How Nagaland's Pangti Village Stopped Hunting Amur Falcons and Became Their Protectors

The numbers are almost too large to picture. Each October and November, somewhere between one and two million Amur Falcons converge on the Doyang reservoir in Wokha district, Nagaland. They arrive from breeding grounds in Siberia and northern China, and they are heading to southern Africa, a round trip of roughly 22,000 kilometres. Doyang is a pit stop, a place to rest and feed on dragonflies before the crossing. At peak roosting, the trees around the reservoir hold so many birds that branches bend under the weight. It is one of the largest congregations of any raptor species anywhere on Earth.
The Amur Falcon (Falco amurensis) is a small, long-distance migrant, males slate-grey with a rust-red belly, females streaked brown. What makes them biologically remarkable is their transoceanic endurance: they are the only raptor known to make a sustained non-stop crossing of the Arabian Sea, flying roughly 3,000 kilometres over open water without landing. They do this on the energy stored at stopovers like Doyang. Which is exactly why what was happening at Doyang until around 2012 was so damaging to the species.Pangti village sits close to the Doyang reservoir. For generations, the arrival of the falcons was also the arrival of a seasonal food source. Villagers set up nets and bamboo poles, and the birds, exhausted from migration and roosting in enormous, densely packed groups, were easy to catch. Conservative estimates from that period put the harvest at 120,000 to 140,000 birds per day during peak season. Some years, the total kill across the season ran into the hundreds of thousands. The birds were eaten locally and sold at markets. Nobody was hiding it. The scale of the hunt was simply not visible to anyone outside Nagaland, and inside Nagaland, it was subsistence and tradition layered together.
The story broke into wider view in 2012, when conservationist Ramki Sreenivasan and journalist Rokohebi Kuotsu documented the hunt and published photographs. The images circulated rapidly. Within months, the Nagaland government, wildlife NGOs, and the Pangti village council were in conversation about what to do.What followed was not a top-down ban enforced by outside agencies. The Pangti village council declared the area around the roost a community conservation zone. Hunting stopped. The decision came from inside the village, which mattered enormously, conservation efforts imposed from outside on communities with legitimate subsistence relationships to wildlife have a poor track record across India and globally.
The Nagaland government designated the region around Doyang as a protected area for the falcons. The state began promoting the migration as an ecotourism event. The Amur Falcon Festival was launched, drawing birdwatchers from across India and abroad to Wokha district every November. Pangti villagers, who had been hunters, became guides, homestay hosts, and festival organisers. The economic case for protection turned out to be stronger than the economic case for hunting, and it was renewable.The Pangti case is studied now because it worked, but it worked for specific reasons that don't automatically transfer. The village council had genuine authority. The intervention came with an alternative livelihood built in, not just a moral argument. And the birds were charismatic enough to draw paying visitors, a million falcons at a single reservoir is a spectacle that sells itself.

The Amur Falcon population globally is estimated at around one million birds. Doyang holds a significant fraction of that population at one time. A single bad hunting season at this one location could have measurable population-level consequences for a species spread across three continents. That concentration, the same feature that made the birds so easy to hunt, is also what makes Pangti's protection so consequential. One village, one reservoir, one decision.The Amur Falcon Festival at Wokha has grown into one of the more unusual wildlife tourism events in northeast India, drawing serious birders alongside general visitors. Pangti and neighbouring villages have built infrastructure around the influx. The hunt has not resumed. Local pride in the falcons, once a food source, has shifted into something closer to ownership of a natural wonder.
Nagaland's forest department continues to monitor the roost counts each season. The numbers have held. Whether the global Amur Falcon population is stable or under pressure from habitat change along its breeding range in Siberia is a separate question that ornithologists are still working through. But at Doyang, the birds arrive each October to find the trees intact and the nets gone.

The Pangti story doesn't resolve neatly into a parable about human goodness or the power of awareness. What it shows is something more specific: that a community will protect what it has a stake in protecting, and that the stake has to be real, not rhetorical. The falcons didn't need Pangti to love them. They needed Pangti to find them more valuable alive than dead. That calculation changed, and a million birds still have somewhere to land.