The Deskbound Birder: Desert National Park and Little Rann of Kutch, India - 13th February (Day 6)

Friday, 26 February 2016

Desert National Park and Little Rann of Kutch, India - 13th February (Day 6) - Part 1

We were up for a 06:30 breakfast of fruit and toast and headed out at 07:00 driving to Jhunbarda and into the Little Rann of Kutch, a vast area of flat desert flooded in the monsoon season and with areas of sparse scattered acacia scrub and grassland. We quickly saw Asiatic Wild Ass and Nilgi and looked for McQueen’s Bustard but the species had not been seen for 12 days in the usual area and we were not hopeful. Birds were particularly scarce within the habitat, we recorded Crested Lark, Ashy-crowned Sparrow Lark, Short-toed Lark, Isabelline Shrike, Desert Wheatear, Indian Spotted Eagle, Montagu’s Harrier and little else. We headed further into the desert aiming for the Bachada Temple which was more like a cattle market with some basic stands of supplies than a temple, this place felt very remote almost end of the world’esqe. Ganesh quickly found our target bird, a Pallid Scops Owl roosting within a tree to the south of the main entrance to the walled temple complex but unfortunately the bird was fairly obscured amongst the leaves and the only angle that afforded a clear view was directly in to the sun. There were apparently four birds here but despite a good effort by Ganesh, painstakingly searching the trees at the temple, we only managed to locate the single bird. We retraced our steps, back through the salt mines worked by migrant workers in the open baking desert, these people pumped water into the pans and excavated the salt by hand, collecting the salt from the surface once the water had evaporated – surely a very tough way to exist.