Death of a sanctuary

If you are sitting in wintry London or New York and planning to visit India the chances are that you will visit Delhi, and having got there, visit Agra, the Taj and Fatehpur Sikri. If you are not a run-of-the-mill tourist, you may go 18 kilometres further and spend a day in Bharatpur. Or if you are a dedicated birdwatcher, you may spend a week. For the Keoladeo Ghana Bird Sanctuary is &ldquoone of the finest bird parks in the world, a reserve that offers protection to faunal species as well. [Apart from] nesting indigenous water birds as well as migratory water birds and waterside birds, this sanctuary is also inhabited by sambar, chital, nilgai and boar. More than 300 species of birds are found in this small wildlife park of 29 sq km of which 11 sq km are marshes and the rest scrubland and grassland.&rdquo

So says the official guide. Birdwatchers like David Behrens are even more enthusiastic &ldquoImagine a park with thousands upon thousands of birds,&rdquo writes Behrens after his first visit in 2001. &ldquoEverywhere you look there are ducks, geese, cranes, herons, pelicans, kingfishers, egrets, cormorants, kites, eagles, hawks, falcons, vultures, owls, hoopoes, drongos, mynas and robins&mdashwith brief noisy interruptions by the coming and going of the &lsquoseven sisters&rsquo&mdashjungle babblers. This is not a silent park. Imagine parakeets as common as sparrows dawn that starts with the piercing trumpeting of Sarus Cranes and evenings announced with the mocking howls of jackals and deep raspy hoots of the Dusky Eagle Owl calling to its mate. Chitals abound with stately racks Sambar bucks are seen sparring in jest and the large ungainly Nilgai with their funny black and white socks are seen grazing among the cranes. That was my introduction to Keoladeo Ghana National Park&mdasha park that ranks as one of the best waterfowl preserves in the world and [is] also known for its wintering of the rare and endangered Siberian Crane.&rdquo

Web listings like these keep bringing thousands of Indian and foreign nature lovers to Bharatpur year after year. There is only one problem. There are no birds. There are no marshes. And now, most of the trees in the drylands are gone. The sanctuary is dead. All that&rsquos left is an elaborate fiction &mdash the grin of the Cheshire cat that lingers on after it has vanished.

Tourists who ask what happened to the marshes are told by their guides and rickshaw peddlers that the rains were poor this year so the marshes received very little water, which soon dried up. The unspoken implication is that things will be normal if they come another year. This allows the tourism industry and the Indian government to keep their websites unchanged and the travel agents happy but is a blatant lie. For the marshes are not created by the monsoon, and do not depend upon them for water. And in 2009 Bharatpur had been dry for not one but seven years.

The Bharatpur wetlands were created circa 1750, by Raja Surajmal Jat, the warlike founder of the Bharatpur kingdom who built a dam, the Ajan Bund, at the confluence of two local rivers, the Banganga and the Gambhir. So long as the state was ruled by the maharaja nothing impeded the annual flow of water into Bharatpur during the monsoon. But sometime in the 1970s the Rajasthan government built small dams on both rivers for irrigation. This pitted the sanctuary against the farmers and put a question mark over the future of the sanctuary.

The scales got further loaded against the sanctuary by the fact that agriculture and irrigation come under the Rajasthan government while forests and conservation come under the central government. As a result, from the 1970s the centre has had to ask the Rajasthan government to release water for the sanctuary every July after the monsoon sets in. When the monsoon was poor, or the prospect of rain was uncertain, the park became the first casualty. Despite this, since the monsoon tends to be poor on an average once every four years, and the water was seldom totally denied, the park limped along. The annual visitation of migratory birds slowly shrank, but since no one could estimate how much of this was caused by ecological changes like the increasing use of pesticides, and losses inflicted by hunters during their long flight from Europe, the slow attrition did not catch the eye of the media.

But even the attenuated marshlands and the thinning inflow of migratory birds is now history. The marshes have been dry for the last seven years, because, beginning in 2003, the Rajasthan government ceased to open the sluice gates on the dams in the two rivers in July. The reason is not the monsoon but politics. When the BJP came to power in Rajasthan after a landslide victory in 2003, and the time came for the water to be released in July, the farmers in the irrigated areas went on a fast and said that they would rather die than let the sluice gates be opened. Vasundhara Raje Scindia gave in, and then kept on giving in year after year till the BJP lost the elections in 2008.

So with no water, the park has died. Only ornithologists can explain the full cycle of death, but as an annual visitor to the park since 1982, I have seen its most salient features unveiled by inexorable degrees before me. When there is no water in the marshes in August, the magnificent painted storks with their black wings, white breast, orange beak and a Jackson Pollock splash of radiant pink on the abdomen, which are even more emblematic of Bharatpur than the Siberian crane, do not come to roost. Nor do the open-billed storks, the spoonbills, and several varieties of ibises, for all of them build nests for their eggs only in the branches of trees that stand in pools of water, for this is the only sure way of keeping their chicks safe from snakes and other marauders while they are away foraging for food.

The absence of water has also driven away the grey and purple herons, who, in their statuesque stillness, had replaced the great sarus crane as the sentinels of the Indian paddy fields and marshes, after the latter started to die out because of the effect of pesticides upon their eggs. Needless to say, with no water, snake birds, cormorants, coots, dabchicks, purple moorhens and scores of lesser species whose multitudes I had taken so much for granted 20 years ago that I would have barely spared them a glance, were almost totally absent.

And, of course, the flocks of migratory birds, the teals, pintails, widgeons, gadwalls, red-headed pochards and shovellers, and the rarer mallards are nowhere to be seen.

Till the spring of 2009, the forest, at least, had remained unchanged&mdash29 hectares of dense growths of acacia, prosopis and other varieties that thrive in semi-arid regions. But last month even these were gone. On entering the gates of the sanctuary, I stopped aghast. In place of the canopy of trees that used to limit visibility and tell us that we had at last come to a patch of land that had not been ravaged by man, there was only sun-baked, dust-white land dotted with scrub and punctuated by an occasional tree, under a glaring yellow sky.

&ldquoWhere have all the trees gone&rdquo I asked my guide. &ldquoThey were all cut down about eight or nine months ago,&rdquo he said. &ldquoThey were Prosopis juliflora. It is a thorny, fast growing tree and it was choking the growth of other species. Birds don&rsquot sit on it, and occasionally a doe or a fawn injures itself when it steps on a fallen branch. The forest department took the decision to cut them all down to give other species of flora a chance to grow.&rdquo

&ldquoCould the forest department not have thinned them to create space, or cleared them from another area deep in the sanctuary to test the impact this would have on the growth of other species&rdquo I asked. To this I received no answer.

But I did notice one change that the lack of cover had brought about. Birds were now no longer roosting close to the lone road in the sanctuary. One had to look for them with binoculars in the November haze. Last month I had to scour the tiny ponds close to the road and around the Keoladeo mandir, which had been created by the government&rsquos dozen or so tubewells, to see a single pair of brahminys, a single pair of sarus cranes, half a dozen ibises, a pair of coots and, at last, when I had almost given up hope, a lone duck, sitting so far away that I could not make out anything more than that it was some kind of teal. There were no purple moorhens, no spoonbills, no bronze-winged or pheasant-tailed jacanas. I saw one darter, and lovingly filmed a water hen which seemed to be the only bird that had not rediscovered its fear of man.

In the newly minted grasslands stood trees with old untidy nests &mdash a reminder of the fact that in 2008, the first year after five dry years, when an extraordinary monsoon in Rajasthan brought water back into the marshes, some painted storks had come back to nest in them. But in 2009, once again, there was not a single new nest, and a tomblike silence enveloped a park that used to be raucous with the croaking cries of young storks demanding to be fed. &ldquoThe storks came in August,&rdquo my guide explained, &ldquobut when they saw no water they flew away.&rdquo It was the same story with the ducks and geese. &ldquoLast week we had a flight of bar-headed geese, but they flew around us and continued southwards.&rdquo

All of that tragic afternoon my mind kept going back to the 1980s and &rsquo90s, when I would sit on the Sapan Mori bund and wait for the birds to come down on the water a few yards from me and start feeding as if I did not exist. I remembered bitterly cold early mornings when I would go out on the Ram bund to take a boat into the heart of the sanctuary, to watch the painted storks feed their young, and find myself two metres from a bronze-winged jacana, in the middle of a thousand tufted pochards, or 10 yards from a black-necked stork roosting on an island. I kept remembering being awakened by the hoarse throated cries of sarus cranes&mdashthose life-long lovers&mdashthat patrolled every open field in the sanctuary in pairs, and the way I used to wait, with straining ears, to hear the long, flute-like double whistled call of the Siberian cranes, one of the most beautiful sounds in the world, which I shall never hear again.

For the Siberian cranes are gone. When David Behrens enthused over them, one last pair was all that was left of the 50 or so that used to come in the 1960s and the dozen or more that still made the perilous trip from Siberia in the early 1980s. I saw this pair one last time in December 2002, feeding contentedly in the marshes beyond the temple. Then they came no more. It is believed that on their way back one of them fell prey to a hunter in Afghanistan or Uzbekistan. The other, one presumes, died of grief. Today, however, you can still see them in all their splendour on the Bharatpur website.

Tragically, as Bharatpur has edged closer to death its fame has continued to grow. In 1985, it was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco. In the 1990s it came to be known as the best place to see the Siberian crane. In the last decade, Bharatpur town has flowered. There are luxury hotels set in beautiful, historic gardens. The food has steadily improved both in quality and variety. It is now a marvellous weekend getaway from Delhi. But not for those who wish to see birds