Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve

Koshi Tappu is a floodplain, not a forest. The Sapta Koshi river comes off the Himalaya, hits the plains, spreads out and changes course, and what it leaves is a shifting mosaic of sandbanks, marsh, tall grass and shallow water inside two long embankments. More than five hundred bird species have been recorded in 175 square kilometres.

If you are not interested in birds, this is a hot flat place with mosquitoes. If you are, it is the best day’s watching in Nepal, and it is not a close contest.

What is here

Birds. Ducks and geese in tens of thousands from November, waders on every sandbank, storks (black-necked, woolly-necked, Asian openbill), herons, egrets, ibis, terns, kingfishers, harriers quartering the grass. Passage migrants in spring add species that occur almost nowhere else in the country. The reserve was declared a Ramsar wetland of international importance in 1987.

Wild water buffalo. The arna, and this is the last wild population in Nepal. A couple of hundred animals and nothing like the domestic buffalo you see everywhere else. They are large, dark and genuinely wild, and interbreeding with domestic stock is one of the main threats to them.

Gangetic river dolphin in the main channel, in small and declining numbers. Seeing one is luck and it is a brief grey back rather than anything acrobatic.

Also: hog deer, wild boar, blue bull, gharial and mugger, otters, and around 200 fish species.

How to watch it

By boat, at first light, drifting down a channel. This is the way to do it and it is what the reserve is for. Dugouts and small motorboats both operate; the quieter the better.

On foot along the embankments and through the grass with a guide. Long, hot, and productive.

By jeep on the tracks inside the eastern embankment.

Most visitors stay in one of a small number of tented or lodge camps near the reserve’s western edge, several of which are run by people who are serious birders themselves. Ask when booking: the difference between a guide who can call the species and one who cannot is the whole trip here.

A scope matters more here than anywhere else in Nepal. Much of the watching is across water at distance. If your camp has one, use it; if it does not, ask before you book.

The river, which is the point

The Koshi drains a huge slice of the Himalaya including the Everest region, and it carries an extraordinary amount of sediment down onto the plains. It has repeatedly shifted its course across this floodplain, and the 2008 barrage breach flooded a very large area of Nepal and Bihar and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

The communities on the embankments live with that. Any honest visit here involves noticing that the wetland’s protection and the district’s flood risk are the same subject.

Practical things

• The season is short and specific. November to February for numbers. Summer is over 40C and the monsoon floods it.
• Mosquitoes are constant. Long sleeves at dusk, repellent, and check current malaria advice for the eastern Terai before travelling.
• Facilities are limited. A handful of camps, basic rooms, generator power. Nothing here is smart.
• Winter fog delays flights into Biratnagar in December and January.
• Bring your own optics. Loaners, where they exist at all, are poor.