Keoladeo
Ghana' name signifies the location of the temple
of Lord Shiva (Keoladeo) in the centre of the
Bharatpur
National Park and dense (ghana) forest covering the
area. It's a soggy green paradise, an ideal home for a large
variety of birds. Scores of migratory species undertake a
perilous journey over the Himalayas to make a seasonal home
in this wetland ecosystem, the most famous of them being the
magnificent but nearly extinct Siberian crane (Grus leucogeranus).
This interlocking ecosystem of woodlands, swamps, wet prairies
and dry Savannah is considered to be one of the world's richest
heronries, where thousands of birds get busy courting, mating
and nesting.
The
Bharatpur Birds Sanctuary was initially created
by Maharaja Suraj Mal, because he had some great ideas - not
of conservation, but of the possibility of a constant supply
of waterfowl for the royal dining table. At that time, it
used to be a scrubby depression of land, seasonally enlivened
by ephemeral ponds of water following the monsoons. These
ponds attracted some unsuspecting migratory ducks and geese
in the winter months, and so Suraj Mal decided to turn it
into a permanent reservoir, the Arjun Bund. And soon,
Bharatpur
National Park became one of India's most productive
hunting reserves. So much so that the British officials used
to vie for invitations!
The
16 square miles of marsh known as the Ghana jheel (ghana means
dense, and jheel lake) hosted such grand duck shoots that
no serious sportsman could afford to miss it. Colonel Sawai
Brijendra Singh, a later maharaja of Bharatpur, explains:
"The jheel had islands to which I constructed little roads
that were wide enough for cars to take VIPs out to their butts.
Each duck shoot took months to arrange and to see that VIPs
were not given bad
butts was like making the seating arrangement
for a dinner party. At the last moment someone would say,
"Sorry, I can't come", and you then had to go through the
list seeing who should go into a VIP butt and who could have
his place." Yet when it came to the largest bags, even Bharatpur
had to give way to the imperial sandgrouse shoots at
Bikaner.
Once the royal hunting preserve of the princes of Bharatpur, this 29 kms park is one of the finest bird sanctuaries in the world, inundated with 400 species of water birds. Exotic migratory birds from Afghanistan, Central Asia, Tibet as well as Siberian cranes from Arctic, graylag geese from Siberia and bar headed geese from China. Colonies of cormorants, spoon bills, storks, egrets, herons, pelicans, ebis and grey herons can be spotted all over the park.
Highlights of The Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary Tour : Birds Watching, Temple of Lord Shiva (Keoladeo), Dense (ghana)
forest, Ghana jheel.
