Punjab has six wetlands on the Ramsar list: Harike, Kanjli, Ropar, Beas Conservation Reserve, Nangal and Keshopur-Miani. Harike is the largest and the most important.
Harike, where the Beas meets the Sutlej, takes over a hundred thousand waterbirds in some winters, on the Central Asian flyway. Bar-headed geese, which cross the Himalaya at altitudes above eight thousand metres, winter there.
The Indus river dolphin, which was thought extinct in India, was confirmed in the Beas in 2007. It is one of four freshwater dolphin species in the world and the Beas population is very small, in the low tens.
Punjab's own resident birds have declined sharply with pesticide use and the loss of scrub and hedgerow. The house sparrow decline is the one people notice. The vulture collapse of the 1990s, from diclofenac given to cattle, removed over ninety-five per cent of three species across the subcontinent and the effects on carcass disposal in villages were immediate.
The state bird is the northern goshawk, chosen for its association with Guru Gobind Singh Ji's white hawk.
Harike takes tens of thousands of waterfowl each winter, coming down the central Asian flyway, and the counts there are the longest running bird data in the state.
The resident species are the ones under pressure: the vultures that collapsed with diclofenac in the 1990s, the great Indian bustard now effectively gone from Punjab, and the grassland birds that went with the grassland.
The sarus crane, the state's largest resident bird, has almost disappeared from Punjab while holding on in Uttar Pradesh. Nobody has explained the difference.