Quote:
The Keoladeo National Park or Keoladeo Ghana National Park formerly known as the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, India is a famous avifauna sanctuary that plays host to thousands of birds especially during the winter season. Over 230 species of birds are known to have made the National Park their home. It is also a major tourist centre with scores of ornithologists arriving here in the hibernal season. It was declared a protected sanctuary in 1971. It is also a declared World Heritage Site.
The sanctuary was created 250 years ago and is named after a Keoladeo (Shiva) temple within its boundaries. Initially, it was a natural depression; and was flooded after the Ajan Bund was constructed by Maharaja Suraj Mal, the then ruler of the princely state of Bharatpur, between 1726–1763. The bund was created at the confluence of two rivers, the Gambhir and Banganga. The park was a hunting ground for the maharajas of Bharatpur.
The park was established as a national park on 10 March 1982. Previously the private duck shooting preserve of the Maharaja of Bharatpur since the 1850s, the area was designated as a bird sanctuary on 13 March 1956 and a Ramsar site under the Wetland Convention in October 1981. The last big shoot was held in 1964 but the Maharajah retained shooting rights until 1972.
In 1985, the Park was declared a World Heritage Site under the world Heritage Convention. It is a reserve forest under the Rajasthan Forest Act, 1953 and therefore, is the property of the State of Rajasthan of the Indian Union.
source - wikipedia Keoladeo National Park - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
Since the time I got serious about photography and wildlife photography in particular I have always been on the lookout for heading towards national parks and sanctuaries at every given opportunity.
Usually, it is a trip to Sariska during the weekend. However, since the park re-opened after rains in Oct there is a lot of "development" work ongoing in the park making wildlife viewing difficult and specially scaring the tigers away from the tourist zones. My last and only viewing of tigers in Sariska was before the rains last year.
Also - i have found myself getting fascinated by birds - they are colorful and they make good and interesting subjects. I often visit Sultanpur bird sanctuary for a shot at capturing some interesting birds through my lens. However, with the migratory season getting over my trips to Sultanpur also got less frequent.
I have been to Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in the winter of 2004 and had enjoyed the trip, however in recent years due to draught, the water had dried out and the park no longer enjoyed migratory birds and hence i had not thought about going there again. This changed when Amol (amolpol) put up his wonderful thread on his trip to Bharatpur and I now started thnking of doing a quick day trip to Bharatpur since the migratory season was over now.
Another reason for the trip came along when i bought my new MMI navigator - wanted to put it to use
Last weekend was a long weekend for my son as his schools were closed and i was thinking of doing a trip during this weekend. After much delibration with my better half - it was decided that we will do a day trip to Bharatpur on Sunday.
My wife had gone to her parent's on Thursday and I reached there Saturday night for a early Sunday morning start to Bharatpur.
Now, I was of the opinion that Bharatpur is some 120 ~ 150 odd kms from Delhi and hence it would be a 2 hrs (max) drive. But shocker of shockers - on plotting the route in MMI - it showed - 197kms and 4 hrs duration
Now - this got a little serious, doing 400 kms in a day and also going in the jungle in between is no joke and add a little 5 yrs bundle of joy to it - makes things all the more tiring. So we again went back to drawing board - where to go??
But finally after much delibration - we decided to stick to the plan and go to Bharatpur.
With this - nights out at 10.30 with alarm set to 3.30 am for an early start.
At 3.30 am with the alarm going off, usual struggle to get out of bed and get ready - and we finally were out by 4.45 am (instead of targetted 4.00 am).
With MMI guiding - we were off.
Route taken -
Indirapuram - DND - Ashram - Mathura road - Faridabad - NH2 - Palwal - MAthura bypass - Bharatpur.
Toll paid - 22 (DND) + 35 + 50 on NH2 both to and fro.
Even at this time - there was quite some traffic on the roads, where i had expected totally empty roads. However, the roads were good and we made good time.
But when we turned off NH2 for Bharatpur, the road turned bad and stayed this way till the sanctuary. I made the mistake of setting the destination to Bharatpur, instead of the the sanctuary and MMI took us in the town. Finally, we reached the sanctuary at around 8 am.
Reaching the sanctuary gates - i was amazed to see that it is abutting the busy Agra-Jaipur highway! I definitely did not remember this from my previous visit to the park in 2004.
Got in and got tickets for us (we were 3 adults and 1 child) - which comes to 150 for park entry (50 per head) and then 100/- for taking the vehicle till vehicle parking, 1.5 kms inside.
At the gate - there was the usual haggling with rickshaw's and guide, etc. Asked about captaan (the guide mentioned by Amol) and they all gave me curious looks and mentioned that he is not there and his license got cancelled.
Anyways - took a guide, he hopped in and we were off inside the park.
The migratory season was almost over - but there are still some later migratory birds in the park and our trip started off with a sighting of flameback woodpecker.
Up next - pictures from the trip.
to be contd...