THE NOISE WAS COMING from some distance away. A mile perhaps. Maybe more. Naba Miri, an Idu Mishmi elder with a thatch of grey hair, stopped to listen, green walls of jungle pressing in on all sides. There was the high, quavering call of a blue-throated barbet, the trilling of yellow-bellied flycatchers and the harsh ‘ka-ka-ka’ of a male peacock pheasant.
But beyond that there was something else, a whooping and hollering high up in the canopy. “Hoolock gibbons,” whispered Naba, as their calls ricocheted through the treetops. “Other tribes have hunted them almost to extinction, but for us they’re misu animals, which means it’s taboo to kill them.”
My guide Naba and I were bashing our way up a bamboo-choked ravine in the Elopa-Etugu eco-cultural preserve, a recently established Community Conservation Area in the north-east Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Part of the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, this little-visited region is home to India’s largest remaining tracts of tropical, subtropical and temperate forest. But nowhere has a richer repository of biodiversity than here in the Dibang Valley, a mountainous fold of eastern Arunachal Pradesh where India, Tibet and Myanmar collide. More than 550 species of bird have been recorded here, as well as rare and endangered animals).
