The search for India’s rarest birds | Lost and found

In 2021, a couple of years before the terrible ethnic conflict started in Manipur, the state threw up some of the most reliable sites to see one of India’s stunning but rare pheasants. Named evocatively as ‘Nong-in’ in the Meitei language, it means ‘one who follows the tracks of the rain’. Also known as Mrs. Hume’s pheasant to the English-speaking world, it is named after the wife of the temperamental but prodigious ornithologist Allan Octavian Hume.