Jatinga — The Bird Mystery Ridge.
Jatinga is hard to reach (the train to Haflong via Lumding is famously slow), the phenomenon only manifests in a narrow Sep-Oct window, and the local Khasi-Dimasa community has actively moved from killing the birds to protecting them via a Forest Department-aided observation tower, which means the spectacle is more muted than the legend.WHY NOBODY KNOWS
A small Khasi-Dimasa ridge village 9km south of Haflong, sitting 1000m up at the foot of the Borail range. On moonless, fog-bound nights in September and October between 6pm and 9:30pm, birds — tiger bittern, black bittern, pond heron, kingfisher, hill partridge, emerald dove — descend disoriented from the dark skies, drawn toward village lights, where they are knocked down with bamboo poles and killed. The phenomenon was first documented in writing by British tea-planter and naturalist E.P. Gee in his 1957 book 'Wild Life of India' (he visited with ornithologist Salim Ali). The cause: high-altitude winds and fog disorient juvenile and local migrant birds at their roost; the lights of Jatinga act as a refuge they crash toward. Not actual suicide — but few places on earth host a more eerily specific avian event.
