Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary

Phew! Finally, I get to this post. I have been meaning to update my blog and, especially, put down my list of birds sighted at RBS for ages.

Ranganathittu is very accessible from Mysore. You could drive there, but we car-less folks took a city bus from the Mysore bus stand and it takes you via the city, adjacent farm land and right outside the gates of the sanctuary. The river Kaveri meanders through this area. Like all historic and significant tourist spots in Karnataka (and perhaps the whole country, I don't know yet), this place is also plastic-free, but surprisingly, does indeed appear to be so (the other place in/near Mysore that's supposed to be plastic-free are the Chamundi Hills, but it's not uncommon to see a bunch of plastic bags and bottles lying right underneath the very sign that prohibits their presence). This part of the world is also very close to the Krishna Raja Sagara (KRS) Dam, so a common sight is of small canals cutting through green fields. Inside one of these canals, right by the entrance of the sanctuary, is a giant statue of Shiva meditating on a stone with his thick black locks touching the water. Some people canoe to the statue every day and leave flowers and fruit offerings. It's really quite a nice sight.

From the park entrance, you have to walk about a kilometer or so before coming to the parking lot and the actual park. This kilometer is beautiful to walk through, tree-lined, with very picturesque little babbling brooks running alongside the road. Many birds, flowers and insects. Kids enjoyed themselves very much. Only thing that spoils the experience are the cars racing through that kilometer, all, for some reason, in a great hurry to get to the parking lot. Slow down, folks! You're missing all the good bits by rushing about!

So, my sincere recommendation: ditch the cars at the main road and walk down.

In large trees, fairly high up from the ground, we saw golden orioles, grey hornbills, rose-ringed parakeets and red whiskered bulbuls

Golden oriole, seen in a tree by the bus stop
near a small village on the way to RBS. What a beauty, no?

A family of red-whiskered bulbuls were seen within RBS, in trees by the side of a small pond

Purple rumped sunbird

In small trees, we saw my favorite bird, the purple-rumped sunbird.

On the ground, by a marshy enclave, right as soon as you pass the parking lot, is the home of the yellow wagtail. And true to his name, he wags his tail as he busily flits from one reed to another.

Yellow wagtail. Friendly fellow, not at all put off by us plonking ourselves down a few feet from him and staring at his antics.

You know what else RBS is also famous for?

Far away rocks, nothing particularly interesting....

Check out the pelican nests on top of the trees

Then you go closer and...do the rocks look different now?!

 Crocodiles! These are Magar types and not terribly active. With a good pair of binoculars, you can even see their long canines stick out of their mouths as they sun themselves on the rocks within the lake. These crocs are native to this region and completely wild. Imagine, even hundreds or thousands of years ago, they were probably sunning themselves on these very same rocks!

RBS is famous for little islands nestled within a large lake. There are boat rides available and for a little bit of extra money, the boater will row in between the many islands, rather than just around the periphery. None of the boats are motored and the splish-splash of the oars forms a relaxing background sound to the scenery.

A nuzzling nestling couple.

The boat ride, for me, really highlighted the truth of the old adage "Birds of a feather flock together". Colonies of each species really do stick to each other, and different species clearly occupy different niches, even on a single tree!

More pelicans hanging out

Cormorants pose together

It's difficult to take particularly good pictures of bird colonies with an iPhone, especially if one is on a rocking boat. Some of the other birds we saw, but I couldn't take good pictures of, were:

Night heron (www.pbase.com)

White ibis

Large and little cormorants, snake bird (dead, draped over a branch like a black shroud), river terns, spoonbills, spotted pelicans, open billed stork, painted storks (in flight, not in colonies) were some of the other birds we saw either nesting in or flying near the islands.

I wonder why so many birds that live close by water bodies are usually white and black. Must be for camouflage... though, why not muddy brown or dirty green? Perhaps there are such birds and I just don't know about them. This question reminds me of the paddy bird, which I came across in Cubbon Park many weeks ago.

Indian pond heron (paddy bird). Muddy white, it tends to fade into the background.

Speaking of birds that are hard to spot, we think we saw the bittern. Certainly the terrain was typical of its favored haunts, that is, reedy shores. It was all the way on the island on the other side of the crocs sunning themselves in one of the pictures above. It was completely motionless, and indeed, I couldn't spot it at all until Ram pointed it out to me.

We also saw this guy close up while boating back towards the mainland:


We lunched at the park cafeteria (decent dosas, but really awful chutney); kids chased a few monkeys around and we headed back by around 3pm. Back along the scenic kilometer! And this time, we stumbled across a true treat.

On a tree in what seemed like a sugarcane field, Ram thought he spotted some hornbills. So he walked into the field and realized that it was actually a patch of land on a hill, surrounded by the Cavery on two sides.  Immediately, what appeared to be a terrain of flat lands and high trees was transformed into one which supported water-loving birds too! A truly marvelous and diverse niche! Once we walked in, we spotted an immense number of birds, amazingly spectacular, brilliantly colored.

The view of the field from the road. Looks fairly ordinary, no?

Bordering the field on one side was the river, home to many species of bee-eaters, kingfishers, weaver birds and muniyas.

Bordering the field on another side was this little lagoon. Check out the weaver bird nests!

The blue tailed bee-eater

The little green bee-eater. We saw both species of bee-eaters side-by side on a wire above the river.

Tricolored muniya

We also saw three species of kingfishers: the pied, little blue and white breasted.

White breasted kingfisher. Pic from www.burneysbirdblog.org

Little blue kingfisher. Pic from Wiki

Pied kingfisher. Wiki pic

So, to end, here's a list of birds we saw at Ranganathittu:

Grey hornbills

Purple rumped sunbird

Red wattled lapwing

Yellow wagtail

Red whiskered bulbul

Golden oriole

Brahminy kites

Indian shag (possibly)

Yellow wagtail

Pied wagtail

Rose ringed parakeets

Heard barbets - not spotted 

Drongo

Bittern (which species?)

Pied wagtail

White Ibis

Night heron

Large cormorant

Little cormorant

Darter (snake bird)

River tern

Spoonbill 

Spot billed Pelicans

Painted stork in flight (?). None seen in colonies

Open billed stork

Pied kingfisher

Little green bee-eater

blue tailed bee-eater

Baya (non breeding plumage) Weaver bird + nests

Tricolored Munia

Little blue Kingfisher

White breasted kingfisher

Tickell's blue flycatcher

Fan tailed flycatcher

Passenger Train Adventures: Close Encounters with a Luggage Rack

While living in Pittsburgh, we would spend weekend breaks in one of several typical ways: camping along Lake Erie, birdwatching on the North shore park, hiking in Schenley etc. In Bangalore, it has usually been Cubbon Park or Lalbagh. A couple of weekends ago, we decided we ought to branch out a bit and explore some more (have you ever noticed that you can only branch out after you feel settled? You might have moved into a house, and kids might have started school etc., but "feeling settled" is much more than just that). So we hit upon Ranganathittu. To get to Ranganathittu, you first need to get to Mysore.

Can you believe that in my 33 years of life, I have never been to Mysore (what an unfortunate spelling, no? My sore... what? bottom? armpit? The old spelling, Mysuru is much better in this case) Mysore is only about 3 hours from Bangalore. It's like someone in Pittsburgh never having gone to Wheeling, WV. No matter where you're going, there's always some point where you have to drive through it. Of course, one could argue that Wheeling probably has very little impact on Pittsburgh, but that's not the case with Mysore and Bangalore. Mysore, being the seat of the Wodeyar kingdom and the old capital of the Mysore princely state (which included Bangalore, most other parts of Karnataka and nearly all of Andhra), is the cultural capital of Karnataka. Most Kannadigas are fiercely loyal to the kingdom. So it was with a feeling of intense anticipation that we left Bangalore. 

There are a million trains running between the two cities and even more buses. We had imagined that there would be plenty of space available on these millions of vehicles, but the trains were pretty crowded. In a fit of unfounded optimism, I booked us "unreserved" seats on the Chamrajnagar Passenger train for Rs30 apiece about 20 minutes before the departure of the train. Thrilled by my thrift, Ram and I dragged the kids along to find ourselves a nice set of seats. Much to our dismay, we found no free seats anywhere in the compartments we looked. I suggested to Ram that we go right up to the last compartment, since not too many people might be willing to walk that much, but Ram had spied some fellows sitting up on the luggage rack above the seats. It was quite a spacious rack, because it was originally intended to be a berth, but the cushions had been removed.

This is sort of what we sat on. The size appears to be just about right too!

"If they can do it, we can do it too", he exclaimed and I echoed the sentiment. We pushed ourselves up on to the rack, settled our belongings and said, "why, this isn't so bad after all!" Soon enough, we saw that every single luggage rack and indeed, every single inch of space down by the seats were filled up with people, their luggage, their food, their kids and their luggage and so on. Passenger trains get REALLY crowded. There was no way we could come down, for if we came down, somebody else would go up and our perch away from the crowd would disappear for ever. We peered down for a while (since there were no windows to peer out of and indeed, the angle was such that we couldn't even get a glimpse of what was outside, no idea of the scenery, where we were traveling or which stations we were passing) and after about 10 minutes or so (really, that's all it took), Ram and I started to fidget with discomfort. Half an hour later, we were seriously considering just getting off the train at the next station, but how? The crowd was SO thick that there was no way we could have shoved ourselves, our kids and our bags out of the train (which led me to imagine what might happen to us if a fire broke out or if the train derailed, but the discomfort of that luggage rack soon chased away other thoughts, no matter how macabre, from my mind).

To pass time, I peeled a couple of oranges and passed them to the kids. A couple of minutes later, somebody from the seats underneath said, "Hey, some of the fibres are falling down here. Watch out!" I gave the kids some water to drink, and met with another protest from down below. Jeez, okay, clearly food and drink were out of the picture.

Despite the immensity of the crowd, railway vendors were still shoving their way through them selling hot vadas, roasted peanuts, water bottles and such. We bought ourselves some packets of peanuts, I carefully extracted the peanuts out of their newspaper packets and handed them over to the kids. I'm sure a couple of them must have fallen on the fellows below, but surprisingly we encountered no protests, perhaps because those worthy people were themselves busy snacking.

The trick to traveling on a luggage rack is to lean back against something relatively soft, such a backpack so that your buttocks are not pressing straight down against the metal rods. Since we only had one backpack, Ani and I shared it for the first hour or so, and then Ram and Ani shared it for the remainder of the time. Ani and Ram promptly fell asleep, leaving me to Durga on my lap throughout, which was pretty excruciating once I lost the support of the backpack.

About 2 hours from our destination, Durga whispered to me, "Mummy, I need to pee".
"F***!" I thought in my head, but offered her a strained smile as she looked hopefully to me.
"No baby! Can't go now! Look at all the people down there. There's no way we can get to the toilet. Keep it in for a while", I counseled. Poor little girl.
Finally, an hour later, she was in acute distress and I, motivated by the thought what of all those people down below who had scolded us for orange fibres and drops of water might do if confronted by a stream of urine, decided to act. I brought out a towel (Thank you, Ford Prefect!), used it as a nappy, and encouraged Durga to do her job. Oh, the relief on her face! And the relief in my mind when I realized that the towel was sufficient for her business!

We reached Mysore after a fiendishly long time, the passenger train compelled to stop at every single little village there ever existed between Bangalore and Mysore. What bliss to climb down that luggage rack! The euphoria of being able to stretch one's arms, legs and every organ possible, and oh my God, the almost spiritual feeling of planting one's bottom on a soft seat after 4 hours on a metal luggage rack! Heaven never seemed closer than at that moment!

My mantra for life is pretty simple, almost cliched. But I believe it completely. It is that everything happens for a reason. And I wondered what might be the reason, the lesson, in this oh so excruciating journey. Is it never to travel unreserved again? Yes, of course. But that's rather superficial. For me, the biggest impression I have of this journey, looking back 4 weeks later, is being a small part of something much bigger. This journey made me intensely aware of the people around me- those crowds, those people, their food, their kids, their luggage. I was a part of this teeming, swelling, relatively poor, mass. What affected them at that time also affected me. Their worries about the journey were my worries (and perhaps my worries were theirs.. surely had anyone, especially the folks sitting beneath us, known about Durga's pressing bladder, would have been quite as worried as I was!). For a person who has spent the past 10 years in the US, very aware of personal boundaries and space, this journey sort of shattered that idea of aloofness and privilege.

When we stepped out of the train, some of my train-mates nodded goodbye. Some went by car, some by motor bikes. We caught an auto and ironically enough, checked into a hotel called "United 21", with a flag of the US waving outside, next to a Papa Johns' pizza shop.