Kanwar Lake Bird Sanctuary

A wandering river made this. The Burhi Gandak, a tributary of the Ganga, meandered across the plain in the geological past and left an oxbow lake behind — 2,620 hectares of it, the largest freshwater oxbow in Asia and around six times the size of the Bharatpur Sanctuary. It became Bihar's first Ramsar site in November 2020. Timing matters: the monsoon puts 1.5 metres of water across the site, and in the dry season the marshes dry out and get farmed. Counts stand at 221 bird species, with 58 migratory waterbirds using it as a stopover on the Central Asian Flyway. Manjhaul, 22 km north-west of Begusarai.