Haekku Banakku: A Festival of Connections, Rediscovering Nature Through Birds
Birds have always been our earliest storytellers. They cross mountains and river valleys, stitch together forests and farms, and slip effortlessly between the human world and the wild. They remind us that the earth is a shared home, held together not only by science but by song, memory, movement and meaning. It is this deep recognition that inspired the Hume Centre for Ecology and Wildlife Biology to conceive the Wayanad Bird Festival (WBF) ‘ Haekki Banakku’, named in the Kattunaikka language to honour the inseparable threads between nature and culture.
Held from 14–16 November 2025 at Puliyarmala, Kalpetta, in memory of India’s Birdman Dr. Salim Ali, the festival set out to be more than an event. It aimed to be an immersive, multisensory, community-led experience, a gathering where delegates did not just watch or listen, but felt, touched, imagined and co-created alongside the landscapes and people of Wayanad. The vision behind WBF was to create a space where scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, creative expression and everyday experiences could meet without hierarchy, forming a collective inquiry into our relationship with the birds that share our lives.A total of nearly 300 registered delegates and over 2500 floaters (non-registered participants) witnessed the Wayanad Bird Festival including indigenous communities, scholars, researchers, students, and people from diverse walks of life.
The festival invited participants into a carefully curated journey across spaces like Situating Birds, Knowing the Birds, the Birds of Wayanad photo exhibition, Become a Birder corners, and the academic sessions of Moot, featuring leading researchers and thinkers. Kilipechu brought indigenous communities and local villagers into conversation with delegates, grounding the discourse in land-based wisdom. Experiential engagements such as nest-making, journaling with natural colours, and Mingei-inspired collective art offered slow, intimate interactions with materials and ideas. Performative spaces like Being the Bird and Listening Error dissolved boundaries between art, ecology and movement, allowing delegates to inhabit birds worlds with their bodies and senses.
Among these many experiences, the bird trails across Wayanad’s varied habitats from the wetlands of Nathamkuni to the high cloud-wrapped slopes of Chembra wove direct contact with nature into the festival’s rhythm.
Through all these elements, the festival sought to slow people down, invite them to see the world with renewed curiosity, cultivate emotional and ethical connections with nature, strengthen birdwatching and citizen-science communities, celebrate indigenous knowledge alongside scientific research, and spark conversations that can shape future conservation practice and policy.
In essence, WBF aimed to transform affection into responsibility to help people rediscover birds not as distant subjects of study, but as neighbours and companions, beings that help us reimagine our place in the living world.
Why Wayanad? Why Birds?
Wayanad is a living mosaic of forests, wetlands, plantations, grasslands and villages — a landscape where wildlife and people have evolved together for generations. It is home to extraordinary biodiversity, including the Banasura Chilappan (Montecincla jerdoni), a species found nowhere else on earth, limited to just a few mountaintops in the district. The region’s ecological richness, cultural diversity, and history of coexistence make it an ideal setting for a festival that seeks to understand human-nature relationships with sensitivity and depth.
Birds, too, were chosen with intention. They are accessible guides to the ecological world visible, familiar, musical, yet endlessly fascinating. They respond quickly to environmental change, making them powerful indicators of habitat health. More importantly, birds occupy our myths, crafts, lullabies, metaphors and childhood memories. They bring together science and emotion, knowledge and wonder.
In a time when many species are increasingly entangled in conflict with humans, birds remain one of the few non-threatening, universally loved beings through which people can explore coexistence, curiosity and care.
Together, Wayanad and birds create a natural synergy, a landscape full of stories, and storytellers who can lead us into them. And it is within this union that the Wayanad Bird Festival found its purpose: to reconnect people with the living world in ways that are thoughtful, sensory, creative and hopeful.
