[va-richmond-general] Birding in India article from the NY Times
- From: "Kathy" <k-kreutzer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <va-richmond-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2011 09:52:06 -0500
Go to the link for a slideshow and photos of some amazing birds!
Kathy Kreutzer
http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/travel/16India.html?nl=travel
<http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/travel/16India.html?nl=travel&emc=tda1
> &emc=tda1
January 14, 2011
India, Through a Birder's Eyes
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
IT began with parakeets, the brash, busybody rose-ringed parakeets of Delhi,
with their lipstick red beaks and their irrepressible chatter, gossiping in
the crevices of 15th-century tombs.
Then one morning while I drank coffee, a shimmering blue-black sunbird came
to drink nectar in my garden. At twilight one day, I looked up to see a
hornbill perched on a neighbor's tree. An interview with the prime minister
of India was repeatedly interrupted by the calls of a cantankerous peacock
in his garden.
And so went my discovery of the birds
<http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/birds/overview.html?inline=nyt-clas
sifier> of India. It was an accumulation of accidental discoveries. A
friend in Mumbai recommended that I check out the flamingos dancing in the
stinky, mucky mud flats of Sewri. Then one day, not far from the Taj Mahal,
a pair of sarus cranes, the tallest flying bird in the world, stood in a
shallow pond. On a trip to the outsourcing hub of Bangalore, I was urged to
drive off the highway to see pelicans roosting in banyan trees. And trekking
across the Himalayan plateau called Ladakh one summer, I was stopped in my
tracks by the sight of a black-necked crane flying across a still blue lake.
Most improbably of all, on a trip back to that clattering, honking, riotous
city called Calcutta, where I was born, I woke up one morning to songbirds.
From the cold lakes of the Himalayas to the sand dunes of western Rajasthan
to the tropical rain forests
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/forests_and_forestry/rain
_forests/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> in the south, India hosts a
dizzying variety of birds, like a dizzying variety of everything else.
Residents and visitors, common and rare, more than 1,200 species have been
recorded in India, which puts it somewhere between the United States (just
under 900 recorded species) and Colombia (more than 1,800 species).
Several bird species in India are, however, endangered and their habitats
are increasingly threatened, as this rapidly modernizing nation expands
roads, mines and steel plants into environmentally sensitive areas. It helps
that farming is done largely without the thrashers and tractors that ravage
nests in more industrialized countries. Most of all, it helps that birds,
just like millions of Indians, adjust to difficult conditions: They roost on
rooftops. They hide their chicks in rice paddies. They fly away when they
must.
"We think of nature as pristine," said K. S. Gopi Sundar, an Indian
ornithologist who studies cranes. "But it's amazing what nature can do."
Birding has taken me to some of the most extraordinary landscapes in this
country - mangroves and desert, rain forest, cloud forest, mountains and
miles and miles of coast.
But even in ordinary surroundings, birding has taught me to appreciate the
rewards of being still. You hear a call. You look for a flutter. Suddenly
something astonishing comes. And then goes.
What follows is a sampling of birding spots in North and South India. (The
northeast and the Andaman Islands, two of India's most important but least
accessible birding areas, must be left for later.)
In an age of so much inconsequential tweeting, it's worth recalling the
advice of yogis: Sit still, they say, so still that a bird can land on your
head.
North India: Delhi, Rajasthan, Himalayas
India's crowded, boorish capital is an improbable haven of birds - and a
natural place to linger for a few days, before venturing out to the wilds of
the north.
In city parks, hoopoes and hornbills are plentiful; the haunting call of the
koel can break the stillness of a muggy afternoon. Owls are everywhere. And
on the flood plains of the Yamuna River, now a filthy drain that swallows
the sewage of Delhi, a city of an estimated 18 million inhabitants, sits one
of North India's richest nature reserves, the Okhla Bird Sanctuary. At
daybreak one scorching Monday at the end of May, I persuaded Mr. Sundar, the
ornithologist, to take me there. A flock of garganey ducks was still hanging
around before making its way to northern China. A purple heron - "rakish,
with long thin neck" in the words of the Oxford "Pocket Guide to the Birds
of the Indian Subcontinent" - landed in a clump of water hyacinth.
Mr. Sundar pointed to a tailorbird stitching its delicate, egg-shaped basket
of a nest. In a bird version of "MasterChef," if you will, the males of the
species compete to construct the finest nest. The female chooses a nest (and
nest-maker) of her liking.
Winter is the best time to visit Okhla, particularly for water birds:
storks, flamingos, geese that can fly over Mount Everest. But even in the
peak of summer - not exactly prime birding season - Mr. Sundar pointed out
at least 20 species over the course of two hours: a yellow-footed pigeon, an
oriole, a pair of partridges that waddled across the road just as we drove
out.
The road out of Delhi offers three distinct birding habitats: plains, desert
and hill. The first option: Hire a car from Delhi and take an extra couple
of days on the well-trodden trail connecting Delhi, Agra and Jaipur to visit
Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur, the former duck-hunting grounds of
maharajas and now the country's best-known bird park.
If you're spending a day in Agra to see the Taj Mahal, drive two hours to
Bharatpur by nightfall and retire early. There are a variety of inns within
a mile or two of the sanctuary - as well as a spartan state-run lodge right
inside the park. The Birders Inn <http://www.birdersinn.com> , where I spent
one Christmas Eve, offers clean, unremarkable rooms encircling a pretty
garden. The Laxmi Vilas <http://www.laxmivilas.com> is a renovated
19th-century palace. No matter where you stay, the real charm of Bharatpur
is to wake up before dawn and head into the park. Songbirds stir themselves
awake. Sambar deer come to drink at a pond. Painted storks spread their
pink-dipped wings and alight from their roosts.
If the rains are good and Keoladeo's lakes are full, the park in winter can
host close to 400 species.
A road trip across the North Indian plains usually takes you along a noisy
highway, past fields, markets and truck stops. But if you time it right
(mornings and evenings are when birds are most likely to reveal themselves),
you may well spot the sarus crane in a paddy field, standing nearly five
feet tall on spindly pink legs. It is considered good luck for a newlywed
couple to see a sarus on their wedding night. Locals believe the sarus mates
for life. This is probably apocryphal. But how can seeing a sarus on your
honeymoon be anything but a boon?
A second option takes you to the Kumaon Hills, a favorite of many birders
because it covers such a wide variety of landscapes: the grasslands and
gently rolling hills of Corbett National Park, the alpine woods just above,
and then, farther up into oak and rhododendron forests that stretch up to an
elevation of 8,000 feet. The rhododendron blooms from February to April,
painting the forest red and drawing flocks of nectar-thirsty warblers. The
village of Pangot, at about 6,500 feet, is a decent base from which to
explore the hills.
The drive up the razorback hills to Pangot is a tricky venture. You may be
rewarded by the sight of the reclusive cheer pheasant crossing the road. But
you might also find that unseasonal rains have shut the road for fear of
landslides. My one trip to Pangot, at what I thought was the tail end of a
monsoon, was blanketed by rain. The tour group I used, Asian Adventures, did
not warn me in advance of the roads or the rain, and I spent a wet weekend
cooped up in a cabin in their Jungle Lore <http://www.pangot.com> lodge
without much electricity; the power was out, and soon the generator conked
out too.
In all that rain and wind, the birds hid from view. But they couldn't hold
back their song. As I walked through the forest during an early morning dry
spell, they sang and sang, like a choir performing for a blind woman in the
mist. My guide could identify each bird by its call. A pair of rufous sibias
screeched at each other from across the trees. A gray-headed
canary-flycatcher trilled. White-throated laughingthrush giggled like
schoolgirls. "Birdsongs," says the blind narrator of "To the Wedding," a
novel by John Berger, "remind me of what things once looked like."
The wind shook the rain off the trees. Two men, their bald pates shining,
walked slowly up the gravel road, hands clasped behind their backs. The
smoke of cooking fires rose up through the dark, damp forest. This is one of
the great rewards of birding: In searching for birds, you end up hearing,
seeing, smelling a great deal more.
In pursuit of a less rustic sensory feast, I went this winter to a luxury
camp, Chhatra Sagar Nimaj, <http://www.chhatrasagar.com> erected on the
banks of a dam in parched western Rajasthan. I woke up before sunrise to the
twitter - "see here, see here" - of a small, reclusive gray francolin. Mist
hung above the water as I stepped out of my tent. Terns dived in for fish. A
cormorant sat on the steps of the dam, jerking its neck forward and back, as
if peering into the future, and then nervously turning right back to the
past - or, more likely, just hunting for fish.
Even if not a storied birding destination, Chhatra Sagar can be a lavish one
for the senses. A hundred years ago, a local Rajput noble known as Thakur
Chhatra Singh dammed a stream that ran through his fields to store
Rajasthan's most precious resource: water. Ten years ago, his descendants
cleverly leveraged it to draw tourists.
The reservoir, full this year, thanks to good rains, is the centerpiece of
the resort. Thirteen spacious tents face the water, including two that sit
on a nearby hill.
On a guided walk along a dirt trail that encircles the reservoir, I could
see through my binoculars a flock of bar-headed geese pecking at the grass
on the far edge of the water. An antelope, known in Hindi as nilgai, ambled
ahead of us on the path; it had lost one of its horns, presumably in a
neelgai version of a barroom brawl. At night, from my tent, I heard jackals.
At sundown, a full bar was laid out under the stars. An inventive kitchen
created a meal for a spice-averse Western palate: peas dipped in coriander
pesto and a local delicacy of smoked, lightly curried lentil cakes. The
spacious tents were equipped with space heaters, often fired by a generator,
I later learned, because the electricity supply here, as in much of rural
India, remains erratic.
Guests are served bottled water, a common amenity in luxury hotels in India,
but excessive, it seemed to me, in a place where locals use and re-use
everything nature gives them. (Properly filtered water is safe to drink
across India.) And the service was characterized by too much ritual
servility for my liking. Waiters bowed, holding trays laden with juice and
rose petals, and a porter was deployed to haul a scope and guidebook during
our walk, along with bottled water.
Western Ghats: Goa and Kerala
The Western Ghats is a mountain chain that runs nearly 1,000 miles parallel
to the Arabian Sea, from just above Mumbai to the tip of the Indian
peninsula. It contains craggy hills, tropical evergreens and several rivers
that pour down into peninsular India. So rich is its variety of birds,
snakes, frogs and butterflies that the Western Ghats is considered a global
biodiversity hot spot in urgent need of conservation. Mining poses the
greatest threat.
"You pick any spot in the Western Ghats," said Rajah Jayapal, an
ornithologist with the Wildlife Conservation
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/wildlif
e_conservation_society/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Society in India, "and
you will see no less than 300 species."
The Western Ghats also run through two of India's most popular tourist
destinations: Goa and Kerala.
Goa is a treasure trove of birds. There are shorebirds, forest birds, birds
that forage in the mud flats along the Zuari River, great raptors that hover
over paddy fields. I have spent entire mornings in a friend's garden doing
nothing but listening to bird songs: orioles, coppersmith barbets, Malabar
trogons.
But the richer bird habitat in the Western Ghats lies in Kerala. Like the
Kumaon range, it offers a variety of landscapes. You can fly into the spice
coast port city of Cochin, drive past paddy fields and within two hours
reach a low-altitude deciduous forest. After a day or two here, you can take
a narrow, winding highway to highland cloud forests near Munnar. Then, a
half-day's drive east and you're in the Indira Gandhi National Park in the
Annamalai Hills, with its tropical wet evergreens that shelter the great
hornbill.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I went with friends to the edges of the
Thattekkad Bird Sanctuary, a mosaic of 11 habitats packed into about 50
square miles about a two-hour drive from Cochin. Salim Ali, India's most
famous ornithologist, identified Thattekkad as having one of the richest
concentrations of bird diversity in the country. But alas. The sanctuary was
closed when I went - a fact disclosed by the tour operator, Kalypso
Adventures, only after I had already reached its camp.
At the Hornbill Camp <http://www.thehornbillcamp.com> on the banks of the
Periyar River, the tents were clean and comfortable, with a pair of lounge
chairs on the porch, facing the river. Unwittingly, our visit coincided with
one of Kerala's most important Hindu pilgrimage seasons. So, at 5 a.m., I
was jarred awake not by songbirds but by Hindu hymns blasting from
loudspeakers at a nearby temple.
The clouds hung low as we drove uphill into the forest that morning. We
parked and walked, following the droppings of elephants that must have
passed by earlier that morning. A pair of white-bellied treepies flew ahead.
The Malabar parakeets - smaller and screechier than their cousins in Delhi -
flitted through the forest. We watched three hill mynahs fly overhead when
we heard the long, lilting song of the Malabar whistling thrush. We found
the thrush, nearly as black as a crow, with a streak of blue across its
head, sitting in a tree, just below a woodpecker. Our guide, Jijo Mathew,
reckoned the thrush was happy to be singing like this. I couldn't argue. So
was I.
Late in the day, as darkness crept over a grove of ailanthus, Mr. Mathew
extracted an MP4 player from his backpack, hooked it up to a small, plastic
Radio Shack speaker and played an unusual track: the territorial call of a
jungle owlet, going "kook, kook," like a terrified kitten, drowning the
silence of the forest.
The trick worked. Being territorial creatures, an owlet is irked by another
owlet in its lair. And so, just as Mr. Mathew had intended, the recorded
call prompted a real jungle owlet - indeed barely bigger than a kitten, with
big curious owl eyes - to reveal itself. It fluttered in the trees. Then it
came and sat on a branch right in front of us. Owlet stared long and hard.
We stared long and hard back.
The forest soon grew dark. Owlet disappeared from view. Mr. Mathew dug into
his bag of tricks and pulled out a flashlight. He shone the light across the
forest, searching for small, bright eyes in the dark.
PLANNING
A word to the birder
<http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/birds/overview.html?inline=nyt-clas
sifier> going to India: First, ask your tour agency or lodge operator about
weather, road conditions, park closures and rain. If you're visiting a body
of water and there hasn't been enough rain that year, water birds are
unlikely to come. Second, do not assume that India's ecological treasures
are always well cared for. After I tried to visit Thettakkad and found it
closed, I read in a newspaper that a local citizens' group had sued the
owners of a stone quarry for blasting near the sanctuary.
For the North Indian destinations, fly to New Delhi; there are many
international flights daily. For the Western Ghats, Mumbai and Bangalore are
the closest international airports; from those cities, take local flights or
trains.
WHERE TO STAY
If you go to Corbett, there are a number of inns and cottages on the
periphery of the park, including Camp Corbett
(cornwall-online.co.uk/camp-corbett; cottages are $68 a person a night,
double occupancy), run by Siddharth Anand. His guides can take you birding
into Corbett and up to the Kumaon hills.
In Pangot, Mr. Anand runs a lodge called Mountain Quail
(blazeatrailadventures.com; 2,400 rupees, or about $54 at 44.8 rupees to the
dollar, for two). Its wood-paneled cottages are inviting, and the large
windows of the dining room overlook a wide expanse of the Himalayas.
At Jungle Lore (pangot.com) two nights, with meals and birding guide, came
to just under 16,000 rupees. I was first offered a cottage next to a
neighbor's barn. The aroma of cow dung was a little too overpowering for me.
I asked to be moved. Corbett and Pangot are accessible by train
<https://www.irctc.co.in/> (rctc.co.in).
In Goa, avoid the beach resorts and stay in a village inland; try to take a
boat ride on the Zuari River. If you go to Munnar and Top Slip, there are a
number of home stays, particularly in old plantation houses, listed in
guidebooks and specialized Web sites like homestayskerala.com.
Chhatra Sagar Nimaj (chhatrasagar.com; double rooms 19,800 rupees, including
meals and tours) is a two-hour drive from the medieval fort city of Jodhpur,
one of a handful of luxury resorts in Rajasthan that offers tourists a
respite from the frenzy of India's human habitats.
To go birding usually means dawdling for hours at your lodge or camp, which
for me means that the food had better be good. At Hornbill Camp
(thehornbillcamp.com; 5,000 rupees for two) in Kerala, the meals were among
the highlights - fresh, local fare like vegetable avial, simmered in coconut
milk, spice-rubbed fish, sweet buttery halvah for dessert.
Birding lodges should have proper coffee, since birding demands early
morning wake-ups. I have been uniformly disappointed. If you care for good
coffee, carry your own.
WHAT TO READ
Salim Ali's autobiography, "Fall of a Sparrow," offers a window into the
making of an unlikely early Indian naturalist. For visitors to Kumaon,
"Man-Eaters of Kumaon" is an old-fashioned, though amusing chronicle of how
Jim Corbett went from being a hunter to a conservationist. I find the Oxford
"Pocket Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent" easy to use.
Somini Sengupta is a former bureau chief in India for The New York Times.
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