Keoladeo National Park, better known as Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, has the distinction of being a World Heritage Site. This small Park with an area of 29 square kilometers consists of extensive marshes and scrubland. It is considered the best waterfowl sanctuary in the world.
It is not that there is a lack of other suitable areas in the Park, but the nests are protected in this way. Even large reports resist raiding a nest because of the racket raised in unison by the alarmed birds.
During the monsoons thousands of egrets, herons, storks, cormorants, darters, spoonbills and ibises breed here, forming a congested heronry. Small acacia trees are tightly packed together with nests of several species
Migratory waterfowl start arriving in October. Soon the marshes are packed with colorful geese, ducks, cranes, pelicans and flamingos. But the limelight focused on the Siberian crane-one of the most threatened species in the world.
In India, Keoladeo is the only place where these cranes winter. Regrettably the number of Siberian cranes arriving here has been declining due to suspected hunting on their migratory route. Last year only 5 of them visited the Park, and at the time of writing in mid-November, none had visited Bharatpur.
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Winter sees predatory birds-the fishing cat which specializes in scooping ducks off the lake. The scrubland abounds in sambar, spotted deer, black buck, blue bull, wild boar, jackal and jungle cat. Pythons bask in the sun around their several known burrows.
It would be remiss not to inform readers about the interesting background of the park. Bharatpur was a small princely state, with no forests worth the name. While many States boasted of grand hunting preserves, the then Maharaja of Bharatpur, in the late 19th century, created a wonderful water-bird sanctuary by converting the arid scrub land into marshes by a system of small dams and dykes. In time, this marshland became the duck shooting preserve of the erstwhile Bharatpur state. Today it is unmatched in India.
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