We wake up early in the morning and explore the grounds for a short while before it is time for breakfast. And afterwards we have our first nature trip planned, a safari to hopefully see safari cranes and maybe other birds in the vicinity. There is a price reduction promised if we use our own car, and why not, we already are paying the driver for the day.
Breakfast is quite good and it is included in the price of our lodging while dinner and lunch are not so we eat as much as we can. We plan to skip lunch anyway and are not sure about dinner afterwards, we decide to decide later.
Our driver is for whatever reason unhappy on driving us and the birding guide around or so it seems but he does it as we make our way east towards the fields that potentially hold cranes. We cross the holy Yamuna River on the way, a major tributary of the Ganges, and the major river flowing through both Agra and Delhi.
There is a lot of wildlife on the way including surprisingly many Nilgai, you would expect the huge deer to have a hard time in these populated areas. And white-throated kingfishers, lots of them, it is surprising to see such a common kingfisher but given that it is not bound to waterways as much as the other ones maybe it should not be that surprising.
And then we see our first special bird a beautiful black francolin sitting just on the side of the road. Luckily our guide spotted it and it sat there quietly waiting for us to take photos before leaving.
We stop a few more times along the way whenever there are some interesting birds including a beautiful Indian Roller resting on the wires. But all the time we keep an eye out for the major goal for our trip, the Sarus cranes that do not seem to want to be seen.
At one point the birding guide tells our driver to stop and asks us if we want to walk to a few lakes. We are game for anything, which seems suprising to him, and on we go into the fields. We find almost immeditely a Paddyfield Pipit, a lifer for us, and then near the lake our target bird, finally. A family of Sarus Cranes is enjoying the edge of the lake and do not like that we approach so we stand as far away as possible until they calm down.
And then we find an even more rarer bird as we return to the car and surprisingly empty highway. It is a Brown Crake and even our guide is very excited and takes photos, it is supposedly a difficult bird to see like all crakes.
There are also many Painted Storks, we really like their colors even though we have seen quite a few already. And a Tawny Pipit is watching us from the wires and quite a few more birds are seemingly everywhere.
It is a nice location and we spend quite a few minutes exploring the surrounding looking for birds and even some raptors, like the Black Winged Kite, just on this short stretch of road.
We continue on before stopping between fields at another adhoc wetland. There are lots of birds here but the highlight is a beautiful bluethroat that we spend some time admiring before moving on.
As we drive around we find a few more groups of Sarus Cranes. It is great to see them and most are less scared of us than the first group that we noticed. A couple of the groups even have chicks, quite fun.
We find a few more Nilgai near the road but the highlight is a Common Hawk Cuckoo, common in name only really. We also stop for tea and then the decision is made to drive directly to our river cruise instead of returning to the lodging and adding fifty plus more kilometers to the drive. The bird guide is indignant that we might want to miss lunch but that was the plan anyway so to the cruise we go.
We pass the usual dung collections on the way and even a truck that funnily says “Milk not for Sale”, do people really try to buy from the truck instead of the store?
We stop in a village along the way for our driver and guide to buy something to eat and we also get a few free small bananas, nice.
And then we pass village after village as we get closer and closer to the Chambal river and badlands, the land of the dacoits/bandits. Hopefully none are there or at least they will not consider two Americans a juicy target…hmmm.
