Head to Dhanauri Wetland tomorrow to celebrate the Bird Festival

Team L&M

All you bird enthusiasts out there, it is time you packed your bags for the day and headed to Dhanauri Wetland in Greater Noida for the Bird Festival being celebrated to mark the World Wetlands Day tomorrow.

Dhanauri in district Gautam Budh Nagar, around 45 km from Noida and 8 km from the Formula One track on the Yamuna Expressway, was notified as a wetland and a sarus crane nesting and breeding zone after noted birder Anand Arya, while on a birding tour in the region in 2014, chanced upon it.

Gautam Budh Nagar district has three wetlands – Okhla Bird Sanctuary, Surajpur and Dhanauri. Surrounded by a green buffer zone, Dhanauri is a marshland with a core wet area of 100 acres and home to around 133 species of different migratory as well resident birds. As of now, there are around 120 sarus cranes, listed under Schedule 1 of the Wildlife Protection Act, at Dhanauri.

While sarus cranes have been a big attraction at Dhanauri, birders have spotted purple herons, hoopoes, Jacobin cuckoo, bronze winged jacanas, grey-headed swamp hens, bay weavers, Egyptian vultures, red-wattled lapwigs, Indian robins, river terns, spot billed ducks, Indian cormorants, egrets, common moorhens and more.

World Wetlands Day is celebrated every year on February 2 and marks the date of the adoption of the Convention on Wetlands on February 2, 1971, in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the shores of the Caspian Sea.