Ravi Sethia

Our state bird is changing its voice to be heard over us If you’ve been to Chopta, Tungnath or the high meadows of Garhwal, you may have seen it: the Himalayan monal, the male shining in green, blue, purple and copper like it’s been painted by hand. It’s Uttarakhand’s state bird and Nepal’s national bird, and it lives high in the mountains, between about 2,100 and 4,500 metres. Now, two studies by researchers from HNB Garhwal University show that this bird is changing, and we’re the reason. For the first study, published in the journal Behavioural Processes in August 2025, Rajeev Lochan, Dinesh Kumar Sharma and Anand Kumar placed recording devices in two valleys of the Kedarnath Musk Deer Sanctuary. One was Madmaheshwar, a quiet valley with no road. The other was Chopta, packed with vehicles, tourists and pilgrims. Between April 2023 and June 2024, they recorded 719 monal calls. What they found was clear. Monals in noisy Chopta were calling at a higher pitch than those in quiet Madmaheshwar. The likely reason is simple: human noise from traffic and crowds is mostly low-pitched, so the birds raise their pitch to be heard above it. The change is so subtle that our ears can’t catch it, but the recordings can. The researchers are careful to say this isn’t a permanent change in the species. It shows the birds are adjusting their behaviour to survive in a noisier world. But these calls aren’t just sounds. They’re how monals find mates, warn rivals and stay connected. If they can’t hear each other properly, it could affect how they breed and survive. The team calls this a preliminary study, and says much more research is needed to know the long-term impact. The second study, published in Scientific Reports in 2025, looked at where the monal can live in the future. Using over 5,000 records of where the bird has been seen, and climate models used by the UN’s climate panel, the researchers projected that climate change will keep shrinking and breaking up the monal’s habitat across Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh through the end of this century. As snow melts and the climate warms, the birds are moving higher up the mountains. At the same time, the alpine meadows where they live are getting crowded with people. Pushed from below and limited at the top, monals could end up in small, disconnected pockets. That makes it harder for groups to meet and breed, and raises the risk of local populations dying out. Right now, the monal isn’t listed as endangered. But that’s exactly why these findings matter. As one environmental expert put it, if even the monal has to change both its voice and its address, what’s happening to the more sensitive species no one is studying? A bird that has lived in these mountains for thousands of years now has to raise its voice and climb higher just to survive us.