Mayamitu Neupane, GPJ Nepal
On a tea plantation in Nepal, Deven Kharel uses binoculars to search for birds migrating down from the mountains.
JHAPA, NEPAL — In Mechinagar, a municipality lying on Nepal’s border with India in Koshi, the country’s easternmost province, 14-year-old Wreet Kharel had a question for her father: What was their hometown famous for? Deven Kharel, who ran a small photo studio on that day back in 2014, couldn’t think of anything at that moment. Days passed, but Kharel often thought about this conversation with his daughter.
Then one day, two years later in 2016, he stumbled upon the work of Indian wildlife photographer Rathika Ramasamy on Facebook. She had posted photographs of Oriental darters, a South Asian water bird, locked in fights over territory on a lake in an Indian bird sanctuary. He browsed Ramasamy’s images of green bee-eaters sitting on a wire, taken somewhere in India. The photographs — sharp, striking and full of color — stayed with him. Over the next few weeks, he felt like he had an answer to his daughter’s long-ago question. He thought documenting Mechinagar’s birds would be a good start, though he wasn’t sure what this quest would yield.
In the more than seven years since, Kharel, inspired by Ramasamy’s work, has set out to photograph and document the birds of his hometown. He started the Mechi Bird and Wildlife Conservation Society, an organization recognized by the local government as the district’s first wildlife conservation society. Though Mechinagar hasn’t traditionally been a tourism destination, local shop owners and auto rickshaw drivers now often send people passing through to Kharel’s shop to know more about the municipality’s thriving bird population. Following his efforts to raise awareness about local birds, the chairperson of Ward No. 4, a neighborhood in the municipality, has started awarding stationery to children who choose to surrender their slingshots to the society.
Mechinagar has 13 community forests spread across 2,000 hectares (over 4,900 acres). Soon after seeing Ramasamy’s photos in 2016, Kharel began looking at birds more closely. During one of his photography strolls, he came across a small bird with bluish purple flecks on its neck, sipping nectar from flowers in a neighbor’s garden. He took its photo and later found that it was a purple sunbird. It was his first bird photo to go viral on Facebook. The response the photograph received gave him much-needed encouragement to seek more birds. Over the next few years, Kharel discovered and photographed 330 species of birds in Mechinagar.
He took photos of the great thick-knee, which is critically endangered in Nepal.
In 2020, he spotted a bird that looked like a pigeon but whose wings were a mosaic of greens, a rarity he had never seen in the species. He emailed the photos to people he knew at Bird Conservation Nepal, a nonprofit that works to protect avian species. It was the green imperial pigeon, a rare species in Nepal. “If I had known on the field, I would have been more excited,” he says.
Then, in 2021, Kharel found the elusive hangrayo (rufous-necked hornbill) in Sim Dhap, Suryodaya municipality, Ilam district, roughly 80 kilometers (50 miles) away from Mechinagar. Kharel had searched for the bird at the urging of Kamal Maden, a botanist, biodiversity researcher and writer who got acquainted with Kharel after following his photography.
A naturalist discovered the hangrayo in Nepal in 1829, Maden says. “Deven is the only other person who found it in Nepal since.”
Kharel says he had no hope to find a bird widely believed to be extinct in Nepal. “But I recognized it as soon as I saw it on a tree on the road. This bird was easy to identify because I had photographed it in India. … I quickly took out my camera and took a quick photograph. It didn’t matter to me whether the photo was good or bad; all that mattered was that I took a picture and there would be a record,” he says.
Kharel was also the first person to photograph the scarlet-backed flowerpecker, which he spotted in the municipality of Rong in Ilam district.
When he takes photos of a bird, Kharel first shows them to teachers, housewives and elderly people in the locality — as they are the most familiar with the species — and seeks the bird’s local name. “Then I go back home and look it up on the internet,” he says.
If locals are unable to identify the bird, he seeks out ornithologists online and emails them photos, asking for their help.
Ornithologist Krishna Prasad Bhusal, from Bird Conservation Nepal, is one of his sources. Bhusal and his team became familiar with Kharel’s work through the photographer’s posts on their organization’s Facebook page.
“So when we spoke, I requested him to not heavily edit the photos he posts on social media. I said, ‘I understand that since your profession is photography, you may feel like editing the photos, but it would be better to post them as you took them.’ Wildlife photos should be natural,” Bhusal says. He adds that Kharel took the advice.
Kharel did not just write to ornithologists to learn more about birds. Though in the initial days, his primary knowledge of birds came from searching articles on the internet, he has since traveled across Nepal and India to attend nature conservation programs to increase his knowledge. After spending months studying the behavior of birds and their calls, he says he is able to identify about 100 birds simply by listening to them.
Kharel’s pursuit of bird photography meant his livelihood as a studio, wedding and events photographer took a back seat. For days, his studio would remain shut as he traveled to photograph birds.
His wife, Nirmala Rani Kharel, says he has spent close to 900,000 Nepali rupees (over 6,700 United States dollars) on books, lenses, cameras and bird-watching equipment. Apart from the 180,000 rupees (1,350 dollars) Mechinagar municipality granted to his conservation society to fund parts of his research, Kharel is mostly self-funded. While sometimes the idea that her husband loiters around forests looking for birds scares Nirmala, she understands his passion too. “When I saw him engrossed in his search for birds on the internet and reading a lot of books, I bought him a good lens with my savings,” says Nirmala, who runs a beauty parlor to support the family.
Niroj Kattel, information officer at the tourism office in Kakarvitta in Jhapa district, says that though their office used to only have posters of popular tourism destinations like Mount Everest, Pokhara and Buddhist pilgrimage hotspot Lumbini, Kharel’s bird photography has changed that. “We replaced these posters with photos taken by Kharel. After seeing the photos on the office wall, Nepali citizens and foreign tourists who visit our office have begun to inquire about the birds, and we have also connected them with him,” he says.
The most important aspect of Kharel’s work, Kattel says, is how local communities have become aware of the importance of birds. “One of the positive effects of his campaign is that the people of Mechinagar have started to think that birds are connected with our lives,” he says.
Mechinagar’s mayor, Gopal Chandra Budhathoki, echoes the sentiment. “I wasn’t aware that birds were so important for humans and nature. He has taught many people, including myself, about the relationship between human life, nature and birds. … People have learned not to kill birds as a result of this,” Budhathoki says.
Dozens of people have registered with Kharel’s Mechi Bird and Wildlife Conservation Society, in addition to nine official members. From teachers, traders, businessmen and housewives to farmers and local construction workers, people have signed up to receive regular information about birds and conservation activities. The society is now working on a proposal to request the government declare Mechinagar a bird sanctuary.
“I feel grateful for my family every day. There’s very little money in this work, but they still support me. If they had ever asked me why I am doing work that makes very little money, I wouldn’t have been able to pursue any of this,” Kharel says.
