finally getting round to writing up my recent trip to India. The tour was organised and led by my good friend Jo Thomas who runs Wild About India, a company specialising in tailormade tours to India (www.wildaboutindia.com). The group comprised, Jo, her 8 yr old twin daughters Emily and Becky, her parents, Sheila and Barry, fellow BFer Richard, some keen photographers, Gordon, Martin, Dave and Claire, another lady called Isobel, my friend Fran and of course myself. Joining us for the duration of the trip was Ranno, who owns Hotel Sunbird in Bharatpur.
Day 1
We arrived into Delhi just before lunchtime on the 11th Feb after our direct Virgin atlantic flight from Heathrow. I won't go into too much detail but suffice to say I was shocked by the poor service on the flight and would certainly not reccommed Virgin for this route (we went with BA last time and that was much better).
We had hoped to reach Bharatpur by late afternoon but, due to terrible traffic in Delhi we did not arrive until around 7PM that evening after a nice meal and some time getting aquainted we headed to bed for an early start the next morning. I would say in hindsiht that it is definitely better to arrive into Delhi on an early morning flight and escape the city as soon as possible. On our last visit we got in at 0520 and that allowed us to reach Hotel Sunbird in time for lunch and so gave us the afternoon to explore Bharatpur. On this trip we had two full days at Bharatpur so the lack of birding on our first day was not really a problem in any case.
I didn't bother with a bird list for this first day, given we were in transit but we did see several common species such as bank and common mynahs, black kite, black drongo, white throated kingfisher etc.
Day 2 Bharatpur
Last time I visited the park in November 2007 it was a real disappointment as it was completely dry. This time I am delighted to report that it was almost back to its former glory of the mid 1990's
(minus the vultures of course!
).There was plenty of water this time and plenty of birds to keep all the photographers interested. Rather than write an exhaustive list (I'll leave that to the end) I'll just show you some photos:
From left to right, collared scops owls, Brahminy starling, pond heron, little cormorant, five striped bush squirrel.