Citrine wagtail, Photo: Enam Ul Haque

Nature lovers living in Dhaka City have very few places to go. A few green patches like Ramna Garden or Gulshan Park are always packed with people. These aren't the places one would want to go for a quiet stroll and a bit of nature watching. The campus of Jahangirnagar University at Savar, however, is one rare place near the city where nature lovers can find small patches of forest and a few wild creatures too. It is good for an early morning walk on any weekday, but it's perfect for daylong wanderings on holidays.

The campus is largely hidden from the main road by rows of large trees like jackfruit and scrub jungle. From the road you only see a couple of red-brick buildings sticking their heads out of the woods. The campus has three large gates opening to the main road. Casual visitors are usually allowed entry through the second and the third gates. The gatekeepers are proud of the wild ducks on their campus and happy to let in visitors who call themselves bird-watchers. Binoculars visibly hanging from your neck are likely to influence them very favourably.

Driving inside the campus is allowed, but it is much better to park near the TSC or the Vice Chancellor's Office and start foot-slogging. The major road passes by the lakes and as you walk around, you will see jacanas with over-size toes walking on the lily pads, cormorants drying off their soggy wings on acacia branches, flocks of half-asleep whistling ducks or a stork-billed kingfisher diving into the lake from a stooping rain tree trunk. If you are lucky, you'll see a grey-headed fish-eagle swoop down on a hapless fish or a half-awake brown fish-owl mobbed by the marauding jungle babblers in the bamboo-grove.

During monsoon the campus reverberates with the most wonderful symphony of nature. It's the breeding time for most birds here. The male bird that doesn't sing well finds no mate in the bird world. Cuckoos, kingfishers and white-breasted waterhens keep the campus euphonious during this time. Now that the monsoon is over, it has less auditory and more visual surprises to offer. Big flocks of whistling duck from the drying beels of the country are converging on the cosy lakes of the campus. 

In many ways, winter is the best time to walk through the campus. You sweat less and see more birds in the lake. You see much more in the trees of the botanical garden and the scrub jungle behind the science workshop. Special species like verditer flycatcher, grey-headed canary-flycatcher and lesser racket-tailed drongo can be seen here. The marshy fields beyond the students' hostels and the villages beyond are good for rarer species such as greater painted snipe, citrine wagtail, eurasian stone chat and yellow-wattled lapwing.

I can recommend a walk on this campus in winter to anyone, bird watcher or not. I haven't met anyone who has returned dissatisfied from a short walk around this campus.

The writer is an ornithologist.