Thank you for joining me for the second innings! In the first dig I concentrated on the #1 target of the trip, Great Indian Bustard, and the other birds and wildlife of the main destination, Desert National Park in Rajasthan. In this post I’ll talk about a major secondary target and some bonus birding tacked on to the end of my very successful week-long trip.
But before diving into that, a word about Dalveer Singh, whom I engaged as a guide for the duration, and who deserves most of the credit for the success of the trip. Dalveer was everything you would want in a tour guide. He was very knowledgeable and sharp in the field, constantly on the lookout and we picked up several species because, for instance, he’d seen them roadside: Yellow-wattled Lapwing, Persian Wheatear, Yellow-eyed Pigeon, Stoliczka’s Bushchat were key birds (lifers all) that he spotted and identified from the moving car. Likewise he was always listening, mentally processing the soundscape in real-time and pointing out interesting things he was hearing, and tracking down the important ones. He was also great and efficient with logistics and willing to be flexible when the need (or my desire) warranted.
Dalveer grew up in Bharatpur, one of India’s most famous birding sites, and still lives there. And amazingly, he has always been a pro-birder! He was always interested in birds and nature and got to know Bharatpur Reserve from a very early age. As a 13 or 14-year-old he was receiving tips and pocket money from tour groups to show them to spots he knew for important species. Then as he got older he graduated to leading private trips himself or joining international groups (e.g. Birdquest) as the local guide. I would use him again without hesitation.
And so to the latter part of my trip: the original sole objective of the post-bustard trip was to travel just a couple of hours from Jaisalmer to the village of Kichan, which is famous as a wintering roost of thousands of Demoiselle Cranes. These elegant birds (as well as Bustards and Coursers, I like Cranes!) undertake migration over the Himalayas, reaching altitudes of more than 7000m.
Day 5
Just outside Jaisalmer on our way to Kichan, there is a small reserve called Akal Wood Fossil Park, gazetted to preserve a number of 180 million year old petrified tree trunks. Dalveer had suggested this as probably our best bet for a secondary target of mine, Indian Eagle Owl. We walked the hilly, barren landscape scanning the small cliffs. A couple of times an Indian Hare burst from cover near our feet and (literally) hared off into the distance. Desert Larks and a Persian Wheatear posed very nicely and allowed approach down to just a couple of metres for frame-filling pics. We also found my lifer Striolated Bunting, a bird that I expect to pick up in UAE some time and is very similar to its western counterpart, House Bunting that I’d seen in Morocco. A Tawny Eagle posed on a distant hilltop and I flushed a couple of Chestnut-bellied Sandgrouse, but we returned to the car having failed to find an Eagle-owl, the only significant dip on a target bird of the week.
The 3 hour drive from Jaisalmer to Kichan was uneventful apart from yet another roadside spot from Dalveer: some small birds scuttled up the roadside bank and the driver slowed in time for us to clock a pair of Barred Buttonquail.
We arrived at the small village of Kichan late morning and checked in to our comfortable hotel. Within minutes as I walked through the garden I heard a honking and a small group of Demoiselle Cranes flew over. That was easy, but also not really the point! Seeing the cranes here is pretty-much guaranteed so this visit was hopefully about experiencing large numbers of these beautiful, elegant birds, not just the tick. Outside the hotel grounds I had some nice encounters with a few commoner species — Grey Francolin, Indian Robin, White-browed Fantail, Isabelline Shrike, Shikra and Plain Prinia.
Lunch was a lot less authentic than most of the other fare I’d had during the week, but the level of chilli in the dishes, presumably catering for tourists like me, meant I could taste the ingredients, which was a nice change!
After lunch we paid a visit to the local hospital so I could have 5 stitches from my forehead removed. A few days earlier at the end of a bike ride, I’d walked straight into a glass door at the post-ride coffee-shop, split my head open and passed out. My fellow riders called an ambulance and the local hospital patched me up, and gave me a CT scan and a tetanus injection. I was worried at first the doctor was going to ban travel. Fortunately that didn’t happen, but he warned that I should not leave the stitches in for longer than 8-9 days to avoid infection, meaning I’d have to make time in India to visit a clinic. I followed Dalveer around the ram-shackle building before ending up in an untidy treatment room, discarded equipment sitting on shelves, walls cracked and peeling, waiting for the doctor to arrive. As I surveyed the scene I seriously considered doing a runner, so grubby did everything look — would the risk of infection be greater if I tried to take the stitches out myself and use betadine and sudocrem liberally?? Maybe so, though in the end I stayed and the doctor did take them out. I inspected the wound later and applied betadine myself.
Late afternoon we drove to some lakes a few km from the hotel. In lovely evening light we observed dozens of beautiful cranes coming in to drink, and I grabbed photos with the Canon and some phone-scoped video.
Day 6
The following morning dawned foggy. Cruising slowly along rough tracks between the hotel and the village, hundreds of cranes loomed through and faded back into the mist. Despite the unfavourable light these yielded my most atmospheric photos.
We made our way to a fenced field near the centre of the village. For several years villagers have put out food in this enclosure, and the cranes know to come in the early hours for an easy feed. At the peak, later in the winter, there can be as many as 20,000 birds. We did not see quite that number, but it was still impressive to have elevated views of around 1000 cranes feeding, numbers swelling as more arrived initially in dribs and drabs then in flocks of 50-100, their honks announcing their approach before their shapes gradually appeared through the mist. Initially this added to the atmosphere, but instead of dispersing or burning off, the pea-souper seemed to have set in, and by the time I made the call to move on we could barely see the birds in the enclosure.
My original plan for this bonus day was to go directly to Tal Chhapar, key site for the highly localised Indian Spotted Creeper, and high on target lists of many tour groups, searching in the afternoon and the following morning. However last night after dinner I started to explore a late alteration to our route. Paying a bit more attention to the layout of our itinerary on ebird and Google maps I realised that a more northerly route to Tal Chhapar, via Bikaner, would add a mere 30 mins to the 4.5 hour drive, and add a key birding site. I made the point to Dalveer that an early afternoon arrival at Tal Chhapar was probably not very useful in our quest for the creeper — I would rather use those middle-of-the-day hours at the famous Jorbeer Carcass Dump not far from Bikaner. This was unlikely to yield any new birds, and we would arrive later in Tal Chhapar, but searching for a small passerine in the hot afternoon hours could be a waste of time anyway. I was happy to wear the elevated risk of not finding the creeper in exchange for another “experience”.
And this was definitely a worthwhile diversion. At times it was smelly and confronting, and the vicious feral dogs that roam the site mean it’s unwise to get out of the car, but the raptor spectacle was of a magnitude I had never witnessed anywhere. The glut of food means that they tolerate each others’ company with no need for instance, for the squabbling I’ve seen amongst vultures in Spain. Several hundred Egyptian Vultures, hundreds of Eurasian Griffon, hundreds Steppe Eagles, Black Kites, and Black-eared Kites shared the scene, seemingly perched on every available vantage point, or cruising overhead, or picking their way over the discarded bones and rotting flesh of dead goats and cows. Dozens of Red-naped Ibises scavenged giving my best views of the week, an Eastern Imperial Eagle drifted past and perched distantly, while at least two Laggar Falcons gave excellent overhead views. Perhaps even more than the raptors, this site is famous for the largest winter gathering of the endangered Yellow-eyed Pigeon. Of course we’d seen a flock already in DNP, so it was not needed as a lifer. Dalveer found a single bird at the carcass dump, but as we departed a quick look at the next-door lake revealed birds numbering several hundred perched on high-tension electricity wires.
We arrived on the outskirts of the village of Tal Chhapar at the “Gaushala area” mid/late afternoon with around 90 minutes before sunset, right on schedule according to the new plan. A stunning looking Black Buck greeted us as we arrived to an area of grassland and sparse khejri trees, short olive-like trees with dark gnarled bark and small grey-green leaves, the favoured feeding grounds of Indian Spotted Creeper.
As you know if you started this blog in the first innings, this was a bonus day and the creeper was not one of my original targets. But reading up subsequently I came to realised that it is a very smart bird, related to the Eurasian tree-creepers but in a different genus, salpornis shared only with African Spotted Creeper (they were previously considered conspecific). Some even suggest the salpornis creepers might even be more closely related to Wallcreeper. To me they look a bit like a cross between a treecreeper and a nutcracker.
The small and compact forest and fairly open stance of the trees, along with recent ebird reports, imbued in me some confidence that this would be easy. We quickly saw lifer Yellow-crowned Woodpecker (tracked down on call by Dalveer) and Eastern Orphean Warbler, but as we covered more ground and the afternoon started to turn to evening my unwarranted confidence ebbed away. Dalveer and I split up as we walked a less promising-looking part of the wood. Large Grey-babblers chattered and bounded about the base of bushes, and I found a family of Rufous-fronted Prinia. A Tawny Eagle cruised through.
We had just reconvened near the end of one stretch of the Kherji trees when I saw a smallish bird with a bouncing flight fly behind Dalveer and land on the trunk of almost the last tree in the stand. I landed bins on it, observing the long down-curved bill and white spots liberally coating its wings and back and announced “I’ve got it!” — embarrassingly just about my first “self-find” of the trip. We continued to track it for the next 30 minutes until we observed it nestle into a small nook in a fork of one of the gnarly trees and apparently go to roost.
In the village of Tal Chhapar we stopped in the bustling street for a freshly prepared masala chai to celebrate, then settled into a simple but comfortable guest house in a side-street. Of course a very tasty, spicy meal followed to round out my final full day of birding in this impromptu trip.
Day 7
Soon after dawn we returned to Gaushala and I followed Dalveer through the fog as he navigated unerringly to the roost tree. There it was, sleeping Indian Spotted Creeper, almost completely unmoved in the 14 hours since we’d left it.
Over the next 30 minutes it began to stir, and eventually it shook itself down, sang briefly then flew to some neighbouring trees. We went in the opposite direction, back to the car for a final bit of birding — we cruised some back roads, scanned the boundary of the Tal Chhapar sanctuary and checked out some local salt pans. We added a few new birds to the trip list, including Wire-tailed Swallow, Pied Avocet and Indian Bushlark.
But by mid-morning it was time to commence the 5 hour drive to Jaipur. We did break the journey at a spot where I’d observed recent ebird reports of Indian Courser, but the ebird pins referred to a very broad area “Raiwasa Lake and surrounds” and not knowing the site, a 45 minute diversion was always unlikely to pay off. I added a few trip ticks — Red-rumped Swallow, Paddyfield Pipit — and even a couple of lifers — Rufous-tailed Lark and Siberian Stonechat — but no coursers. That would have to wait for another trip! I even got in most of a day’s work once in Jaipur, finishing off my invited talk for the Amazon Research Day in 2 day’s time.
