Birding spots to the south of the city

Gillian of Delhibird network had this to say about the spots she visited from Madras:

VEDANTHANGAL

Just 80 kms south of Chennai this is a village water body where birds are said to have been
protected by villagers since 1793. They found that the guano dropped by nesting colonies made excellent fertilizers and their crops were better than their neighbours. It is now a sanctuary – a real bird city if ever there was one.

When I visited on the afternoon of Sunday, 24th February, there were hundreds of tourists strolling on the bandh at one side of the sanctuary. There was not a scrap of litter to be seen, all the visitors were quiet and taking a real interest in the birds. Many had their own binoculars or had hired the ones available. It was really heartening to see such genuine enthusiasm.

The magnificent nesting colonies occupied trees standing in the water. Many hundreds of painted storks were in the process of building their nests, incubating eggs or caring for new fluffy chicks. Hundreds of immature open-billed storks were standing waiting for their parents to return (some adults could also be seen around them), and at the back was a huge number of spot-billed pelicans and small cormorants. Night herons, spoonbills, black-headed ibis, grey heron and glossy ibis were present in less substantial numbers while a few darters and pintails could be seen in the water. The coming and goings of all these species made the sky a spectacular sight.

AUROVILLE, city of human unity near Pondicherry

The main success of Aurovillians has been afforestation. With years of building check dams, bandhs and planting first Australian acacia to stabilize the land and then indigenous species they have created a de facto forest sanctuary for many species including porcupines.

There is now a fascinating nascent botanical garden and a specialist medicinal herbs garden. Much work is being done on organic cropping – one of the reason the place is full of butterflies and other spectacular insects.

Among the bird highlights I saw were Indian pitta, yellow-wattled lapwing, paradise-flycatcher (both phases), white-browed bulbul, black-naped monarch, blue-throated flycatcher, black-headed cuckoo shrike, golden oriole, yellow-billed babbler, Loten's sunbird. The common hawk cuckoos are deafening in the morning.

Salim Ali's nephew, Dr. Rauf Ali, is based in Auroville and has a checklist for the forest city and for the nearby wetland of Kaliveli.

KALIVELI

This is a major wetland about 20 kms from Auroville - next to flat grassland full of oriental skylarks, ashy finch-larks and other grassland species stands a huge expanse of short, round-stemmed reeds used for thatching. Beyond the reeds the water is no more than 2 meters deep. Walking along one edge of the reeds, we saw thousands of Garganey, and good numbers of spot-billed pelican, ruff, marsh sandpiper, wood sandpiper, black tailed godwit, little ringed plover, pintail snipe, little stint, black-winged stilt, painted storks, and one white stork. There were dozens of marsh and Montagu's harriers but the first raptor we sighted was a peregrine.

There are many other tanks in the area which merit investigation, and it was particularly heartening to see Garganey in such good numbers in this region.

A visit to Kaliveli is on the cards in the coming month, for me! MNS members did go on a day trip to Vedanthangal, and this is what Chitra had to say:

Hi,
For an informal trip, we had a surprisingly large group of 16 adults and 2 kids who turned up at the Vedanthangal bird sanctuary this morning. Of course, different groups had different agendas and we converged only for breakfast! One group went off on a photography course... one group just enjoyed the walk on the bund, where as the majority tried their best to identify the birds there...
We saw about 40 species of birds in the two hours or so we spent in Vedanthangal and the half hour we squeezed in at Karikili Tank.
Chitra

(Note - Karikili is different from Kaliveli!)