GUWAHATI, Feb 22 � A four-month-old greater adjutant stork, fondly named Boom, was successfully reintroduced to the colony of greater adjutant stork at Boragaon near Deepor Beel recently.
The rehabilitation exercise was taken under the initiative of Aaranyak, a conservation NGO, while the zoo and police authorities took active part in it.
The bird underwent treatment for a fractured leg for about three weeks since January 20 after it fell off a tall nesting tree at Dadara village in Kamrup district.
Sachin Ranade and Dr Parag Deuri of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and Dr Samshul Ali of College of Veterinary Science put a ring on the bird (code PD) for future monitoring.
It is the 13th such greater adjutant stork chick which have been rescued and rehabilitated.
The Aaranyak team thanked the zoo vets ML Smith and Panchami Sarma, for their help in treating the chick, and Partha Sarathi Mahanta, Superintendent of Police, for assisting the rehab exercise.
The injured chick was from Dadara village which hosts perhaps the biggest concentration of the endangered greater adjutant stork.
The global distribution of adjutant stork, the rarest of the 20 species of storks, is confined to a few isolated pockets in the Brahmaputra Valley of Assam, Bihar and in Cambodia. In Assam, the bird mainly nests in private areas and conservation is mainly dependent on community effort. The global population of the species is just about 1,000, of which some 80 per cent are in Assam.
