Meet Raju Koranga!

(Rajendra “Raju” Singh Koranga (@rajkoranga) was featured in a video about iNat a few months ago, and @abhasm on the iNat team was able to summarize it for us. I found Raju’s story compelling, so I reached out to him for a profile on the iNat Blog. Raju looped in @ram_k, who’s been doing a lot of great work building the iNat community in India. Raju wrote his answers by hand in Hindi and Ram translated them into English for me. I want to thank them both for taking the time and effort to do that, and for their contributions to iNat.)

“We live in a place where from the morning itself birds constantly call,” says Raju, a farmer and nature guide from the Munsiari area in India’s Uttarakhand state. As a child, Raju and his friends and family roamed the countryside, collected food, and played in the forest. 

At about age 16 I became a forest watcher for our village forest council (Van Panchayat). Due to family responsibilities I could not continue studying and needed to work. Our village forest is about 80 hectares and I was responsible to protect it (or alert my elders) from illegal grazing, illegal grass and fodder collection, and to generally ensure nothing untoward was happening in our village forest. This gave me the chance to look at the forest even more deeply: at plants, wildlife, and birds. For many of these we have local names but I did not know any of their English names.

Later, in 2004, Raju joined a nature and outdoor tourism program in his village and was trained in mountaineering and trek leadership. Since then his larger combined village started a nature and culture festival, which has grown to encompass a bird festival and a butterfly and moth festival. 

These festivals brought us in touch with experts and interested people from whom we learnt a lot. We also started to get access to more material (books, pamphlets etc) and also started to get work as field assistants and nature guides. All of this has increased both my interest in nature and also gives me some extra earning opportunities. 

Raju has now leads several nature treks a year and is getting consistent work doing high altitude snow leopard camera trapping and conservation.  

Through this snow leopard project we got opportunities to live and deeply explore the high altitude pastures and learn from shepherds and from families who migrate every summer to the seasonal alpine villages. We also had some very senior scientists who came and taught us about plants, and also a little bit about mammals which helped me understand even more about nature.

And starting in April of 2022, Raju has been working with India’s Nature, a small informal (and unfunded) group doing nature education and outreach. 

He first heard about iNaturalist in 2020 but did not have a phone he could use with it, so only uploaded sparingly via a computer. The next year, Ram started training a few men in Raju’s village (including Raju and also @babloo_farswan, and @k_pawan). Raju says

Very soon I saw how much they were learning because of using iNaturalist and eBird and how soon they were able to improve their knowledge, and also how many interesting things they were seeing and sharing. I too was seeing all these but apart from WhatsApp I could not really share them and more importantly could not collect all my photos in one place.

Since 2021, after I bought a new phone, I really started using iNaturalist a lot and focused on diverse groups of life that I could record on my phone (butterflies, moths, beetles, amphibians, fungi, bird calls, and even a musk deer).

I also started taking part in iNaturalist events like Big Butterfly Month, Monsoon Beauty, etc. In the 2021 Monsoon Beauty event I posted 2,888 observations and came in 3rd overall (and 1st among Rural Observers). For this I got some books and pamphlets as a gift. Meanwhile I was also given a butterfly book, bird book, plant book (and later mammal book, moths book etc). iNaturalist combined with eBird, the Merlin app and the books made it easy for me to know what I was seeing and how to share them.

With over 16,000 observations, Raju is now the top iNat observer in Uttarakhand, and uses iNaturalist when doing his alpine work as well as his work with India’s Nature. As a nature guide, he mostly was focusing on birds and butterflies, the interests of most clients, but tells me

Because of iNaturalist I now look at everything and I also like beetles very much. I have also started to look at moths too. My favourite areas are in the oak forest around my home and in the alpine areas both close by (half a day's walk) and further away (3 days walk).

The alpine areas have a lot of special/new organisms which we don’t see elsewhere. Many interesting plants, some birds, butterflies and a lot more. But of late I have not been able to go to the further away alpine areas. In May this year I was part of a team and went to an alpine area I had previously visited and we saw a lot of interesting birds and plants.

Raj was “born to a farming family and that is the traditional and main occupation of most people in our village,” he says, “and my whole family is involved in farming work.” So he spends much of his time farming but takes guide work when he can. “Work is very hard to get so earlier whatever work I could get I would take,” he explains. “Now with India’s Nature I have more security so I can work on both my farm as well as nature observation/nature education work.”

(Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- you can read another profile of Raju in this journal post by Ram, including some of his most interesting and unique observations, and following him on Instagram here.

- Raju is a signatory and practitioner of an Uttarakhand Nature Guide Ethical Guidelines 

- Uttarakhand is home to India’s first “lichen park”!

- check out some of the most-faved iNat observations in Uttarakhand!

Posted on December 29, 2023 01:37 AM by tiwane