Back to life

The decade-long drought in Bharatpur&rsquos Keoladeo Ghana National Park is over. In December last year, the central government completed the construction of the Chambal canal across ninety miles of difficult terrain to revive the marshes of this world-famous bird sanctuary, long known for being the last approachable habitat of the nearly extinct Siberian crane.

Last year, however, its life-giving waters reached the sanctuary a shade too late. More than two-and-a-half centuries ago, Maharaja Suraj Mal Jat sealed off a bowl of low-lying land near his capital into which three small streams flowed, to create a marsh that became a perennial source of water for his largely nomadic, cattle-herding subjects. Since then the marshes had been receiving their annual recharge of water in July upon the onset of the south-west monsoon. It, therefore, became a favourite breeding ground for every species of stork, egret and other birds, whose breeding season coincides with the late Indian summer.

Then, in 1982, the Rajasthan government built a dam across the rivulets to supply water to farmers in northern Rajasthan &mdash and the assured supply of water to the sanctuary vanished. For the next two decades, Bharatpur received a small amount of water in July through an agreement between the central and the state governments, and some more in good-monsoon years in August. This sufficed to meet the needs of the wetlands in three out of every four years. So the sanctuary continued to live, albeit on short and uncertain rations, throughout the eighties and the nineties.

But at the end of the nineties the Rajasthan government decided to raise the height of the dam by another three metres, and the supply of water to Bharatpur stopped. After 2002, Bharatpur received its full quota of water in only one year of superabundant rainfall. Over the years the once-lush marshes gave place to grasslands. Chital, sambhar, nilgai, jackals and jungle cats multiplied. Bharatpur even acquired a male tiger which had trekked across a hundred kilometres of enemy terrain in search of sanctuary and an assured prey base after being forced out of Rantham-bhore. But the teeming thousands of ducks, geese, migrant storks, cranes and pelicans that had fired the hunting instincts of three generations of maharajas, governors and viceroys of the British Raj and the imagination of tens of thousands of bird lovers and ornithologists in a later age, gradually faded into memory.

Last year, when the painted storks, with their Jackson Pollock rear ends, arrived in August, there was virtually no water in sight. They waited around the Keoladeo temple, which marks the centre of the wetlands, for a week &mdash even two &mdash and then flew on. Many of the ducks that began to arrive in November did the same. But the sanctuary did spring back to a sort of life. &ldquoWe did not have the painted storks, but we did have a lot of ducks,&rdquo a cycle-rickshaw owner, who knew the location of every resident bird on the four-kilometre road to the Keoladeo temple, told me. &ldquoThis year there will be many more.&rdquo

This year the Chambal dam authorities released the canal waters promptly in July. But in one of its quirks of humour, nature unleashed a deluge on Rajasthan in late August. As a result the Karoli dam also had to open its sluice gates. Bharatpur has, therefore, gone from drought to something embarrassingly like a flood within a single year.  The change is visible within minutes of crossing the barrier that divides the core from the buffer area of the sanctuary. Giant trees that provided shade and a welcome relief from the sun's glare now stand once again in large pools of water, their intertwining branches and the dead branches of their ancestors creating enticing patterns against the sky and the water underneath.

As in the old days, the wetlands once again begin where the trees end. But to me, haunted by thirty years of memories of Bharatpur in its prime, they seemed curiously empty. &ldquoIt is because the water is too deep,&rdquo my omniscient rickshaw-man told me. &ldquoMost of the storks, herons and other wading birds have gone to the edges of the marsh or to drier lands outside it, because they cannot find their prey in the deep water. But they will come back as the water level recedes,&rdquo he said with the complacency born of experience. "Come back in January and remember that my name is... and my rickshaw number is...&rdquo

It was not only the storks that were missing. I saw only one pair of white-necked storks in my two days there, relatively few ibis and not a single black-necked stork. There were no chital on the islands in the marshes as there used to be, and only one small family of sambhar whom I heard deep in a thicket on an island, but did not see. They too had been driven along with all the nilgai, the jackals and even the pythons into the large drylands beyond the Keoladeo temple.

But I could see why my sardar rickshaw-man was so confident. From the temple there stretched unbroken expanses of water, with grass and weeds poking their heads out, in all directions as far as the eye could see. And the painted storks, surely one of the most extravagant of God's creations, were back. From a kilometre away, as I cycle-rickshawed up the central bund, I could hear once more the incessant, angry chirruping of hundreds of babies and immature adults demanding food from their mothers. It was the ugliest, and yet one of the most beautiful, sounds I had ever heard. Soon the ducks and geese will arrive, and this year they will not shun the vast acres of wetland with their luscious shoots of grass and their abundant supply of small fish. The rickshaw-man is right. I will go back in January.