The recent torrential rains have devastated many areas of Sindh including portions of Tharparkar, but for most areas of this desert district, they are a blessing. It is a time when the great Thar desert turns lush green. The cattle owners, who leave their native areas for barrage lands during the drought season, return along with their herds. The Tharis sing songs to praise the “blessing of God” and celebrate rain festivals.
Even the peacocks of this desert district dance to express their happiness and display their beauty with a touch of arrogance.
The rainy season, when the desert turns green, is also the time for peahens to lay their eggs. However, it is also when poachers find the opportunity to lay their hands on these eggs and peachicks as well as adult peafowl so that they can sell them in big cities.
But to protect this valuable species of the desert, more than two hundred volunteers, who are residents of different villages in two union councils of Tharparkar, are trying to fend off the poachers. A nongovernmental organisation – the Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment (SCOPE) – has formed this group of volunteers called the ‘Green Guards’. They are mostly farmers or shepherds and they wear green coloured waistcoats even while carrying out their routine tasks.
Whenever they see someone trying to steal eggs or peachicks or capture a peafowl, they blow a whistle provided to them by SCOPE and a large number of other volunteers gather at the spot to thwart the poaching attempt. “We have informed the Green Guards about wildlife laws and they can also contact the district officials of the Sindh Wildlife Department for assistance,” said SCOPE official Bharumal Amrani.
“The Green Guards not only protect peafowl, but also keep an eye on poaching of deer, rabbits and other wildlife species of Thar,” he added. The swan-sized peacocks are a beautiful bird species of the Thar desert with a colourful fan-shaped crest of feathers, a white patch under the eye and a long, slim neck, gleaming blue chest and a spectacular bronze-green train of elongated feathers. The peahen is brownish in colour, smaller in size as compared to the male and without the long feathers.
Peafowl are found everywhere in the Indian subcontinent including different states of India, but in Pakistan it is found in Cholistan, Achhro Thar (also called the White Desert), Umerkot and Tharparkar. Being the seventh largest desert in the world, Thar is the hub of several species of birds, reptiles, insects, wild animals and plants, but peacocks are its most attractive wildlife. The reducing rains, fast vanishing rangelands and repeated droughts have badly affected the peafowl population of the desert.
Apart from all these natural factors, poaching, viral diseases and selling of eggs have pushed the bird on the verge extinction. Ironically, the Sindh Wildlife Department, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature and other local and foreign organisations working for nature conservation have never bothered to conduct a survey the ascertain the number of these birds in Thar. Khizar Samoon, a retired primary school teacher of the Manserio Samoon village, told Pakistan Today that there are around 3,000 peafowl in his village alone.
He said that poaching is the main cause of the plummeting peafowl population in the area. “The electricity poles in the desert have also killed many peafowl, as sometimes the birds climb them and get electrocuted,” said Samoon. Bharumal Amrani said that peacock is the national bird of India, and in Pakistan, it is the provincial bird of the Punjab province. “However, the Sindh government has never bothered to declare it as the provincial bird or make efforts to conserve this beautiful bird,” he added.
