Nannaj (The Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary)

Nannaj

The Romantic couple

The Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary


Nannaj is a village in solapur district of Maharastra, India. The land of Nannaj is semi-arid and drought prone.The climate of this region is very hot summer,dry and mild winter.The forest in this reason is thorn forest and dry grass lands.Rainfall to Nannaj is very less.

Nannaj is famous for wildlife sanctuary and especially for Great Indian Bustards(Ardeotis nigriceps). Hence it is called as Great indian Bustard Scantuary,and it is named as Jawaharlal Nehru Bustard Sanctuary in 1979.Great Indian Bustard in Nannaj was first noticed by MR.B.S.Kulkarni in 1972.Its because of Mr.Kulkarni's extensive efforts to save this endangered species, Dr. Salim Ali visited Nannaj and started research on this project. Great Indian Bustards(GIB) are locally called as Maldhok and it is a endangered big bird.The natural habitant of Great Indian Bustard is short grass plains.GIBs prefere open grass lands.

Here is an account of our trip to Nannaj

After a rainy day I visited Nannaj along with few bird enthusiasts to the Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary.Prior permission to visit this place is must.I spoke with few wild-life research students in the guest house premises and found that one group was doing research on Wolves  and another group was doing research on Blackbucks .A girl in the Wolves research team  explained very clearly about the nature of Wolves. My conversation with the group went on and now it was time for us to see Queen of the Grasslands. we took a guide inside the sanctuary as he is familiar with the surroundings .He asked us to enter into a closed mud hut to watch the GIBs, as the Great Indian Bustards are shy in nature.

The mud hut

We found a  herd of Blackbucks, pack of wolves, pack of Dogs ,after much await we found the Queen of the grassland flying towards us and landed away.To my surprise, I found the GIB to be much larger than what I had imagined .We spotted around 8 Great Indian Bustards.They were there for a period of an hour and then flew off to another grass land on the opposite side.We were still there in the hut to see more GIBs. During this time we saw a pack of Dogs hunting Blackbucks. And on the other side of the land we found a herd of wolves in a playful mood.

The time when I visited Nannaj, the forest department had cleared all the big trees over a huge area of land to make the grass land GIB friendly and to grow the Great Indian Bustard's population.

Dry Grassland

It was a pleasure to the eyes to see Blackbucks playing and jumping on each other along with Great Indian Bustards in the beautiful grass lands.

Great Indian Bustard and Blackbuck

School children from the local school visited the Sanctuary on the same day and tried spotting birds with one of our friends Spotting scope.

These are the list of species of Birds we saw in Nannaj

1.Red -Wattled Lapwing, Yellow-Wattled Lapwing.

2.Chestnut Bellied Sandgrouse

3.Sykes-Lark

4.Indian Courser

5.Jungle Babbler

6.Jungle Bush Quail

7.Red Necked falcon
8.Short Toed Snake Eagle
9.Eurasian Collared Dove
10.Common Hawk Cuckoo
11.Indian Robin
12.Munias
13.Francolins
13.Spotted Owlet
14.Raptors
15.Indian Silver Bill
16.Pipits
17.Pied Bush Chat
18.House Sparrow
19.Indian Peafowl,Peacock
20.Baya Weavers
21.Small Minivets
22.Black Shouldered Kite
23.Common,Jungle  Myna
24.Jungle,House Crow


Apart from this we also spotted few garden Lizards(which are food for Great Indian Bustards),Red mites and etc..........

Coming to Accommodation one can stay at Forest department guest house which is preferable or can stay at Solapur hotels.The distance from Solapur to Nannaj is approximately 22 kms and the travel time is approximately 30mins.