As the morning sun shines over the 50 feet tall Sal trees, dragonflies stretch out their wings by the gentle warmth of the golden sun. Sitting calmly on the dew- drenched leaves, they bask in the fresh warmth to recharge themselves for the day’s flight. Somewhere in the distance a koyal welcomes the morning with it's musical ode. Very little of the sun is able to cut through the thickness of the jungle. But what reaches the ground definitely explodes into a majestic display of light and shadow on the canvas of dry leaves. An occasional rustle sends shivers down the spine. This is Dudhwa National Park,the most precious reserves, that makes excellent wildlfie holiday vacations in India.
Location
Around 420km by road from Delhi and 260km from Lucknow, Dudhwa National Park is spread over 490sq km along with a buffer area of over 100sq km. Besides massive grassland and swamps, the Park boasts of one of the finest qualities of Sal (Shorea robusta) forests in India. Some of these trees are more than 150 years old and over 70 feet tall. But when the area was first notified as a Wildlife Sanctuary in 1965, and later as a National Park in 1977, it faced intense opposition from foresters, game lovers and local inhabitants.
Converted Into National Park
Nobody wanted to lose this precious piece of land that was a life-support system for the locals. It was Billy Arjun Singh who stepped in to see Dudhwa through its fate. Committed to the point of being obsessive, this man stood firmly in favour of the jungle and convinced the erstwhile Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to notify the forest as a National Park.
This was a turning point in the history of Dudhwa National Park. Till then, the forest was a safe haven for both poachers and timber smugglers. Soon strict measures were taken to save the forest. In 1976, the park boasted of a population of 50 tigers, 41 elephants and 76 bears apart from five species of deer, more than 400 species of birds, a few crocodiles, and some other species of mammals and reptiles. officials claim that today the tiger population in Dudhwa has touched 70. However, the local NGOs believe that the number of tigers in Dudhwa doesn’t cross 20.
Distance from Delhi : 420km
Distance from Lucknow : 260km
Total area : 490sq km
Best time to visit : October to April
Bandhavgarh National Park
This National Park is small compared to others, but its importance lies in the fact that it has a high game density. When originally notified as a protected area in 1968, the Park was only 105sq km in size. But in 1986, this area was extended to include large areas of sal (Shorea robusta) forests in the northern and southern ends of the Park. Today, the Park covers an area of about 448sq km and is home to a wide variety of animals, including carnivores, primates, ungulates, reptiles and birds.
The Elusive White Tiger
The forests of Bandhavgarh are the white tiger jungles of the yesteryears. However, no white tigers have been reported from the wild in the last 50 years, and it is believed that less than a dozen have been seen in India in about a hundred years. and yet when white tigers were sighted, it was right here in Bandhavgarh.
Documents in the Rewa Palace record as many as 8 occasions on which white tigers had been sighted in and around Bandhavgarh during the first half of the 20th century. In 1951, Maharaja Martand Singh of Rewa captured an orphaned white tiger cub from the Bagri forest in Bandhavgarh (see Rewa & Land under Madhya Pradesh). The Maharaja domesticated this male white tiger and named him Mohan. The Maharaja was also able to successfully breed white tigers in Rewa and export the cubs to distant countries. As a result, all white tigers in captivity today are Mohan’s descendants. The species has thrived in captivity, with a number of specimens related to Mohan finding homes in zoos and circuses all over the world. Mohan was the last white tiger in the wild, and no white tiger has been reported ever since.
Before scientists undertook research projects on the white tiger, it was widely believed that the animals were albinos. However, it was discovered that the white tiger did not have pink eyes as albinos do. Instead, these tigers had black stripes and blue eyes, a result of genetic aberration that occurs due to mutant recessive genes in both parents.
Altitude : 811m
Core Zone :105sq km
Buffer Zone :448sq km
Best time to visit : February to June
Temp : Max 42o; min 2o Celsius
Closed : July 01 to October 31
Rainfall : 1,500mm
Keoladeo Ghana Bird Sanctuary
Paradise For Aerial Population‘Keoladeo Ghana’ name signifies the location of the temple of Lord Shiva (Keoladeo) in the centre of the Park and dense (ghana) forest covering the area. It's a soggy green paradise, an ideal home for a large variety of birds.
Scores of migratory species undertake a perilous journey over the Himalayas to make a seasonal home in this wetland ecosystem, the most famous of them being the magnificent but nearly extinct Siberian crane (Grus leucogeranus). This interlocking ecosystem of woodlands, swamps, wet prairies and dry Savannah is considered to be one of the world's richest heronries, where thousands of birds get busy courting, mating and nesting.
Foundation of The Keoladeo Ghana Bird Sanctuary
The Keoladeo Ghana Bird Sanctuary was initially created by Maharaja Suraj Mal, because he had some great ideas – not of conservation, but of the possibility of a constant supply of waterfowl for the royal dining table. At that time, it used to be a scrubby depression of land, seasonally enlivened by ephemeral ponds of water following the monsoons.
These ponds attracted some unsuspecting migratory ducks and geese in the winter months, and so Suraj Mal decided to turn it into a permanent reservoir, the Arjun Bund. and soon, Bharatpur,Keoladeo Ghana Bird Sanctuary became one of India's most productive hunting reserves. So much so that the British officials used to vie for invitations!
The 16 square miles of marsh known as the Ghana jheel (ghana means dense, and jheel lake) hosted such grand duck shoots that no serious sportsman could afford to miss it. Colonel Sawai Brijendra Singh, a later maharaja of Bharatpur, explains: "The jheel had islands to which I constructed little roads that were wide enough for cars to take VIPs out to their butts… Each duck shoot took months to arrange and to see that VIPs were not given bad butts was like making the seating arrangement for a dinner party. At the last moment someone would say, "Sorry, I can't come", and you then had to go through the list seeing who should go into a VIP butt and who could have his place." Yet when it came to the largest bags, even Bharatpur had to give way to the imperial sandgrouse shoots at Bikaner.
Distance : 5km south of Bharatpur
Area : 29 sq km
Population : 16,46,501 (humans)
Temperature : Ranges from 49 ºC to 2 ºC
Rainfall : 650mm
Sariska Tiger Reserve
A Hunting Reserve of Erstwhile Maharajas
The 300 square miles of Sariska Tiger Reserve is one of the last sizable remnants of the dry hilly country which once stretched across the length of the Aravalli hills. This hunting preserve of the Maharaja of Alwar was declared a sanctuary in 1955, and when Project Tiger was born in 1979, Sariska Sanctuary was merged into it. Sariska Tiger Reserve has been through immense pressure due to poaching, mining activities in the area as mentioned above and also due to sheer neglect by government authorities.
The forest vegetation has degraded, the wild life is vanishing and the water sources are drying away. It was felt by many that the richness of the forest was lost forever and it was declared a lost battle. It was then that the villagers around the reserve who depended on the same ecosystem that nurtured the wildlife took upon themselves the task of reviving the forests.
Manas National Park
Manas National Park - A World Heritage Site
About 176 kilometres from Guwahati, the world heritage site, Manas National Park lies just in between Kaziranga and Jaldapada. Make a trip to Manas National Park - a world heritage site, one of those few places that has the ability to hold a visitor spellbound, the main reason being the 540sq km of diverse topography and rich flora and fauna.
This kind of topography is home to small herds of wild buffaloes and fishing birds that fly screeching over the river in search of prey. Move a little away from the bank and you will enter a thick jungle of broad-leaved trees, where even sunlight fails to make its way to the ground. On the other side of the jungle, majestic herds of elephants wade through swamps and tall elephant grass (although in comparison to the other National Parks, it is very difficult to spot the elephants here). There are nullahs, or streams, hillocks; almost everything that you would wish to see in a Manas National Park situated in the foothills of the Himalayas.Just make a holiday trip to Manas National Park
Area : 2800sq km
Nearest Railway Station : Barpeta (40km)
Nearest Town : Mothanguri (40km)
Nearest Airport : Guwahati (176km)
Best season to visit : November to March
Status : World Heritage Site
Sasan Gir National Park
Great Habitat of Asiatic Lions
Amidst the vast arid landscape that dominates the state of Gujarat, towards the tip of the Saurashtra Peninsula, lies a wildlife oasis that has a pool of biodiversity the rest of the world has lost a long time ago.This 1,412sq km reserve, with a core zone of 260sq km, is home to the last 300 Asiatic Lions (Panthera leo persica) left on the planet. Once this majestic animal was found all over Asia Minor, Arabia, Persia and India. But the royal families’ insatiable desire to kill and to ‘decorate’ the walls of their palaces with stuffed ‘trophies’ led to a near wipeout of the species from the jungles that cover this stretch.
Shikar Obsession of Royal Court
The obsession for shikar,or hunt intensified with the advent of the British. One can see hundreds of photographs with big game like lions or tigers lying dead in the foreground, and a team of shikaris, or hunters standing proudly behind it brandishing as many as 30 guns. The kind of havoc these shikar parties have wreaked in the jungles is just unbelievable. A British officer of the India cavalry, who was posted in the princely state of Kathiawar for three years, shot more than 80 lions. Another British officer killed 14 lions during his ten-day visit to the Gir forest. and the number of ungulates and birds that must have fallen to the guns of the British, is anyone’s guess.
Best time to visit : – December to March, Park remains closed from June to October
Distance from Junagadh : 55km
Distance from Veraval : 40km
STD Code : 02877
Annual Rainfall : 1000mm
Sunderbans National Park
Sunderbans - The World Heritage Site
The holy Ganga journeys down the Himalayas and flows along India’s vast monotonous plains into the state of West Bengal. Towards the southern tip of the state, the land and the Bay of Bengal break out into a lively welcoming fandango to form a fresco of tangled mangrove swamps – the Sunderbans. The Sunderbans National Park are spread out over an area of 16,500sq km in the prostrate delta towards the mouth of the Ganga, and form the world’s largest estuarine forests that constitute 80% of India’s total mangrove swamps. A World Heritage Site, the Sunderbans are also amongst the richest biosphere reserves in the subcontinent.
The silt deposit islands on the Sunderbans Delta are connected to the mainland through a labyrinthine waterway system, with some islands being practically impenetrable. This has turned out to be a boon in disguise because the ecology of the area and these fecund marshlands, wired in thick foliage, are able to support an astonishing variety of plant and animal life. Twenty-six of the fifty broad mangrove types found in the world, thrive in the Sunderbans.
A Home To Largest Tiger Population
In order to preserve this clearly unique biosphere, the area between River Hooghly and the River Teulia was declared a National Park in the year 1984. The protected reserve covers a stretch of 1,330sq km, and also constitutes the core zone of the National Park.
Compared to other reserves in the world, Sunderbans National Park has the largest population of tigers, and also abounds in salt water crocodiles, olive Ridley turtles, Gangetic dolphins, chitals (spotted deer), fishing cats, wild boars, otters, rhesus macaques, monitor lizards, snakes, innumerable fishes, crabs, lobsters, shrimps, worms and a host of birds including kingfishers, storks, herons, Brahmin ducks, arghilahs, ibises, water fowl and egrets, to name only a few.
How To Reach
Air : Getting to the Sunderban National Park is no mean feat. The closest airport is the Dum Dum Airport in Kolkata, at a distance of 166km from the Sunderbans.
Rail : The nearest railhead, at a distance of 105km, at Canning, is not close either to this elusive destination. From Canning you have to reach Sonakhali, from where the adventure takes on another dimension altogether.
Boat Ride : You must now take a boat ride that lasts a good six to seven hours, to Gosaba. This is followed by a rickshaw ride to Pakhirala from where yet once again a boat ferries you across to Sajnekhali – the base of the Sunderbans National Park.
At a distance of 50km from the Sunderbans National Park, Gosaba is the nearest town. Many travellers find it more convenient to take a bus from Kolkata to Sonakhali or Basunti via Babu Ghat. It is also possible to hire your own private boat from Canning! For the uninitiated, the journey provides the rites of passage to rural Bengal.
The Tiger Law Reigns Supreme
Though the Sunderbans National Park boasts of the largest number of tigers, spotting one effortlessly is not half as easy. That human existence is oftentimes at the mercy of the tiger population is evident from the fact that roughly 20 man-eating cases are reported every year. Pretty much a land where the jungle law reigns supreme, where only the fittest are meant to prevail.
The islands are inundated twice every day due to tidal action! It is interesting to see how the tiger, like the other life forms, has adapted to this habitat against such odds. The Sunderbans tiger is an adept swimmer, can survive on brackish water, and is also known to feed on fish and sea turtles.
Though you may cruise around the maze of islands, waiting with bated breath to catch a fleeting glimpse of the beautiful cat you may or may not see, your odyssey shall nevertheless be a memorable one, with many coloured kingfishers diving for their kill and the curious life of a myriad tiny creatures weaving their own magic into it.
Status : World Heritage Site & Biosphere Reserve
Established : 1984
Nearest Airport : Dum Dum Airport (Kolkatta) 166km
Nearest Railhead : Canning 105km
Best Time to Visit : November to February
Kanha National Park
Kanha - Idle Location For Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book
Kanha Tiger Reserve became famous when the author Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book in 1894, setting his story in Kanha’s forests. While in Kanha National Park, you will see the dramatic beauty of the forest and the immense variety of wildlife that must have fired the author’s imagination, and ample opportunity for elephant safari.
Even before Kipling, Kanha National Park(like many other National Parks in India) was famous as a preferred hunting ground for rulers and viceroys. The first effort to conserve this area was in 1933, when about 250sq km of the forested Kanha valley was declared a Wildlife Sanctuary. Another 300sq km of the adjoining Supkhar Sanctuary was added to the original area, only to be de-notified within a few years, after which just the original 230sq km of wilderness remained protected.
Opened As A Hunting Ground
oftentimes, unpleasant incidents have made us sit up and realise that certain forest areas needed to be protected. A famous cricketer in the early 1950s, Maharaja Kumar of Vijayanagram was allowed to shoot as many as 30 tigers in and around the Sanctuary for the sheer sake of sport. This incident was followed by a public outcry that forced the authorities to formulate a special legislation and declare the area a National Park in 1955. The size of Kanha National Park increased to 318sq km in 1962, and again to 446sq km in 1970. In 1976, Kanha National Park became a part of Project Tiger that was launched in 1972, giving the Park its present area of 940sq km. This is surrounded by an additional buffer area of 1,005sq km. Project Tiger was essentially a conservation effort begun by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Its main objective was to ensure that the poaching of tigers stopped, and to secure the tiger’s habitat.
Distance : 65km from Mandla, 169km from Jabalpur, 330km from Nagpur
Altitude : 1,480 to 2,950ft (450-900m)
Temperature : Max 43o, Min 11o celsius
Rainfall : 1,250mm
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