Nameri National Park

Here is another guest post by Arun Bhat , as he shares his experiences at Nameri National Park , located in  North East India.

The one thing that I will always remember about Nameri is the story that the manager at Nameri Eco Camp told me. �We had two birders from Europe who were keenly looking for some bird on a tree with binoculars glued to their eyes. I heard some sudden sound nearby. Just behind us, a python had caught hold of a goat and was wrapping itself around the poor animal. I was excited and called for the visitors� attention. The python had already started consuming the goat. These people who were searching deeply for some birds on the branches looked back once, said �oh! interesting!� and immediately returned to their search on the tree!�

I do not know if he made up the story. Perhaps he did, but the story gives an idea of avian richness that Nameri possesses. People come from all over the world to Nameri, looking for many rare species of birds. While White Winged Wood Duck and Ibisbill are two most famous residents of the park, there are about three hundred more types that entertain the naturalists. When I think about searching for these birds, I remember a friend�s effort to see the rare White Winged Wood Ducks that number less than a thousand worldwide today. They walked several kilometres deep into the forest that was occasionally marshy and painful to walk through. The ducks were in a remote marshy lake covered with thick vegetation all around it. These people had to be extremely careful not to make noise and not to scare the birds, and had to stand still in a leech infested territory to see the ducks.

I spent just one day in Nameri on the way from Tawang to Kaziranga, so no wonder I never saw these rare ducks. But Ibisbills, the other coveted species, allowed me their sighting. They were relatively easy to spot and were wandering happily along the bed of Jia Bhoroli River at a place where we set out on a raft.

Talking about rafting, the ride over Bhoroli�s waters was an easy one without any rapids. It was more a pleasure ride than an adventurous tumble. The river�s water was so pristine and the forest around it was so beautiful and untouched, it still comes in my dreams and wakes me up with longings to be there.

Besides rafting, the other memory of Nameri that haunts me often is the sighting of great hornbills. Once we were walking over a grassy open patch when a small flock of hornbills flew across to a nearby tree. While I looked at them for a while and decided to move on, another small bunch followed, and a little later an individual. In a few more seconds came another and another and many more, all of them entertaining us with their superbly graceful flight and the swooshing sound from their wings. We paused for next five minutes, counting hornbills that emerged from the forest and flew across slowly. They numbered about three dozens and all of them assembled in a tree somewhere faraway. Just before I was about to pack up and leave Nameri that morning, these hornbills had organized a send-off that I will never forget.

Posted by Arun Bhat for Affordable Calling Cards which offers international phone cards such as calling cards to India. 

Eagle Nest National Park

Blogger and photographer Arun Bhat will be sharing some of his unique experiences in this post as he travels to the Eagle Nest National Park in Arunachal Pradesh

My introduction to Eaglenest National Park happened through a forwarded email. It was the first time I was hearing about this place, but since I had been contemplating a visit to North East India for some time, I decided to take another look. It was a park recently opened to tourists in the remote corner of the country, bordering Bhutan and China. Probing further revealed that the park had a biodiversity unheard of in rest of the country. I wasted no time in signing up for the tour and booking my tickets.

The days before the visit were spent browsing through bird book and remembering names of bird species that I had never heard of, and reading about a landscape that varied so much across the park that you would barely need a sweater in one corner of the park in a season when it snows at the other corner. While the southern edge of Eaglenest was less than 1000 feet in altitude, the other end was more than ten thousand feet high. There was tropical rainforest in one end while the other end sported conifers. No wonder Eaglenest boasted of so much diversity.

Walking the park from end to end and looking for birds in the forest, I was surprised to see absence of any kind of birds I have seen before, except the ubiquitous crows. They came in all shapes and colours, though most of them were small and had bright plumage. The cutias, as the name indicates, were so beautiful that I lost track and nearly fell into a gorge when I kept my eyes craned on one of them and walked behind it. 

The yellow-bellied fantails with their lemon-yellow colour fanned their tails and moved quickly from branch to branch, never stopping to post for a picture. Mrs. Gould�s sunbirds revealed so many hues on its back that I had to stop counting after sometime. It was like being in a bird-heaven full of avian apsaras.

The forest itself was as beautiful as the birds. I walked through paths littered with bright red rhododendrons, bunch of purple wildflowers and trees full of drooping lichens. The thick trees never revealed all the animal life hidden in their depths, but we knew Eaglenest was home to a large number of elephants and an existing population of large cats. They could wait for another visit, but the birds surely kept me occupied and entertained in the seven days I spent at the park.

Posted by Arun Bhat for Affordable Calling Cards which offers long distance calling cards like international phone cards to India