Experiencing Kaggaladu

Kaggaladu, a village near Sira, Tumkur in Karnataka is not just like any other village. This village is the second largest breeding place for Painted Storks (Mycteria leucocephala ) in South India. Being so special, Kaggaladu is in need of serious sustainable conservation effort to maintain itself as one of the most important breeding sites for Painted Stork.

It was a beautiful experience when Balan and I visited Kaggaladu in March 2008. The first thing we noticed was, this large beautiful birds prefer Tamarind trees for nesting, completely avoiding all other trees. Probably the strong stunted branches of Tamarind provide an easy landing for these heavy birds. More over, having no dense foliage, tamarind trees offer relatively lower resistance against stiff wind, which is prevalent in this part of Karnataka. This makes the nesting places safe from dangerous sway.

We were told that Painted storks regularly visit this village for many years for breeding. The presence of a lake, availability of large trees and the protection offered by local community would be the reasons.

Even though we could see many tamarind trees in the village, the storks choose only 5 of them for reasons I am completely unaware of. Apart from the fact that the villagers take care of the trees, there is no coordinated effort to protect them. Four of the five nesting trees are on government land, by the road and the other one is on private land. We have seen private buses irresponsibly honk their horn loudly and race through the village road directly below the nests.

Just before entering the village there is a large tank which appears as if it is recently made. Even though it is connected with channels and flow regulating shutters, it is yet to receive water.

We stopped our car near the tank and there on top of the Tamarind trees, we saw magnificent large storks busy making their nest.



We were so excited to see these beautiful birds so near. This village has definitely won the confidence of the storks. We spent some time near one of the tamarind trees watching the birds. While perching on small branches in strong breeze they often spread their wings to maintain the balance. These birds were so confident that they even neglected our presence and concentrated on building their nests using twigs put together loosely.

It was hard to imagine seeing these large birds coming so close to human settlement and convert an entire Tamarind tree looks like a maternity ward.



After spending few hours, we decided to visit their main feeding ground, an old tank, not too far on the other side of the village. We could see a lot of other small birds too, as we approached the tank.



This tank is comparatively in a better condition than the first one. However the water has receded to it's deeper areas. We took a longer route to cross the tank along the bank and walked towards what seems like a small congregation of birds. Hiding ourselves behind thorny bushes we climbed up the embankment to get a closer look. Through the binocular we could identify different species of birds; Spot billed pelicans, Painted storks and Grey herons. The most exciting moment was when we saw Spot billed pelicans among other species of birds. Mainly because we never came across any reading saying Kaggaladu is frequented by Pelicans too.



Not disturbing the birds, we retrieved, climbed down and walked around the lake to reach the main road. It was not a good sight to see people using this lake for washing large quantities of cloths, probably using chemical detergents and thus polluting the water. More disturbingly part of the lake bed was dug up at various places for making bricks.

We just wished the paddy fields in the village which lie adjacent to the lakes, where storks feed, will one day stop using chemical pesticides.

On the way back we saw a group of people extracting fiber from a plant. It was learned that these strong fibers are shipped to Calcutta and there it is used for making expensive rugs. why cant we encourage these people to make rugs here itself?

It was getting late, we started off to Bangalore, wishing we would visit this place again.