UN News

by Enam Ul Haque

A Campus to Comfort Nature Lovers

Nature lovers living in Dhaka city have very few places to do what they love to do: be outdoors. Ramna Garden and Zia Uddyan, the two green patches worth mentioning, are always packed full of people.

These are not the places for anyone to go for a quiet stroll and a bit of nature watching. Jahangirnagar University Campus at Savar is one rare place near the city where the nature lovers can still find small patches of wilderness and a few wild creatures. The campus is good for an early morning walk any day, but on holidays it is good for daylong wanderings.

The campus is about 25 km west of the city centre. If you exit the city through Mirpur Bridge and drive 3 km past Savar Bazaar, the campus will be on your left. It is largely hidden from the main road by lines of jackfruit trees 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 allowed entry through the third gate. Gatekeepers are proud of the wild ducks on their campus and are 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 Vice-Chancellor’s office and start walking. The major road passes by a tank with its twisted tentacles winding through half of the campus. As you walk around you will see waterbirds with oversized toes walking on the lily pads, cormorants drying off their soggy wing on acacia branches, flocks of half-asleep Whistling Ducks floating like castaways or a Stork-billed Kingfisher falling into the lake from a stooping rain-tree trunk like a ripe brown fruit. You may be lucky to 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.

Winter season is of course, the best time to walk through the campus. You sweat less and see more birds in the lake. But the monsoon season is the time when the campus is more melodious. It is the breeding time of most birds here. The guy who does not sing well finds no mate in the bird world. Cuckoos, kingfishers and White-breasted Water Hens keep the campus reverberating with the most wonderful symphony of nature.