Everything written about Thrissur is about the middle of it — the hill, the ring road, the temple, the gold. Go twenty minutes out in almost any direction west or north and the city stops abruptly and something much stranger begins: a flat, wet, treeless expanse of rice fields that lie below the level of the sea and stay dry only because they are pumped.
The numbers, which are the story
The Thrissur–Ponnani Kole lands cover about 13,632 hectares, running north from the edge of Thrissur through Chavakkad towards Ponnani, between the Chalakudy and Bharathapuzha rivers. The ground sits roughly half a metre to a metre below mean sea level. They are part of the Vembanad–Kol system, which went on the Ramsar list of Wetlands of International Importance in 2002.
Kole is a Malayalam word for a bumper yield, and that is the bargain being struck here. The land floods in the monsoon and is farmed afterwards: water is pumped out, the fields are worked and a crop is taken from ground that spends part of every year underwater. It is the same principle as Kuttanad further south, and it is nowhere near as well known.
One of the great bird sites in India, on farmland
The Kole lands sit on the Central Asian Flyway, and by sheer number of birds they are reckoned the third largest wetland in India — after Chilika in Odisha and Amipur Tank in Gujarat. That is a startling thing to be able to say about a landscape that is not a national park, not a sanctuary and not protected in the way those words normally imply. It is working farmland that happens to be one of the most productive bird habitats in the country.
The reason is the farming rather than despite it. A cycle of flooding, drawdown and stubble produces exactly the shallow water and exposed mud that waders, ducks, egrets, herons and terns need, on an enormous scale, at exactly the season migrants arrive. Take away the rice and you take away the birds.
- The season is roughly November to February, when migrants are in and the fields are being drawn down.
- Early morning. The light is low across flat ground and the heat later is severe with no shade anywhere.
- This is private farmland with working pump houses and bunds. Stay on the bunds and the access tracks.
- Adat, Palakkal and the fields around them are the commonly named access points, reachable in well under half an hour from the Round.
Why a wetland like this is fragile in an unusual way
Most threatened wetlands are threatened by being drained. This one is already drained — that is the farming system — and its risk runs the other way. If rice stops paying, the fields do not revert to marsh; they get filled and built on, because land within half an hour of a prosperous city is worth far more with a foundation on it than with a crop. The habitat depends on an agricultural economy continuing to make sense, which is a much less stable form of protection than a fence.
Ramsar listing recognises the system’s importance but does not by itself decide what an individual farmer does with an individual plot. That tension — internationally important habitat, privately owned working fields, a growing city at the edge — is the actual conservation story here, and it is more interesting than a species list.
What it is like to stand in
Disorienting, if you have come from the Round. Kerala is a state of enclosure — coconut, rubber, walls, water, hills — and the Kole is the one place in this part of it where you can see the horizon. Flat wet ground to the edge of sight, bunds running out in straight lines, pump houses, a buffalo, and in the right month several thousand birds. It is not pretty in the backwater sense. It is genuinely unlike anywhere else in the state.