National Parks and Sanctuaries of Uttar Pradesh: Dudhwa to Okhla

Uttar Pradesh keeps its wildlife in three belts. Along the Nepal border runs the Terai, a wet strip of tall grassland and sal forest where the tiger, the swamp deer and the one-horned rhinoceros live; along the Ganga, the Yamuna and the Chambal lie the river sanctuaries of the gharial, the turtle and the Gangetic dolphin; and across the plains sit dozens of shallow lakes and marshes that fill with migratory birds every winter. Questions from this chapter are nearly always of one kind: a protected area paired with its district, its river or the animal it was created for. Learn the pairs and the chapter is finished.

Dudhwa, the only national park of the state

Uttar Pradesh has a single national park, Dudhwa, in Lakhimpur Kheri district on the Indo-Nepal border. It was declared a national park in 1977 and is the finest surviving piece of Terai grassland in India, home to the swamp deer or barasingha, the state animal, and to the hispid hare. The one-horned rhinoceros was brought back to Dudhwa in 1984, generations after it had been shot out of the Terai, and the herd there is now the only rhino population of the state. In the late 1980s Dudhwa became a tiger reserve under Project Tiger, taking in the Kishanpur sanctuary of Lakhimpur Kheri and, later, the Katarniaghat sanctuary of Bahraich, so the three together form the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve.

Tiger reserves and the big sanctuaries

Wetlands and the birds

The plains of Uttar Pradesh are dotted with shallow lakes, locally called jheel or taal, that are shallow enough to grow weed and deep enough to hold water through the winter, which is exactly what wading and diving birds need. The state's Ramsar wetlands, the sites recognised under the international Convention on Wetlands, include the Upper Ganga river stretch from Brijghat to Narora, which was the first in the state, the Sur Sarovar lake at Keetham near Agra, the Nawabganj and Parvati Arga lakes, Saman, Samaspur, Sandi and Sarsai Nawar, the Haiderpur wetland on the Ganga barrage in Muzaffarnagar and Bakhira in Sant Kabir Nagar.

• The sarus crane, the tallest flying bird in the world, is the state bird, and the marshes of Mainpuri, Etawah and Etah are its stronghold.
• The Gangetic dolphin, India's national aquatic animal, survives in the Ganga and in the Girwa at Katarniaghat.
• The Okhla bird sanctuary on the Yamuna in Gautam Buddha Nagar sits on the city's edge and still draws thousands of migratory birds.
• Sur Sarovar also houses the bear rescue facility at Agra, built for dancing bears taken from their keepers.
• The state tree is the ashoka and the state flower the palash, which an exam may ask alongside the state bird and animal.

Why these places matter

The Terai belt is a corridor: tigers move between Dudhwa, Pilibhit, Katarniaghat and the forests of Nepal, and the whole landscape is managed with that movement in mind. The river sanctuaries do the same work for water species, protecting a continuous stretch of river rather than a patch of land, which is why the Chambal sanctuary is shared by three states and why a sanctuary for turtles was declared on the Ganga at Varanasi. For the exam, remember that a national park allows no human use, a sanctuary allows regulated use, and a tiger reserve is a management unit of core and buffer declared under the Wildlife Protection Act.