Kaziranga is famous for the one-horned rhino, but to confine its significance to just one animal would do a grave injustice to this park. JOYDEV SENGUPTA visits the sanctuary in Assam and gets mesmerised by its pristine beauty and diversity
Kaziranga National Park in Assam occupies a special place among wildlife sanctuaries in the country. Nestled along the banks of the mighty Brahmaputra, it suffers the ravages of a flooded river year after year, only to regenerate as the waters recede. Blessed with a unique natural environment and an animal base second to none, Kaziranga boasts of a World Heritage Site status bestowed on it in 1985 by UNESCO.
The park itself continues to get the limelight for all the wrong reasons with a depressing regularity and hardly a week passes by without stories of rhino killings by poachers grabbing the headlines. The park's dark and ugly underbelly belies a great success story however, that of a resurgent rhinoceros population whose numbers were once in terminal decline. Kaziranga is quite simply the best place to see the rhino in India, housing over 70 per cent of the world's one-horned rhino population; from a time in 1908 when their numbers had dwindled to a mere 12, today they can be seen grazing from the adjoining highway itself. The best way to see them up close is still the early morning elephant ride, the only hazard being the occasional mock charge as the elephants get too close. Despite the large rhino numbers in the park, getting to see unusual animal behaviour is always a matter of luck and we were fortunate enough to witness two rhinos mating there. The one memory of that time, which seems funny, strictly only on hindsight, did not involve the rhinos but a baby elephant. Right after we completed the morning elephant safari, one baby elephant took a fancy to my camera and the lens cradled in my wife's arms, wrapping its trunk around it and tugging at it. A baby elephant's strength is deceptive, and the ensuing tussle was a fascinating one to watch; my wife was having great difficulty in preventing the baby elephant from snatching the equipment, and it was only because the mahout yelled at it that it let go. One has no doubts that had the elephant succeeded in its endeavours, the incident, on hindsight or otherwise, would have never been funny in the least.
Be that as it may, this particular elephant safari was memorable for a different reason. In our quest for the rhino, we stumbled upon a large herd of the Asiatic wild water buffalo — Kaziranga accounts for about 57 per cent of the world population of this animal. Usually, the early morning ride yields sightings of the rare Bengal florican as well, but that was not to be, and the non-appearance of the florican and the hoolock gibbon, India's only ape, remained lasting disappointments from the trip.
The tiger continues to be the biggest draw among animals and birds in the sanctuaries and national parks in India, and Kaziranga is no exception (the rhino possibly enjoying equal billing here). Discussions about the best place to see the tiger inevitably gravitates towards a Corbett versus a Ranthambhore debate, with good reason but neither of the two premier tiger parks have as high a tiger density as Kaziranga. Kaziranga apparently boasts of the highest density of tigers among protected areas in the world and was declared a Tiger Reserve in 2006. Despite these impressive numbers, the chances of sighting a tiger there are rare. The tigers hide in the tall elephant grass in the sanctuary and finding them in the open is a matter of pure chance. All we had to show for our efforts, looking for the elusive animal after three days of searching, was a solitary instance of the deer letting out their alarm calls.
Kaziranga National Park boasts of an impressive species count of 479 birds, making it one of the best places anywhere in the country to go for birding as well. A measure of its importance as a habitat for birds can be judged from the fact that of the approximately 71 globally threatened bird species found in India, 25 can be found in Kaziranga. The experienced birder, of course, understands that chances of sighting certain bird species are better in some locations than others and this is certainly the case in Kaziranga. The Pallas's Fish Eagle, for example, can be found in the Dhikala area of Corbett National Park but the sightings are usually distant and not always at the best angles; in Kaziranga, however, it is seen more often and that too at closer quarters. Our sighting of this eagle was a particularly memorable one as we watched it devour a fish it had caught while we stood watching. The other eagle which can be sighted fairly regularly and at relatively short distances is Grey-headed Fish Eagle. listed as near-threatened, and difficult to spot elsewhere, these birds can be located with certainty in Kaziranga. The other bird that we were ecstatic to find at Kaziranga was the Stork-billed Kingfisher. Relatively rare in the large sanctuaries up north, one had seen it on a few occasions in the Dhikala area of Corbett, and that too from far. The Stork-billed Kingfisher was seen more often in Kaziranga.
India's parks and sanctuaries are great places to see a variety of birds and animals, and Kaziranga is no exception. It is one of the rare places offering a glimpse of the aquatic world as well. The Brahmaputra and its tributaries flow past the sanctuary and this part of the park is a great place to see the endangered Gangetic dolphins. As we floated down the river, an entire school of dolphins surfaced, jumping up and diving into the water on either side of us. The Brahmaputra remains one of the last refuges of the Gangetic dolphin, the mammal disappearing from a large swathe of its earlier habitat, as industrial pollution took its toll on nature.
Finally, it needs to be said that February is the best time to go to Kaziranga. One of our earlier trips to the park was in November and even at that stage, some of the sanctuary routes remained closed due to wet patches and slush in the area caused by the flood waters of the Brahmaputra.
The writer is a Delhi-based wildlife enthusiast