Birding with Ram Gopalakrishnan: Gir: much more than just lions

My daughter has always been fascinated by Gir National Park in Gujarat: she says she wanted to see a lion. I had a sneaking suspicion that it was an opportunity to sample chaas, the local buttermilk which she would down by the jug. Anyway we braved the heat of a May summer and flew to Rajkot, from where a 4 hour drive took us to Sasan the park headquarters, where lay our comfortable and aptly named Gir Birding Lodge.

The word Gir is derived from Girmala which means "continuous hill range", and this undulating area is one reason why it hasn't been brought under the plough like the surrounding plains. This erstwhile hunting preserve of the Nawab of Junagadh now covers some 1415 square km of protected area, and is the last refuge of the Asiatic lion that once roamed over most of Asia Minor and North India. Only 514 remain in the latest census, but that itself is a major achievement, numbers having doubled in the last three decades. Now their range has expanded outside the sanctuary, so much so that you can see lions even on the beach on the coast of Saurashtra. Gujarat has pointed to this success story and prefers not to translocate a few to neighboring Kuno in MP: an epidemic could theoretically decimate the entire contiguous population. Anyway here we were in 40 degree heat, hoping to catch a glimpse of this majestic predator and all the lesser denizens of this dry deciduous forest over the next three days.

Everything in Gir is a light sandy brown in summer. The dry heat shrivels the leaves and coats everything in a fine layer of sand, and the trees, ground and even the lions are all the same colour. So much so, that we found it hard to identify the three Indian thicknees standing at the roadside. Both hunting and escape strategy is largely based on camouflage and it certainly works in this habitat. The mottled wood owl was a lifer for me, and closely resembled the bark of the tree on which it was perched: two more lifers for me were an Indian nightjar and an Indian Scops owl. The striking multi-colored Indian pitta (called nav-rang or nine colored locally) was very active and its calls resounded everywhere: you could deem it the trademark bird of Gir in May. The paradise flycatchers with their long brown streamers were also everywhere. The large cuckooshrike and the pygmy woodpecker, the smallest woodpecker in India, were added to my lifer list.

As the sun came out, a certain torpor set in. The jungle was the same monotonous dusty brown, the heat was dispelling the pleasant morning cool and we were a little bored of seeing and hearing the same paradise flycatchers and pittas. The Indian nightjar was in the exact same spot that we had left it at yesterday and opened a lazy eye at us: my thoughts skipped to the morning breakfast awaiting us. Then a peculiar sense of foreboding set in. Why had the jeep in front of us stopped? And why was a forest guard around? Had to be a lion! Two fully grown males majestically strode across the road after lazily stretching and yawning. They say that the females do all the work, namely hunting and rearing the young, and the males just show up at dinnertime and to reproduce. Sounds like the good life for the men!

Day two yielded ten lions in one day and truly resembled a safari in the East African game parks, where numbers and sizes of mammals are huge and sightings mundane. Certainly, after having having roamed tiger forests in (more often than not futile) pursuit of the tiger, this was a welcome change. Chital and sambar deer were abundant and now form the diet of the lions, as opposed to predominantly cattle a couple of decades ago. The forest department has put up concrete waterholes at strategic points and fills them during the dry season when water scarcity is extreme which certainly provide for great opportunities to photograph thirsty animals. We had 31 lion sightings involving 12 individual lions over 6 safaris in all: next to impossible in a tiger forest. We tried hard to spot the large local male leopard which was driving the chital into a frenzy of alarm calls, but there was to be no icing on the cake.

I asked our host why our bird list was only at around fifty instead of the century we would usually rack up in other natural habitats by day two? He explained how all the migrants leave in summer and only the endemics and the few summer visitors are left behind. For instance the pittas are here only on May, and go further south the next month. The final bird count stood at 85, and the manager of our lodge urged us to come again in winter when the forest is green and when the migratory birds arrive.

There is a certain laissez-faire about this national park: large fields (literally) crop up in the middle of pristine forest and there are whole villages inside. I am told these were set up during the Nawab's times before the creation of the sanctuary and so cannot be moved out. That has resulted in pedestrians, motor cyclists, motorized carts and other vehicles nonchalantly moving around, sometimes with lions strolling around at the roadside! What is the future of Gir? I think it's safe to say it will be secure so long as a Gujarati is the prime minister! Certainly Gir is the top tourism money spinner of the state, even more so than tiger sanctuaries in other states on account of the easy visibility of the lions. How the man-animal conflict, caused by the numerous villages inside the forest and the outpouring of lions outside the protected area, will play out is anybody's guess. Will a population of lions be shifted to a second location and villages inside the sanctuary be resettled outside? Not very likely.

Meantime plan your visit to this unique habitat, and go not just for the lions!