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TANGENTS

Birding in Haryana

BY IHTISHAM KABIR
Last month, I travelled west of Kolkata in India for the first time, arriving at Gurgaon, Haryana, for a wedding. I found some time to go bird-watching.
I first tried the Sultanpur Bird Sanctuary, about an hour from Gurgaon. Leaving the hotel at dawn, I arrived promptly at opening time only to find it closed. Due to reasons of bird flu, the authorities had decided to shut the Sanctuary to visitors for the week.
So here is the difference between visiting a museum and visiting a bird sanctuary. If the museum is closed, you are done. But sanctuary or not, birds are virtually everywhere, and so, undaunted, 1 decided to explore on my own and walked through several nearby villages which were surrounded by agricultural land. In the front yard of many farmhouses elderly people sat on rugs enjoying the morning sun while smoking a hookah. Children chirped on their way to school and farmers headed for the fields.
The main crops were mustard and wheat. The ground was dry and cisterns held water used for irrigation. The mustard fields were much less densely planted than they are in Bangladesh.
Among the birds in the fields were stonechats, prinias and black kites, similar to what 1 see in our mustard fields. However, behind the Sanctuary I saw three peacocks - gorgeous creatures that ran off as soon as they saw me.
The next morning I hired a birding guide. We first went to a pond about five kilometres from the Sanctuary. Ducks (teals, shovellers), black-winged stilts, a purple heron and whitebreasted waterhens played there. The ducks were quick to fly off. The stilts were, however, friendly.
We then took a long walk through the fields, spotting a rich assortment of
birds along the way. Grey-backed shrikes were abundant. New to me were the desert wheatear, pied bushchat and Indian robin. My guide had promised to show me short-eared owls at the end of our three kilometre walk. The owls lived in a group of trees set in the middle of a mustard field, but today they were missing.
My disappointment turned to delight when, walking back, we encountered a herd of nilgai. These are a type of antelope, but the male looks like a blue-black cow. The female looks like a deer. The herd with one male and several females and calves was basking in the sun. 1 approached them gently but they still ran off, females and children in a rush, male at a more leisurely pace.
We also visited wetlands in Basai. Gurgaon is developing rapidly and this area was no exception. Large machines dug out the earth everywhere. Wide highways, some half-finished, crisscrossed the land which was dotted with high-rise apartment buildings. Yet, miraculously, there was enough of nature left for numerous birds.
Among the reeds, I saw warblers, shrikes and a shikra. Down the road stood two woolly-necked storks standing on a pile of dug-up earth. At the edge of a pond, a mixed flock of ibises and painted storks fished in shallow water. From a lake further afield, a large flock of gadwall ducks rose and flew in circles. Saurus cranes, I was told, were common, but today they eluded us.
It was beautiful to see the birds in this friendly land. But I felt heartache too, because many of the birds here -painted storks, peacocks, Saurus cranes - were once found in Bangladesh. Nevertheless it was a marvellous trip and I hope to return soon.
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