Wings of India: A Birding Expedition

Drive south to Keoladeo Ghana — the man-made marsh that became the subcontinent's most famous bird reserve. From cycle rickshaws on the raised bunds: painted storks stacked on their nests, sarus cranes in the shallows, and if the winter is kind, the whistle of bar-headed geese newly down from Tibet.

A second dawn on the marsh, this time for the hunters: marsh harriers quartering the reeds, greater spotted eagles on the dead snags, a peregrine putting ten thousand ducks into the air at once. Afternoon at the Ajan Bund grasslands for larks, pipits and the evening cranes.

West to Ranthambore, where the birding comes with an escort of tigers. Afternoon safari in the dhok forest: painted spurfowl scratching the leaf litter, white-naped woodpeckers, crested serpent-eagles — and every thicket checked twice, because this is still tiger country and the jungle tells you so.

Morning drive to the lakes — bronze-winged jacanas on the lotus pads, black storks by the ruined chhatrisChhatriA domed pavilion raised on pillars, used to crown a roofline or to mark a cenotaph.Read in the glossary, an Indian eagle-owl in the fort cliff's shadowed crevice. Then south by air to the other India: the wet, green, endemic-heavy GhatsGhatA flight of steps leading down to a river or tank, used for bathing, worship and cremation.Read in the glossary.

Dawn by boat into the Kumarakom Bird Sanctuary heronry: darters drying crucifix wings, night-herons ferrying nest sticks, streaks of stork-billed kingfisher blue. The afternoon is slow water — a country boat through paddies where whiskered terns hawk insects over the green.

Climb into the Cardamom Hills. Periyar's lake-and-forest mosaic holds the mid-elevation specials: great hornbills crossing the reservoir in heavy pairs, Malabar giant squirrels rustling the canopy, white-bellied treepies in the shade coffee. Evening walk with a tribal tracker on the sanctuary's edge.

Into the sanctuary proper on foot with armed forest staff — the only way Periyar truly opens. Flycatchers in the gloom, trogon fire in the mid-storey, wild elephant sign kept respectfully upwind. An afternoon at leisure: the trip list gets its mid-expedition audit over cardamom coffee.

The final climb: Munnar's tea country and the shola-grassland mosaic above it. In Eravikulam's mist, the black-and-orange flycatcher and Nilgiri pipit — species that exist nowhere else on earth — and on the crags, Nilgiri tahr grazing through the clouds.

A last dawn among the tea, then down the ghat road to Cochin for the flight home. The expedition list is closed formally over breakfast — species, place and hour, in a bound field log inscribed by your ornithologist. Most guests pass one hundred and eighty. All of them come back.