What comes to your mind if you were asked what type of location you usually bird in? A lake? A forest trail maybe? Yes, those are what would come to my mind too. This blog post is about birding at a very unusual place; unusual in the sense that it does not come to our mind when we consider places to go birding. Well, what could it be? A garbage dump! Yes, you read that right 😀 .

You may wonder as to why in the world would anybody want to go birding at a garbage dump of all places. Well, the reason for me was Greater Adjutants. I had seen Lesser Adjutants down in South India and elsewhere. But the Greater Adjutant was still a lifer (not yet seen bird) for me.

Rahul and I were doing a 10 day birding trip to the Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary and surroundings areas. The first leg of our journey was to fly from Bangalore to Guwahati. Here is both of us at the Bangalore airport clearly excited to be getting started with the birding trip 🙂 .

Dombe Pradhan was to be our birding guide for the trip. He and his driver Shankar were at the Guwahati airport to pick us up. Our bags loaded in the SUV we were ready to see birds 🙂 . Our first and only birding stop on this first day was to be the city garbage dumping yard. The main target was to be the Greater Adjutants.

It was not long before we were on the dirt road leading to the dump. I had mentally prepared myself for the expected stench. But surprisingly it was not as bad as I had expected. The lack of rains in the last weeks had made the dirt road fairly easy to drive on. The lack of breeze helped in not carrying the stench. The birding gods were looking down upon us favourably 🙂 .

I saw the target birds standing on the garbage mounds from afar.

We approached closer and stopped at a patch where there were several of the birds standing. They were pretty big birds. Here are some the photos that I took of a few of them:

Here is one of them in flight:

There were easily around 150 of these birds around the dump. But there were other birds that were around too. An unexpected lifer for me was the Bengal Bushlark.

There were also a couple of Rosy Pipits getting into their breeding plumage. Here is one of them:

As I was observing the Bushlark, Rahul shouted “Raptor!”. I took a few poor shots of it as it flew by. It turned out to be a Shikra.

The other birds in plenty was the Black Kite. In addition to these birds, we also got to see the Red-wattled Lapwings, a Purple Heron, Black Drongos, a Long-tailed Shrike (the tricolour sub-species), a White Wagtail, a couple of Eastern Yellow Wagtails, and plenty of the Common Mynas. Not a bad set of sightings for a dumping yard 🙂 .

We then decided to head off as we had several hours of drive left in the day to reach our night halt.

Video

Here is a short video of the Greater Adjutants:

Do you still think that a garbage dump is not a good place to bird? Would you go birding at garbage dump? Or may you have a story similar to mine? Let me know your thoughts through your comments to this post.