It was 8 in the morning. We'd woken up at 4:45 and driven over a hundred kilometres to Bhigwan. We waited a long while for our boat, and as we waited, we looked at terns, gulls, storks and stilts around us. And then, eventually, we boarded a boat and made our way across the waters towards the flamingoes.As we sat there, watching geese and ibises, I looked at the water around me and thought about what draws me to Bhigwan year after year. Why do I wake up in the pre-dawn hours and travel before light to a place two hours away?(Incidentally, when we went this time, my great-aunt had an interesting question, "Do flamingoes stink?" That was one of the questions I pondered as I sat and gazed at the pink-legged flamingoes in the distance. I still cannot answer that.)I looked at the painted storks, which look like old men walking with their hands behind their backs.I gurgled with … [Read more...]
Bhigwan
My European travelogue has to wait; I went to Bhigwan yesterday.A journey of two hours brought us to Bhigwan, which has a lake that is roughly east-south-east of Pune. Flamingos, they say, come to Bhigwan, and stay there till the end of February.We left home at 5 in the morning, but by the time we got on to the boat at Bhigwan, the sun was well up in the sky, and we knew that we would see nothing. Birds, we know, come out only early in the morning, before it gets hot.How wrong we were! Flamingos, spoonbills, open-billed storks, bar-headed geese, cormorants, gulls, glossy ibises, black-headed ibises, terns, grey herons, egrets, kingfishers ... We saw them all. My eyes darted from one to another, noticing details of each bird because we saw so many of them. We saw enough birds up close, right there, flying above our boat. We heard their calls and saw them hovering over the … [Read more...]