On a Bird Trail in Maharashtra’s Kumbhargaon | Travel

On that 11-hour drive from home to Kumbhargaon (Maharashtra), I began with a rejig. No, not a space shuffle in my lily white car with a chauffeur, a Man Friday, and a friend. I was trying to adjust vowels within imprudent consonants in a 16-letter unpronounceable word. Why would anyone name a pretty leggy wading bird’s family Phoenicopteridae? The glamorous flamingo with pink plumage deserves a better family name and at least an utterable order. Poor pink thing! It mostly stands on one feet and is burdened with Phoenicopteridae as family name in the order Phoenicopteriformes.

Hundreds of Godwits gather near the lake shore. Photo by Vijayalakshmi Nidugondi on Unsplash.

But in Kumbhargaon, a pint-sized village that sits languorously by the backwaters of Ujjani Dam, I had dropped the family, order and the vowels to take the boat to see the flamingos that flock in thousands to eat, mate, sleep. And repeat. For months. On the placid water, men and women were fishing on styrofoam boats stitched together with twine, some ingeniously using rubber slippers as blades for their paddles. I was utterly intrigued by the ingenuity but Sachin Bhoi, the boatman, was in a hurry. He switched off the boat motor and used wooden paddles to quietly sneak near the flamingo flamboyance (this is no alliteration, a flock of flamingos are called flamboyance). The morning air was crisp, the silver terns raucous and flirtatious but Sachin wasn’t ready to stop for any tern-mating voyeurism.

Take a boat to tiny rock island where silver terns gather during the winter months. Photo by Paul Crook on Unsplash

Far away, strokes of pink bobbed up in the blue waters. Not a dinky stroke of pink but an entire stretch speckled with desaturated shades of reds, roses and magentas and anomalous hints of grey of the juvenile flamingos. The flamingos are dainty but they are noisy like wanton idlers – growling, grunting and their nasal honking shattering the morning quietude. The flamingo men were libidinous- head flagging, bowing and extending their necks in S-curves to attract the leggy females beautiful in their pretty plumage. The oldest and tallest male were initiating a courtship dance – they certainly can shake a leg; flamingos have 136 different combination of dance moves. The flamingos were so busy wooing that they stood oblivious five pairs of eyes staring at them in utter astonishment. Then, in a sudden magical moment, hundreds of flamingos fluttered their feathers and flew in tandem. The sky turned pink, the afterglow of the morning sun melding with flamboyance.

In the quaint Kumbhargaon village, no one had ever heard of Pliny the Elder (24-79 AD), the Roman savant and author of the celebrated Natural History. But in the middle of the lake, I was thinking of the man with tousled hair, gimlet eyes and sharp nose, who talked of the wide, flat, serrated tongue of the flamingo as a delicacy. The flamingo tongue as food? Really? But the savant was convinced; he wrote: “Apicius, the most gluttonous gorger of all spendthrifts, established the view that the flamingo’s tongue has a specially fine flavour.” Really, Mr Pliny! Continue being the savant but spare the pretty leggy wading bird with Phoenicopteridae as its family name.

Kranti Flamingo Point, a five-minute walk from the lake shore, is the most convenient place to stay.

That morning, I forgave Pliny the Elder for his epicurean musings, for there lay a delicious spread in the dining hall of Kranti Flamingo Point, a homely hotel that is barely a five-minute walk from the lake shore. Supriya Dole and Shobha Nagare, wives of the cofounders Nitin Dole and Datta Nagare, sedulously make local dishes for the guests. And if you are lucky, Ganpat Popat Pansare on whose land the hotel sits, will pull an onion fresh from his fertile land and handover with utmost love.

Evenings in Kumbhargaon are equally mesmerising. Godwits, kestrels, terns and painted storks laze around, egrets meticulously pick worms from the tilled land, locals sit around a mound of fish to sort and sell, and shepherds walk their sheep and cattle home. And when darkness blankets the sky, Kumbhargaon and its flamingos, terns, godwits and storks sleep in silence. Except a rowdy jackal’s downslurrred wailing howls.

Kumbhargaon is an ideal mooring for water birds, it is in Kadbanwadi grasslands that vultures, hyenas, owls, foxes, jackals chinkaras and the elusive Indian grey wolf roam around fearlessly. Flat and barren, this grassland is a 30-km track which can only be accessed along with a designated guide of the Forest Department. In Kadbanwadi, you are not allowed to step out of the vehicle in the core grassland area, so I stuck my neck out of the Bolero to watch baby hyenas frolicking in the sun and stout vultures feeding on poultry waste.

When I returned, the wrinkled Ganpat Popat Pansare was standing with bunches of garlic from his land, Sachin Bhoi brought dried moringa, Datta Nagare extended a warm invitation for the annual village festival, Payal Pansare became a friend and little Komal had a handful of dead shrimp as a parting gift. I had driven to Kumbhargaon to see flamingos but it was the kindness of the village folk that pulled at my heartstrings. In The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac lauds that ‘One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls’. In Kumbhargaon, there are so many practicing kindness in the wilderness. And there are flamingos, too.

Good to know:

Where: Kumbhargaon, Taluka: Indapur, District: Pune.

Getting there: Kumbhargaon is a two-hour drive from Pune International airport. Kranti Flamingo Point charges ₹8,000 for both pick/drop from Pune airport; ₹4,000 for pick/drop from Daund railway station.

Stay: Kranti Flamingo Point (5-minute walk from the lake). Tariff per night: ₹1,500 for AC room, ₹1,200 for non-AC room. Group discounts available. All meals are chargeable.

For booking, contact Datta Nagare (phone: 8087767691, 9665913842).

Cost: Boat ride: ₹1,000 per hour (up to 6 individuals). Scorpio ride to the Kadbanwadi grasslands ( ₹5,000 for half day).

Best time to visit: For water birds: December to May. For grassland birds: August to November.