Bharatpur & Keoladeo

Keoladeo is a made thing. Maharaja Suraj Mal raised the Ajan Bund in the eighteenth century to hold monsoon water, his successors flooded the depression below Bharatpur for duck shooting, and by 1899 it was a formal shooting reserve so rich that a viceroy's party killed more than 4,000 birds here in a single day in 1938. Salim Ali's campaigning made it a bird sanctuary in 1956, the last big shoot was held in 1964, national park status followed in 1982 and UNESCO listed it in 1985.

Now you go in on a bicycle or in a rickshaw pedalled by a park-trained naturalist who can name every call, along raised bunds between flooded acacia and kadam groves. In the monsoon nesting season, painted storks, spoonbills, openbills and cormorants crowd the trees; from November, bar-headed geese, pintails, shovelers and pelicans arrive from Central Asia, and sarus cranes dance in the shallows. Pythons sun themselves near Python Point, nilgai and spotted deer wade, and the Keoladeo Shiva temple at the centre gives the park its name.

Half a day is enough for the highlights, two full days for a birder. Bharatpur town, a few kilometres away, has Lohagarh Fort, built by Suraj Mal in 1732 with mud ramparts that absorbed British cannonballs in 1805, and its Government Museum in the Kamra Khas. Deeg, 32 km north, has the Jat rulers' pleasure palaces of Gopal Bhawan and Keshav Bhawan, whose fountains play on festival days.

Agra and Fatehpur Sikri are an hour east, so Keoladeo makes a natural bridge between the Taj and Jaipur.