“The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people, baffled and disturbed, spoke of them. The feeding stations in the back yards were deserted. The few birds to be seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. In the mornings, which had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, and wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marshes.”
Thus begins The Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s epochal 1962 book narrating the eerily real story of how bird populations across America suffered due to the widespread application of the synthetic pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT. Birds, among other living entities, were the first casualties of the pesticides. Their disappearance was a warning, indicating that something was amiss, an anomaly in the status quo. Carson successfully linked the vanishing birds to a catastrophic change in the environment. The Silent Spring, and Carson herself, became milestones in the global history of environmentalism.
Fast forward to India. Over six decades since the publication of The Silent Spring, three researchers—Arjun Kannan, Prashanth M.B., and T. Ganesh—narrate a disconcerting tale:
“It was a late winter evening in the early 1980s. One of us was in a small patch of grassland near Hyderabad, counting harriers, a hawk-like bird that migrates to India in winter. There were hundreds of them, all flocking down to spend the night on the grassy meadow. When we returned to the same place some 15 years later, the grasslands had disappeared... the harriers were nowhere to be seen.”
What could possibly be happening? What explains the mysterious disappearance of these migratory harriers? Should we be alarmed by the vanishing visitors? Is this the beginning of a silent spring for India? If it is, what’s causing it? Climate change? Urbanisation? Deforestation? Find the answers in their compelling essay here. It is not merely a story about migratory birds; it is a story about all of us.
Wishing you a safe week ahead,
Team Frontline
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