When the cormorant was found dead and cold under the bamboo bush, Hakim Uddin stood frozen in the first morning light. He could feel the hot trail of tears rolling down his cheeks. He fondly brushed off the red ants that piled out of the open beak of the black bird.

Later that day he buried the bird. Neighbours joined in the curious funeral.

It is immediately obvious that Bara Bahadurpur village in Manikganj is different. It is a bird sanctuary, run by the Nature Conservation Movement (NACOM) with villagers' participation.

The approach is difficult and

even a bit risky, with the large waves of the choppy, monsoon-swollen Padma breaking on the banks.

As we stepped ashore we saw the cormorants and herons flapping overhead, buffeted by high winds. Next came the cackles, hundreds of hoarse, high-pitched voices.

Hakim emerges from his dingy bamboo lean-to, a thin, hole-pocked, half-sleeved vest clinging to his torso.

"Climb up," he says, pointing to a bamboo ladder, shooting some 120 feet up into the sky in the middle of a thicket of bamboo bushes and mahogany trees. "But keep quiet or they'll be disturbed."

It takes several gruelling minutes

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to reach the top of the slippery bamboo ladder, where I clamber onto a platform, five feet by three feet. And all around me are nests, hundreds of them. Each nest is home to cuddly chicks and spotted eggs. The herons, the egrets and cormorants peer back in amazement.

"It used not to be like this," explains Hakim. "Only a few birds were left here after poaching. But now there are at least 1,000."

"It was a hunting ground for poachers," confirms Anisuzzaman, president of NACOM. It was his idea to fight back: "One day when sailing by the village I noticed the bird colony and decided to set up the sanctuary."

NACOM talked to the villagers to find out why they did not care about the birds. One reason was that the villagers needed the bamboo, which they regularly logged, destroying the birds' habitat. They also disliked the stink of bird droppings and raw fish waste.

"We thought of helping the villagers with small credits. We bought them cows in exchange for a commitment that they wouldn't touch the bamboo trees. The villagers readily agreed," recalls Anisuzzaman.

This solved part of the problem.

To combat the bad smells, NACOM bought the villagers chicken and ducks to scavenge in the waste.

The methods worked like magic. The colony has ballooned from perhaps a dozen cormorants to around 1,000 and still rising.

NACOM has also set up an awareness-raising school in the village where staff spread the message of ecological balance.

Under a bamboo bush Hakim spots a half-eaten snake carcass.

"The chickens will soon come and eat it up," he observes. "We are poor. But at least NACOM has showed us a living. Once, we couldn't care less for the birds. Today we protect them. We don't let any hunter come near the village." Persuasion also came handy in protecting the birds.

"One of the biggest hunters in the area was the local chairman," says Anisuzzaman. "Every winter he would kill thousands of birds. We talked

him into giving up hunting."

As our boats pulled away the village, the half-clad figures of the villagers on the banks slowly shrank, until they finally disappeared round a bend in the river.

The cackles could still be heard and the birds glided lazily over Baro Bahadurpur.