And, on that day at the cattail-bordered wetland in Central Gujarat, I, a Wetland Wanderer, enjoyed wandering in company of birds, fish, insects and aquatic plants. You too should give it a try!
It was 5 am of a winter last year and I, a wetland wanderer, was standing at the edge of a cattail-bordered wetland in Central Gujarat. It was a nippy night just before dawn. In a way, I was at a temporal and spatial transition! One may ask, "What's that?"
Well, by "temporal transition", I refer to the time when the darkness of the night was dying and the crepuscular light was reluctantly attempting to brighten the sky and everything beneath it. And by "spatial transition" I wanted to refer to a place where I was standing — a wetland which is scientifically defined as the transitional zone between upland and a permanent water body.
With the crescent-shaped moon and few other celestial bodies still in the sky, I was unable to see which birds existed in shallow open water of the wetland in front of me. Nevertheless, now and then, I could hear grunts of flamingos, fluting calls of a Redshank, harsh and loud (and somewhat laughter-like) calls of a female Gadwall, sharp, low-pitched and momentary calls of Whiskered Terns and crazy, loud, raucous calls of Purple Swamphens. Owing to these bird calls heard in the darkness, I felt as if a sleepy wetland was sleep-talking!
All the birds that I had just mentioned are the wetland-dependent waterbirds, but they use wetlands in different ways. In other words, they have different niches. Flamingos (of which there are two species in India, namely Greater Flamingo and Lesser Flamingo) are the lanky birds that wade across shallow to moderately deep open waters in search of their food (including microscopic diatoms and blue-green alga Spirulina) that they filter-feed.
Redshank belongs to the group of waterbirds called "shorebirds" or "waders" and it has got its name from its relatively long orange-red legs. Gadwall (now having "Mareca" instead of "Anas" genus) is a surface-feeding migratory duck that migrates to India in the beginning of winter every year from Europe and Northern Asia. Whiskered Terns which are seasonally abundant at inland and coastal wetlands of Gujarat perform the role of aerial foragers by flying over the wetlands back and forth looking keenly for a small fish or an insect in the water.
Purple Swamphen, which I mentioned earlier, is a resident bird of Gujarat is of the size of a village hen. As its name suggests, the noisy bird is gifted with an elegant purple-blue plumage. The Purple Swamphen often rests, roosts and nests in reedy marshes and thus, it is a marsh-bird. Despite having affinity with dense cattails and reeds, it is not a shy and secretive bird. It is often found in open areas including the mat of free-floating aquatic plant like water hyasinth, muddy shore of a wetland or even an agriculture land near a wetland.
And, on that day at the cattail-bordered wetland in Central Gujarat, I, a Wetland Wanderer, enjoyed wandering in company of birds, fish, insects and aquatic plants. You too should give it a try!
Ketan Tatu, Founding Editor of e-Periodical Jalaplavit, Senior Scientist and Ph.D scholar from West Virginia University
ketantatu1@gmail.com
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