Birdwatching In India
Today India host a dizzying variety of birds, like a dizzying variety of everything else from the cold lakes of the Himalayas to the tropical rain forests in the south. Residents and visitors, common and rare, more than 1,200 species have been recorded in India, which puts it somewhere between the United States (just under 900 recorded species) and Colombia (more than 1,800 species).
Several bird species in India are, however, endangered and their habitats are increasingly threatened, as this rapidly modernizing nation expands roads, mines and steel plants into environmentally sensitive areas. It helps that farming is done largely without the thrashers and tractors that ravage nests in more industrialized countries.
While you birding in India, you will be taken into one of the most extraordinary landscapes in this country — mangroves and desert, rain forest, cloud forest, mountains and miles and miles of coast.
India’s crowded, boorish capital is an improbable haven of birds — and a natural place to linger for a few days, before venturing out to the wilds of the north. In city parks, hoopoes and hornbills are plentiful; the haunting call of the koel can break the stillness of a muggy afternoon. Owls are everywhere. And on the flood plains of the Yamuna River, now a filthy drain that swallows the sewage of Delhi, a city of an estimated 18 million inhabitants, sits one of North India’s richest nature reserves, the Okhla Bird Sanctuary.
If you plan to go birding in India, first, ask your tour agency or lodge operator about weather, road conditions, park closures and rain. If you’re visiting a body of water and there hasn’t been enough rain that year, water birds are unlikely to come.
