chilika times

I had basically gone to Orissa to visit a dear friend. I know D from my school days... so we've known each other for a very long time. I'd been desperately wanting to visit her at Chilika (where she goes every now and then for research), but hadn't managed it over the past 4-5 years. This year I was determined to go while she was there. D currently lives in Satpada, one of the villages along the lake. She studies the Irrawady dolphin which is a resident of the lake. I spent three mornings on the water with her, the first two mornings were D's work-days and it was nice to find out what her work entailed and to sit in the donga (the boat) at such leisure.

D & R at the bow of the donga, skimming the water with their binoculars for dolphins

R has spotted a dolphin in the distance

While D and R worked - measuring salinity of the water, depth of the water, location of the dolphin, identifying them by the unique shape of their fins, observing their behaviour and taking notes - I lazed around in the shady part of the donga, gazing at the water, observing the gulls swooping down and picking up fish from the water, squinting to see the dolphins everytime they had sighted one, trying to train the binoculars on them and keep them in sight, trying to understand what exactly D could see when she pointed out that the dolphins were "feeding" or "milling" or "travelling"... :-)

And of course I took photographs.

Chilika lake shimmering in the sun

in flight

the forest-guard

a local donga ferrying people between villages

dolphin sighting

another dolphin sighting

fisherman

egrets
(I really liked these commonly seen birds and the way they perched on the fishing nets... and now I've suddenly noticed that they're often hopping about, picking at the remains of fish at the outdoor fish-market at Char Bangla - which is near where I live in Bombay :-))

plastic bottles that mark the location of konkda-jaals, small square nets to catch crabs

our donga

spent one night in the donga out in the lake... it was the night before the full moon but there was not enough light for a good photo... but it was calm and peaceful and a flash photograph would not do the night justice

The Nalaban Bird Sanctury is located in the middle of the lake and the next morning we headed towards it. On the way...

a sand-dredger to remove the silt from the lake (yes, the lake is getting silted). The dredged sand has been used to make new islands in the lake!

Fishing nets arranged to create the khonda, a catchment area the fish swim towards when they hit the bado, a long straight stretch of net (apparently fish are stupid and will turn at right-angles to swim along the net when they hit the net - rather than turn around and go away from the net).... From the khonda the fish end up swimming towards smaller box-like nets called pudajaal (not see in this photo).

There is over-fishing and excessive aquaculture (prawn farming) in the lake which is affecting the marine ecosystem. But I won't venture to say much since it seems like a complex problem... involving livelihoods, alternate livelihood options such as in tourism, fishing rights to a particular area given by the government to each village, how the village distributes this area amongst themselves, the profitability of aquaculture and the government's interest in promoting it, etc

When the fishing nets are folded up over the water, they look surreal, beautiful, mysterious...



The blue synthetic nets seen in all the above photos are new. Traditionally the nets were made entirely from bamboo, like below.

In the Nalaban Bird Sanctury...

Bar-headed geese (It breeds in Ladakh and is a regular winter visitor to Chilika)

Flamingos and many other birds in the distance

One of the things I'd not really known about birds (maybe I'm just stupid and ignorant) was that during the breeding season many of them change colours.

So the Black-headed gull which I saw (above) looks quite different during the breeding season... see below picture (br) taken from D's bird-book

And...


The black-tailed Godwit (above pic) that I saw at Nalaban looks quite different during the breeding season... see below pic taken from D's bird-book

Saw many other birds - Pintails, Terns, an Osprey (which is a dark brown hawk whose habitat is near rivers, lakes, coastal lagoons, etc - its a winter visitor to Chilika), Black-winged Stilts, Common Pochards, Little Cormorants and Common Coots. But my camera zoom wasn't powerful enough to get good pictures. We also saw a Brahminy Kite, also known as Chilla - it is a resident of the area and the Chilika Lake is named after it.

More closer home (D's home in Satapada) we saw other wildlife :-)

I had a plane to catch on March 1st, which was Holi. So we had to take a rickshaw at 5 am to get to Bhubaneshwar early. The paddy fields, the sunrise, the fog (called kuhudi in Oriya.. I love that it has a mischievous sound) and the road-side chai were wonderful on the way.