By Azahar Islam

Winter usually follows late autumn, but this year, breaking nature's pattern, it has arrived a little early and is steadily getting colder. Every winter, thousands of birds whose names we do not know come to our country. Bangladesh has 28 sites internationally recognised as important for waterbirds.

In winter, the canals, beels, haors, baors, ponds and waterbodies of these areas come alive with birdsong. These birds fly thousands of miles to get here, and we call them guest birds.

Unable to bear the bitter cold, migratory birds move to countries where winters are milder. Food is also scarce in severe cold, temperatures stay below freezing most of the time, and there is snow, which makes living and finding food much harder. These birds come from the North Pole, Siberia, Europe, parts of Asia and areas around the Himalayas.

The winter visitors include balihash, patihash, lejhash, perihash, chomahash, jolpipi, rajsorali, lalbuba, cormorants, herons, shamukkona, chokhpokhim sharas, kaima, shrikes, gang kobutor, bonhur, horial, narundi and manikjora. Besides about 15 species of ducks, birds such as gagini, gao, oyel, pigtail, datasmok, tham, arathil, pelicans, paij, shrevir and batan come to Bangladesh every year.

According to zoologists, Bangladesh's birds fall into two groups, resident and non-resident, and migratory birds are non-resident. The country has about 650 species of birds in all, of which 360 are resident and the remaining 300 non-resident. Not all non-resident birds come in winter: of the 300 species, 290 come in the winter season and 10 species stay.

Anyone is happy when a guest comes home. Even when money is tight, Bengalis do their utmost to entertain guests. But migratory birds get the opposite treatment: we greet them with gunshots, traps of all kinds and poisoned bait.

We call them guest birds, but they really come to save their lives. Instead of letting them live, we are obsessed with hunting them. Having come to escape death, they find themselves near death. Such reports appear in the newspapers all the time, and it is hard to say how many more birds are hunted freely.

How much can a bird weigh? At most 100 to 200 grams. Yet many people are eager to taste even that much. For a small profit, some unscrupulous people use various methods to kill birds. There is also strong demand for birds in the market; anyone who manages to catch them has little trouble selling them, and they easily fetch Tk 200 to Tk 500.

These birds are hunted illegally, and it is a punishable criminal offence. Penalties are set out in the Wildlife (Preservation) Order of 1974 and the Wildlife (Conservation and Security) Act of 2012. The maximum punishment for killing birds is one year in prison, a Tk 1 lakh fine, or both, and a repeat offence carries double the penalty and fine.

Anyone who collects and possesses, buys or sells the meat or body parts of migratory birds faces up to six months in prison, a fine of up to Tk 30,000, or both.

Some unscrupulous people keep doing this for profit, ignoring the law. Sadly, although these laws exist, they are rarely applied. The existing laws must be strengthened to stop the hunting of migratory birds, and local administrations must also act.

The writer is a student in the Department of Law and Land Management, Islamic University, Kushtia.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.