India GOBirds of Jaipur
Indian peafowl
The peacock rides with Kartikeya, sits in Krishna's crown as a single feather, and is painted on half the doorways of the old city. Rajasthan's dry-country villages have protected it for centuries because its call is read as a promise of rain.
Pavo cristatus
Indian roller
Its Hindi name, nilkanth (“blue throat”), is a name of Shiva, and seeing the bird around Dussehra is counted as a good omen across northern India.
Coracias benghalensis
Rufous treepie
Rajasthan's fort courtyards are its best habitat: it takes scraps at Amber and Nahargarh and is bold enough to come to an outstretched hand, which is how most people meet it.
Dendrocitta vagabunda
Rose-ringed parakeet
The tota is the mount of Kamadeva and a stock character in Rajasthani miniature painting, where a parrot on a woman's wrist carries a message. Jaipur's havelis were built with parapet niches that parakeets still nest in.
Psittacula krameri
Lesser Flamingo
The salt pans that flamingos feed in have been worked since at least the Mughal period, and the birds and the salt workers share the same water: flocks arrive after the first heavy rain and leave as the brine thickens. On Sambhar Salt Lake the lesser flamingo is the single most abundant bird: a long-term survey counted more than 20,000 in September 1995 and about 15,000 in January 2009. Sambhar is one of its largest strongholds on the subcontinent.
Phoeniconaias minor
Greater flamingo
At Sambhar Salt Lake it is a regular winter visitor arriving in the second week of August, with more than 10,000 counted on one January day in 1998, and flocks also winter at Chandlai Lake on the Tonk road. Rajasthani calls the flamingo raj-hans, “the royal goose”, the same name a Sanskrit poet would use for the bird that separates milk from water; on a salt lake the name has stuck to a bird that literally filters its food.
Phoenicopterus roseus
Bar-headed goose
This is the goose that flies over the Himalaya twice a year, one of the highest migrations known in birds; the flocks that settle on a Rajasthan farm pond have just crossed the highest mountains on earth.
Anser indicus
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