Kadalundi is described everywhere as a bird sanctuary, and it is also something else, with a different legal basis and a different logic. It is the Kadalundi–Vallikkunnu Community Reserve, the first community reserve declared in Kerala, and that phrase is not a synonym for sanctuary.
What the law actually says
Section 36C(1) of the Wildlife (Protection) Amendment Act 2002 empowers a state government to declare private or community land, outside existing protected areas, as a community reserve — and it does so upon the voluntary participation of a community or an individual willing to conserve wildlife, its habitat, and traditional or cultural conservation values and practices.
Read that again for the two phrases doing the work: outside existing protected areas, and voluntary participation. A national park or sanctuary is typically declared over state-controlled land and works by exclusion — rights are extinguished or restricted, people are moved out or fenced out. A community reserve is declared over land where people live and work, and it works by agreement. They keep their rights; they take on a conservation obligation.
The Kadalundi declaration, with its file number
What was declared, and when
| Declared | 17 October 2007, by G.O.(MS) No. 66/2007/F&WL |
| Standing | The first community reserve in Kerala |
| Total area | 153.84 hectares |
| Of which Reserve Forest | 21.22 hectares |
| Spans | Kozhikode and Malappuram districts |
| Co-managed by | The respective grama panchayats |
| Protects | Mangrove forest, mudflats and five islands |
| The five islands | Company Thuruthu, Cheru Thuruthu, Cee Pee Thuruthu, Bala Thuruthu, Mannan Thuruthu |
Two things stand out from the numbers. First, 153.84 hectares is small — about a square and a half kilometre. This is a precisely drawn boundary around an estuary, not a landscape-scale reserve. Second, only 21.22 of those hectares are Reserve Forest, which is to say state forest land. The overwhelming majority of the protected area is not, and that is exactly why the community-reserve category was the one that fitted.
- There is no gate, no ticket and no jeep track, because there is no exclusion zone. The reserve is a place people live and fish in.
- The boats, nets and mussel-gathering you see are not encroachment. They are the rights the declaration was designed around.
- The consequence is that the etiquette is different: you are a visitor in a working estuary, not a visitor to a park.
- It also means enforcement is co-operative rather than uniformed. Do not assume somebody else is policing your behaviour.
Why this category exists at all
The 2002 amendment that created community reserves and conservation reserves was a response to a plain failure. Exclusionary protection works where land is empty and fails where it is not — and in a country like India, the ecologically richest fragments are very often the ones people have lived alongside for centuries, sometimes because they lived alongside them. Sacred groves are the classic example; a tidal estuary that a fishing community has worked for generations is another.
What Kadalundi tested was whether the new category could be made to work on the ground. It was the first in the state, in 2007, and the fact that it is now routinely described as a bird sanctuary in travel writing tells you that the label did not stick in the public mind. The legal instrument underneath it did.
A note on what the reserve is not
It is not the same thing as the bird sanctuary, and the sources will frustrate you if you try to reconcile them. The English Wikipedia article on the bird sanctuary gives no area and no declaration date for the sanctuary as such — those figures belong to the community reserve, declared in 2007, and the two are routinely merged. If you see a single set of numbers presented as “Kadalundi Bird Sanctuary, established, area”, treat it with suspicion: it is almost certainly the community reserve’s data wearing the sanctuary’s name.