The Indian grey hornbill, known around Gir as the Chilotro, stopped being seen in that forest somewhere between the 1950s and the 1960s. In 2021 the Gujarat Forest Department set about bringing it back, catching birds from healthy populations in the Aravalli hills about 380 kilometres away and releasing them in Gir: twenty eight of them across 2021 and 2022, then another twelve in 2023. Eleven males carried small satellite transmitters, and what those tracked is the nicest kind of result, because it is the sound of birds deciding to stay. In the first months each one ranged over roughly sixty square kilometres, casting about. Once settled, that shrank to under six. Their daily wandering fell from about four kilometres to less than one and a half. They had stopped looking and started living there.

Then came the part that cannot be rushed. Hornbills are among the fussiest nesters in India: a female seals herself into a hollow in a mature tree to raise her young, so the tree has to be old enough and big enough to hold her. In Gir the birds chose cavities in Indian gum and baheda trees, and they fed on banyan and peepal figs, on karamda and dhraman fruit, and on insects, in the forest and around village orchards alike. One pair nested in the first year after release. Three more nested in the second, and the state says nesting has been recorded every year since, though the peer reviewed study covers only those first two. Jaipal Singh, Gujarat's Chief Wildlife Warden, points at the real cause: “Though the hornbill disappeared from Gir decades ago, improvements in habitat protection following the declaration of the Gir Wildlife Sanctuary in 1965 and Gir National Park in 1975 created favourable conditions for bringing the species back.” Sixty years of a forest being left alone to grow is what made the hollows. Four known breeding pairs is a small beginning rather than a finished job, but the birds are carrying figs across the hills again, planting the next generation of trees as they go.

Our short take: the research is by Mohan Ram and colleagues, published in the journal Birds, with the breeding update announced by the Government of Gujarat and reported by ANI and The Assam Tribune. Photograph: an Indian grey hornbill by Tisha Mukherjee, CC BY-SA 4.0.