Sultanpur National Park

Sultanpur National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Sultanpur is a small bird sanctuary round a shallow lake on the plains of Haryana, fifteen kilometres beyond the office towers of Gurugram, the former Gurgaon, and about fifty kilometres, an hour and a half to two hours according to the traffic, from the centre of Delhi, and it is the easiest place for a visitor to the capital to see the wintering waterfowl of northern India without travelling to Bharatpur. There is no convenient public transport, and visitors come by hired car, taxi or on the day tours from Delhi, which supply a car and, in the better cases, a birdwatching guide with a telescope, which makes a great difference; those tours commonly leave at five or six in the morning in order to arrive at the opening of the gate. The park is run by the Haryana forest department, which charges a very small entrance fee, with a supplement for cameras, at the ticket window, where identity documents may be asked for.

Inside, the arrangement is simple: a level, paved and earthen path, about three and a half kilometres long, makes a circuit of the lake under acacia and neem trees, with four brick watchtowers from which to look over the water and its islands, benches, signboards illustrating the birds, and side paths to the shore. It is entirely flat and takes two hours at a birdwatcher's pace. No vehicles, boats or bicycles are allowed. Near the entrance there is an interpretation centre with displays and photographs, a small library dedicated to the ornithologist Salim Ali, a children's park, toilets, and a state tourist complex with a plain restaurant and rooms. Local men who know the birds well wait at the gate and can be hired as guides for a modest fee.

Visiting Sultanpur National Park: what you will see

The park covers no more than 1.43 square kilometres, which makes it one of the smallest national parks in India, and its creation is owed to one man, Peter Jackson, a British journalist who was Reuters' correspondent in Delhi and an ardent birdwatcher, later a leading figure in the conservation of the tiger. In the 1960s he used to come out to the jheel, a natural depression near the village of Sultanpur which filled with the monsoon rain and overflow and dried out in summer, and which drew astonishing numbers of wintering birds; alarmed by shooting and by plans for drainage, he wrote in 1970 to the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, herself a founder member of the Delhi birdwatching society, asking that it be protected. It was declared a bird sanctuary in 1972 and raised to a national park in 1989, and in 2021 it was recognised as a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar convention. The forest department subsequently deepened parts of the lake, raised earth mounds as islands for nesting, planted trees, and, since the natural supply became unreliable as the surrounding country was built over and the water table fell, the lake is now topped up with water brought by pipe from a canal of the Yamuna.

About 250 species of birds have been recorded. The residents include painted storks, black-necked storks, black-headed ibis, spoonbills, purple herons, darters, cormorants, purple swamphens, the sarus crane, the tallest flying bird in the world, which pairs for life and is seen in the fields round about, grey francolins, hoopoes, Indian rollers, spotted owlets and rose-ringed parakeets, many of which nest in noisy mixed colonies on the acacias standing in the water. From October they are joined by the migrants that come down the Central Asian flyway from Siberia, Central Asia and Tibet: bar-headed geese, which cross the Himalaya at extraordinary heights, greylag geese, northern pintail, shoveler, common teal, gadwall, wigeon, ruddy shelduck, great white pelicans, greater flamingos, black-tailed godwits, ruffs, spotted redshanks, marsh harriers, and wintering eagles. Nilgai, the big blue-grey antelope of the Indian plains, wander freely through the park and sometimes wade in the lake, and there are a few jackals, mongooses and monitor lizards.

Sultanpur National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open from sunrise to about 4.30 pm and is closed on Tuesdays; it is generally shut to visitors altogether during the breeding season and the monsoon, from June to September, though practice has varied, so check beforehand. The season is from October to March, and the peak from December to February, when the migrants are present in the greatest numbers. Those are, however, also the months of the dense winter fog and smog of the Delhi plain, which can hide the lake until the middle of the morning and delay the journey, so that a bright day in late November or in February is ideal.

Be there at opening, since the birds are most active in the first two hours and the park fills with families and picnickers from Gurugram on weekends and holidays, which are best avoided. By April it is hot and the water is low. Bring binoculars, warm clothes for a winter morning, and water. Allow two to three hours. Gurugram is half an hour away, the Qutb Minar on the way back into Delhi, and the Basai wetland, unprotected but excellent for birds, near by.