Punjab's Ramsar wetlands beyond Harike are Kanjli near Kapurthala, a barrage pond on the Kali Bein; Ropar on the Sutlej; Nangal below the Bhakra system; Keshopur-Miani in Gurdaspur, a natural marsh; and the Beas Conservation Reserve, a 185-kilometre river stretch listed in 2019.
Keshopur-Miani is unusual: it is a community-managed marsh, leased by village panchayats, used for singhara water chestnut cultivation and fishing, and it holds large numbers of wintering birds.
The Beas Conservation Reserve was listed largely because of the Indus river dolphin population found there in 2007.
All of these are small, all are under pressure from encroachment, effluent and water abstraction, and all depend on flows that are managed for irrigation rather than for the wetland.
A state with under four per cent forest cover has six internationally listed wetlands, which is a fair summary of where Punjab's remaining ecology actually is: in the water, not on the land.
The Kali Bein that Kanjli sits on is the stream associated with Guru Nanak Dev Ji at Sultanpur Lodhi, and it was cleared out over years from 2000 by a volunteer effort under Balbir Singh Seechewal, working with village labour and no state budget. It is the one river restoration in Punjab that actually happened.
That means the state's bird habitat is a by-product of its irrigation engineering, and the water level at each of them is set by an irrigation department rather than by anything ecological.
Water hyacinth, silt and sewage are the standing problems at all of them, and the management sits with a department that has almost no ecological staff.