Birding with Ram Gopalakrishnan: Little Rann of Kutch: Take a ride on the wild side

I gulped in the clear and cold desert air and couldn't help marveling at the amazing convenience of modern travel. At 5 am, I was breathing the humid Chennai air and here I was five hours later in the middle of Kutch: a direct flight to Ahmedabad and a 2 hour drive from the airport was all it took.

The iconic resident

The Wild Ass Sanctuary on the Little Rann would be our destination for the next three days, a desert habitat named after its iconic resident. I'm all for icons‎: just as Kaziranga has its rhinos and Gir its lions as the flagship species found there and nowhere else, having a large mammal as an emblem can help conserve the habitat and its lesser denizens effectively as politicians and tourists understand large animals much better than small birds. This former sea bed was part of the Gulf of Kutch a few hundred years ago, but is now a dry salty plain for most of the year, filling in during monsoons and home to numerous species including flamingoes that breed here. The area has numerous shallow water bodies that attract a number of migratory ducks and waders, Kutch being bang in the middle of their migratory flight to southern latitudes.

More than just dotted lines

Most maps just show the Rann as dotted lines over a large area: a tantalising invitation to explore it. We set up camp at Bhajana, a village on the fringe‎ of the Rann and spent the first couple of days on the edges of the sanctuary, scouring the numerous water bodies. Everything is grey: the sand, the birds and the mammals which are all accordingly camouflaged. Common cranes and wild asses were everywhere. An auspicious start was provided by a sighting of a magnificent short-eared owl on the ground under a bush: some superstitious people actually consider an owl sighting inauspicious! A Sykes's nightjar whose location was jealously protected by our local guide was the second lifer to follow, impossibly camouflaged despite its large size. In fact our guide deliberately drove away when another group approached, and came back later so as to protect "our" bird's location!

Duck diary

A single lake revealed numerous species: common teal, Northern shoveller, tufted duck, gadwall, Northern pintail and ruddy shelduck. ‎We learnt how upending ducks feeds on vegetation just underwater while diving ducks go much deeper in search of fish.

Hyena hideout

We visited a hyena den, a unique crossword of tunnels under an elevated mound flanked by telltale signs of recent meals: a skull of a nilgai, skin of a dog and numerous bones. Though there were fresh drag marks, the hyenas were either away or underground. We contented ourselves later with a sighting of two Indian foxes as they scampered away on seeing our vehicles.

Pink islands on a sea of gold

Sunset over a lake on the Rann was the stuff of fairy tales: as the sun went down in a giant orange ball, turning the water to gold, the flamingos formed a linear island‎ of pink on the right. And not just flamingos: pelicans, black winged stilts, egrets, spoonbills and ducks all were there. Harriers, raptors that quarter their prey, roosted nearby: we were told the differences between male and female, and between the pallid, the Marsh and Montagu's harriers. An enormous flock of greylag geese kept their distance when we attempted to get closer to photograph them. Watching the sun go down with the only background sound being the faint clucking of the birds was a sight to die for: pity we couldn't line the flamingos up with the setting sun to get the photo of a lifetime!

Sir, a malkoha lifer!

The sirkeer malkoha was our first sighing on day two. It patiently waited for us gleeful photographers to finish clicking. Shortly afterwards, a bluethroat posed nearby for close ups of its blue throat, allowing us to really enjoy the breakfast shortly afterwards. Wheatear class followed: the desert, variable and Isabelline species all having a wheat colored spot near their ear. The greater short-toed larks glittered in the sun in groups of 20-30 as they banked at great speed, while the crested lark and ashy crowned sparrow-lark allowed close up pbotos.

The end of the road‎ and the middle of nowhere

We started off in early morning on the final day and headed deep into the Rann. At one point the ‎tar road literally ends: after that it's just one vast cracked salt pan, an off-roader's paradise. As our vehicles zoomed across the open landscape into the middle of nowhere, we wondered how the drivers knew where they were going and more importantly, how they were going to find their way back. There's a real thrill in this for city slickers like us: no traffic, no road, no rules, no speed limit and certainly nobody honking. Not that we got too much time to think, the wind chill literally driving the bitter desert cold into our bones. Even taking a hand out of a glove to check the bird book was a mistake! As our driver flattened the accelerator on the Rann with nothing but sand on all sides, the experience was exhilarating, but you have to be careful. In our eagerness to get to an abandoned flamingo nesting colony, we found our vehicle suddenly immobile: the mud had become too wet. We wished for a moment we were in a four wheel drive Gypsy, but a brief push helped us retrace our tracks to firmer ground.

Darshan of a cryptic inhabitant

So engrossed were we in ‎this amazing habitat, that it was something of a surprise when we stopped at a temple courtyard right in the middle of the Rann. While pilgrims thronged the temple, we scouted around in the trees in the compound for our own darshan. After much searching, our guide triumphantly found it: the Pallid Scops owl, a little sleeping beauty that lazily half opened one eye at the gaggle of photographers below. The curious pilgrims soon came over for this 'side darshan'. To each, his or her own God!

Rustling up raptors

Raptors were found roosting on the ground, in the few bushes that were there ‎and of course soaring overhead. The booted and tawny eagle, the griffon vulture, the peregrine falcon and the common kestrel were all ticked off. While reasonable to identify on the ground, flying raptor identification remains a blind spot, however much the differences between these in was drilled into me: need a raptor class one day. Of course sorting out the tiny warbler species is out of the question: that class will take even longer to materialise!

All is not well even in this desert paradise

The usual culprits were all there: creeping human habitations thanks to population pressure and sturdier vehicles, salt production in the Rann, temple tourism and of course Prosopis julliflora, the invasive alien weed which dominates much of the landscape wiping out endemic species. However a more modern issue is water from the Narmada which is now used to irrigate much of the area surrounding the Rann, and which threatens to permanently alter the unique dry habitat.

We did miss out on a few endemics found in few other places: the Macqueens bustard, the greater hoopoe lark and the Indian courser.‎ Can't be greedy, I guess.Our perambulations on the Rann had pushed us dangerously beyond our scheduled departure time, and we barely made our flight after a frenzied dash to the airport!