Endangered birds laid to rest

Scores of Buddhist villagers in India's north-eastern state of Assam have performed a unique funeral ritual for more than 800 endangered storks found mainly in India and Sri Lanka that died after a tree where they were nesting fell.

The Asian openbill stork is a broad-winged soaring bird and is also found in some south-east Asian countries.

The villagers, most of them farmers, considered the banyan tree sacred and believed that the storks were their guardian angels.

The Asian openbill storks died when the 200-year-old banyan tree that served as their colony crashed last week into a pond inside a Buddhist monastery some 300km east of state capital Guwahati, the IANS news agency reported.

"Five monks led the special funeral prayers at the monastery on Sunday as the incident of the banyan tree crashing and the subsequent deaths of so many storks is considered a bad omen," Dibyadhar Shyam, a villager, told the IANS. The banyan tree was home to about 1500 storks of the species listed as endangered under the Indian Wildlife Protection Act, the report said.

The global population of these storks is estimated at 130,000 - Independent Online, South Africa