"No Water, No Birds, No Tourists" - Drought Empties India's Keoladeo Park Of Legendary Birdlife

[hatrack]

BHARATPUR, India - For years, tourists have come to India's Keoladeo Ghana National Park to gaze at shimmering, bird-flocked wetlands stretching to the horizon. But where there were once vast lakes, visitors now find puddles nursed by a network of stuttering diesel-fuelled pumps, which suck up groundwater from deep beneath the parched earth.

Years of poor monsoon rains have left most of this World Heritage site near Bharatpur in the desert state of Rajasthan dry and cracked, while local farmers insist on getting most of what little rain water is dammed to irrigate their fields. This has forced most of the thousands of migratory birds that would once spectacularly descend on Keoladeo every year for the winter to make alternative arrangements elsewhere. "Before, the skies were so full of birds it was a wonder they didn't collide into each other," recalled Mahendra Vyas, a lawyer who advises India's Supreme Court on conservation issues. "Now there is nothing there," he added.

Although the park has not yet been added to the United Nation's danger list, the World Heritage committee warned in 2005 that if the park continues to dry up then it risks losing its status as a World Heritage site.

"The situation is not good and the prognosis for the future also doesn't appear to be very encouraging," Kishore Rao, the deputy director of the United Nation's World Heritage Centre, told Reuters by telephone from his Paris office. "Delisting has not happened before but that doesn't mean it won't happen in the future," said Rao.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/40524/story.htm

[phantom power]

1. Nature preserves can't protect against climate change.

Bad. Very very bad. Mass-extinction bad.