November 2026

Wetland travel gathers bad advice the way mud gathers footprints. Old ticket prices circulate for years. Someone’s cousin remembers a

Mangalajodi sits on the northern edge of Chilika, where the lagoon frays into marsh, channels and village land in Odisha.

Guest letter — a composite visitor voice from a first winter trip to Chilika’s marshes. Not the editors’ own travel.

Somewhere between the first pair of binoculars and the tenth birding group chat, many of us learn the wrong ambition.

Fame is a poor map of India’s wetlands. Bharatpur and Chilika deserve their reputations, yet November also fills quieter floodplain

In November, Indian wetlands look suddenly busier. The temptation is to narrate that busyness as spectacle — “thousands arrive,” “rare

Chilika does not introduce itself as a single lake. It is a brackish lagoon on Odisha’s coast, wide enough that

There is a version of Bharatpur that exists mainly in photographs taken after breakfast. The light is hard, the paths

Issue 91 · November 2026 Birding Season This month we travel slowly through India’s winter wetlands — Keoladeo Ghana at

November arrives in India with a change you can hear before you see it. Wetlands that looked ordinary in September