Gurugram: 40 years after it was last spotted in Sultanpur, a species returns

GURUGRAM: The spotting of a rare water bird at Sultanpur National Park created a flutter among birders recently. They confirmed that the sighting, on March 2, was of the hybrid variety of the falcated duck (Mareca falcata).
This species is a winter visitor to the wetlands of east Asia, mainly in China and Japan, and parts of southeast Asia. The falcated duck, which breeds in the marshy interiors of northeast Asia, Russia, North Korea, China and Mongolia, was last spotted here more than 40 years ago, in 1979.
Not surprisingly, the news brought excitement to the community of birders, whose members recognise the exceptionality of such an occurrence. “Considering that the bird is rare in this part of the country, there are mostly sparse historical records of their sighting from Delhi-NCR, with the last being in 1979 by Sudhir Vyas,” shared Abhishek Gulshan, founder of ‘NINOX - Owl about Nature’, a nature education and awareness initiative.
There are, he revealed, barely a handful of records of the species in the region. “To our surprise, a fellow birdwatcher, Douglas Ball, had posted a picture from Sultanpur on February 27, of a duck which looked very similar to a falcated duck. On careful inspection, it turned out to be a hybrid bird as there have been prior records of falcated duck interbreeding with similar-sized gadwalls,” Gulshan continued.
It was, in fact, second time lucky for Gulshan and his fellow birders. A day earlier, they had been scanning the area for the hybrid species for around three hours, but in vain. The next day, a Monday, they returned to the spot to a change of fortune. “The three of us somehow managed to locate it,” he said.
“The bird in view looked slightly different from a typical falcated duck, showing variation in colour on the head, with yellow on the throat and above the upper mandible, which is otherwise absent in falcated ducks.”
Vyas, the birder who last spotted a falcated duck in these parts, recalled with delight that “brilliant” February morning, when he caught a glimpse of the distinctive and “handsome” species at Okhla. “There was only the old wooden weir across the Yamuna at Okhla then; the Kalindi Kunj barrage only came up in the 1980s, and the reedy impoundment beyond the Okhla Sailing Club held rafts of duck each winter. There it was, the male falcated duck, resplendent in a party of more soberly-clad gadwall,” described Vyas, who has served as India’s ambassador to Germany, United Arab Emirates and Bhutan.
“I wrote about the record in an article published in the journal of the Bombay Natural History Society some years later. I believe this was the last occasion this species had been seen in the Delhi area, until the present report from Sultanpur.”
Delhi and its surrounds have been transformed in the last four decades but for Sudhir Vyas, it was almost as if time stood still. Incidentally, there have been occasional sightings of the falcated duck in eastern India, in Assam and Bengal, with a few confirmations of sightings from Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra.