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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MacNara" data-source="post: 1754998" data-attributes="member: 23290">Bharatpur Kheoladeo Ghana NPI went to Bharatpur in late September 2009 for one evening and one morning visit (3 or 4 hours each). My wife and I had a naturalist and a bicycle rickshaw. The naturalist knew what the birds were, and more or less where they were. However, there weren't that many, especially waterbirds, and I think it would have been disappointing for someone more experienced with Indian birds than ourselves.The guide told us a number of things. He said that he and the rickshaw man between them got only 200 rupees or less for each of us per visit. He also said that these days, each guide only got a job every four days or less, because of the lack of visitors. There were about fifty rickshaws waiting outside, but we only saw three or four other customers during our two visits.The guide said that due to a lack of water (the monsoon was very late last year), the water birds had stopped elsewhere (he mentioned a reservoir somewhere to the north). He was clearly uneasy about the lack of bird spectacle, and really happy to hear that this was our first bird viewing stop ever in India, so almost any birds would be new (although it turned out that about half of the birds we saw, we had already seen in the hotel garden in Khajuraho, or on the road there, or on the river at the Taj Mahal).Finally, he said that apart from the lack of or bad timing of rain, the locals were taking a lot of firewood from the park, and it was being replaced with weed trees of various kinds, which also reduced the number of non-water-birds. The areas near the road in the park are the most convenient for wood-taking, and therefore the most degraded. But you are not allowed off the road, so that suitable habitat for some interesting birds, if it remains, is now too far away from the road for the birds to be seen clearly.Incidentally, there is only one entrance to the park, so if you go more than once you essentially do the same places twice, so there is a lot of overlap of species. It might be sensible to set out in the morning early and stay out all day, if it's not too hot when you are there, and the guides will co-operate, so you can get further from the entrance (though I'm not sure that you can in fact go all that deep into the park).It was truly surprising that this is a Unesco World Heritage site. Apart from the degradation, the entrance is truly shabby and uninspiring. You would think the Indian government would do more, especially as this is a place short-term visitors might go, as it's easily reachable from Delhi.Our guide was a very pleasant person, and the rickshaw man, too, so we enjoyed that aspect of it - being able to spend some time with Indians in a calm environment. We talked about families, and things like that. Our guide's father had also been a guide there. There's a bright side to most things.The rickshaw has a shade and this is a problem, since inside the rickshaw you can't see the sky or anywhere up in the trees. We mostly walked with the guide, and used the rickshaw basically to get to the start point (about 1km inside the entrance gate) and then to get back quickly from wherever we were when our time was up.For any Indians reading: the guide expressed a dislike of Bengalis as customers, because they seemed to expect the place to be like an aviary with birds constantly flapping about them, and complained all the time because it wasn't; and a liking for Gujaratis, who he said listened politely and were interested in what they saw, and didn't complain.</blockquote>

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