Venerated Cranes Face Extinction in Nepal as Civilization Encroaches : Environment: The government eradicated malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the 1960s and drained many wetlands, attracting more people to the Terai and squeezing out the birds.

Red-crowned, stilt-legged Indian sarus cranes--largest of all flying birds--have coexisted with people for thousands of years.

Now, thanks to people, they may face extinction in their once-plentiful habitat in Nepal.

Cranes, the oldest birds on Earth, date back 60 million years. The 15 species today total no more than a million birds worldwide.

Seven of the 15 species are endangered, said George Archibald, director of the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wis. In the most danger are the whooping crane of North America and the Siberian crane of Russia.

Also at risk, he said, are many individual populations of the other eight species, including the sarus of southern Nepal’s Terai lowlands.

The bird has disappeared in the eastern Terai, and only 200 to 250 remain in the western region, said Rajendra Suwal, a sarus specialist in Katmandu. “That is an optimistic count,” he said.

The Indian subspecies of the sarus, standing between 5 and 6 feet tall, is sacred to the Hindus of northern India and Nepal’s Terai.

Fittingly for such an ancient, venerated bird, its prime home in Nepal is the village of Lumbini, birthplace of the founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama. Ten nesting pairs of sarus inhabit Lumbini, Suwal said. The people who live there look upon them as a good-luck omen.

“Unlike some of the cranes, the sarus is highly adaptable to rather small areas of habitat--if they aren’t directly persecuted,” said Jim Harris, deputy director of the crane foundation.

But developments in the 1960s benefited people in the region and devastated the non-migratory sarus.

Until then the Terai, which stretches across the southern border with India, had been home to a virulent strain of malaria.

With help from international agencies, the Nepalese government used chemicals to eradicate the disease-bearing mosquitoes--and drained a lot of marshy land where the sarus lived.

The Terai’s human population has been zooming upward ever since, as farmers from Nepal’s inhospitable northern mountains have surged into the more moderate, more fertile south.

Wetlands have given way to cultivated farmlands and to some industrial development. An east-west highway is under construction across the Terai. The northern newcomers show less respect for the sarus, sometimes stealing their eggs or even shooting the birds.

Perhaps 25,000 sarus still live in India, Archibald estimates, although they are diminishing dramatically as a result of pesticides, industrialization and other human incursions.

“Ultimately, what happens in nearby India will make a lot of difference in Nepal,” Harris said. “Until recently, sarus were numerous in India. Now there’s reason for concern.”

The subspecies reportedly has disappeared from Pakistan and is all but gone from Bangladesh, he said.

Another sarus specialist, Mahendra Shrestha, a Nepali graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, foresees the time when some cranes may be moved from other areas into the eastern Terai. Nepali naturalists need to work more closely with their counterparts in wealthier India, he said.

A Nepali-sponsored project is being developed to preserve and restore Lumbini as a historic and religious site, with hotels, guest houses, monasteries and stupas--dome-shaped shrines--in a 3-square-mile area surrounded by a moat.

Rich Beilfuss, a wetlands ecologist with the International Crane Foundation, has been trying to raise money from Buddhist organizations and others to create a wetlands habitat for cranes in conjunction with the Lumbini project. So far the money has not been forthcoming.

“We’re at a point where, if we can’t raise funding pretty soon to contribute to the program, its survival is questionable,” Beilfuss said.

“People want to hear that Lumbini is going to be the savior for these birds. That’s just not going to happen. Lumbini alone can’t do it.” Ideally, Beilfuss said, Lumbini would be part of a network of nature reserves in the Terai.

Several reserves already exist in the western part of the region, and a few sarus cranes live there. But big animals have overshadowed birds in Nepali planning.

“They really haven’t focused on birds in Nepal,” Beilfuss said, “because tourism is so fantastic for the elephants and rhinos that parks have been set up based on mammals.”

At an international crane symposium in Kearney, Neb., in March, Pat Waak, director of the National Audubon Society’s population program, cited a staggering projection: Nepal’s fast-growing population will more than double, to 41 million, by 2025. Land will decline to a half-acre or less per person.

And that will mean even greater pressure on whatever cranes remain.

“Things look very tough for the sarus, both from a habitat perspective and from the protection of the beast itself,” said Peter A. A. Berle, Audubon president. “We’ve heard about how they’re hunted and caged. From a long-range perspective, one cannot be optimistic.”

But the experts aren’t ready to give up on the sarus in Nepal. “I feel guarded optimism,” Harris said. “The fact that the people are doing some work bodes well.”