi and Vallikkunnu panchayats and the inter-tidal area used to be periodically leased out by them for retting and defoliation.
Report By R.Madhavan Nair
