Tripping the world, slowly
Some people are just so elegant that they look equally good in colour or black and white. A vote found garganeys to be the world’s most elegant duck. Only one person participated in that poll, me. But it is true. It looks great even when startled.
This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.
Why did this flower look half familiar? I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I took photos and left the identification for later. Now when I dug it out after a whole season has passed, I realized why I had that nagging feeling. This coneflower (Strobilanthes penstemonides) is related to the Karvi and Neelakurinji which mass-flower once in many years. I’ve seen other coneflowers too, but mainly in the western ghats, but this was growing in the Himalayas.
Could the ID be wrong? I can’t rule that out without uprooting the plant. Still, everything I see fits: the shape of the flower, the anthers and stamen, the form of the leaves (highlighted in the photo above), the size of the bush and flower, and even the way it buds out. Then I remembered that a year earlier I’d seen chir pheasants eating a coneflower (Strobilanthes) at a similar height in Uttarakhand. And then there is the common name: Dalhousie blue bells. It’s a Himalayan species all right. So the ID is very likely to be correct.
This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.
Two roads diverged at Rorathang. In a yellow fog of a forest fire I watched one disappear around a bend as we took the other branch and crossed a bridge over the Rangpo river. A short climb and we pulled up for a break at a tea house.
There are many teahouses across this part of the country, a place for a short stop, or a very basic overnight stay. But not many can boast of a large concrete fish in front of it, complete with its own little concrete pool. A hill dog was very excited to see us and jumped on top of the fish to present his profile to us: a clear photo op. We paparazzi are always happy to click the king of the hills.
I took a look at the tea house. It had a typical layout. The place was divided into three areas: a kitchen at the back, a table for eating at the entrance, and next to it a small room where you could spend a night if you needed to. The toilet adjoining the tea house was kept clean by a boy who collected a small fee for its use. The lady who ran the tea house brewed up a cuppa as we stretched our legs.
A little roadside complex had begun to form around the tea house. Next to it was a car repair. With its stock of truck tires, it looked like it catered more to trucks than cars. No one was in evidence. I peeped in at the door cut into the the metal wall of the shack behind it to look. It was a typical workshop space, full of tools, and the smell of oil. Comfortable, and too dark for photos. Next to it was a small store. A couple came by on a scooter and the lady walked in to the shop while the man parked. They had set up a nice table outside. Was there enough custom here to compete with the tea house? Our tea was ready, so I walked back to it.
This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.
Mandar had chosen good homestays for the trip to Sikkim. His focus was on places where you could watch birds right from the property. Homestays can be dicey, and depend on the way people live their own lives. The easiest index, I find, is to look at the kitchen. A clean and airy kitchen means that the rooms in the homestay are likely to be clean. And the bonus is that the food that you get will be made with care. This one had a wonderful view. In the featured photo you can see the small farm adjoining the property with its bushes of black cardamom (that is the main cash crop here), and beyond that the hills of upper east Sikkim. As we watched the scene in front of us I had three lifers: a Himalayan bluetail (Tarsiger rufilatus), a blue-fronted redstart (Phoenicurus frontalis), and a short-billed minivet (Pericrocotus brevirostris). A cackling laugh reminded us that white-crested laughingthrush are always lurking in these hills (but is lurk the right verb for these descendants of dinosaurs?).
All hill people have a garden outside their house. If there is enough space then there will be a patch of garden. If there is not, and often, even if there is, every available ledge will be crowded with potted plants. Sometimes even the pots are not needed: plastic bags full of soil can hold a plant. As a result, in every season the house will have colour around it. In the morning as we waited for the rain to subside, I took a photo of a ledge with flowers on it. My phone wanted me to use its resident AI to brighten the image, and I had to be pretty assertive to let it keep the atmosphere which I found so attractive.
At a bend in the road above the homestay we spent a good half an hour watching a mixed hunting party of birds forage in the trees. In spite of the rain and the gloom, a good time was had by all.
This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.
Spotting red-faced liocichlas (Liocichla phoenicea) was our main hope when we sat in a hide in east Sikkim. They are not endangered, but are extremely rare. Ebird has only about 2000 reports of them. Compare that to 6.6 million reports of Great egrets, and you can see how rare it is to sight one. We sighted two in as many hours, and managed to get some decent enough photos of this extremely shy bird. Even though it could not see us (sight is a primary sense for it, as you can guess by the size of its eyes) it remained wary, and stuck to the darkest corners at the edge of a clearing, eating what the laughingthrushes had dropped.
That is a clue to how it diverged from the base stock of laughingthrushes, in which earlier zoologists had placed it until genetic techniques indicated that it was just slightly too far away to be in the same genus. It skulks in the undergrowth, eating the food that is dropped to the forest floor by its messier cousins. Its range is very restricted: from Bhutan to Arunachal Pradesh in the north, and then south along the Myanmar border where the dense forests of Nagaland and Mizoram give over to the irrigated plains where a war is currently raging. In this small but dense area the species has differentiated enough to have two subspecies (the ones we saw belong to the nominate L. phoenicea phoenicea). The process of diversification and speciation is widely studied, but still shrouded in mystery.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine, but do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.
Not-a-particularly-beach-person is how I describe myself. I don’t lie on hot parrotfish poop to let UV radiation from the sun knock off safety features from my DNA. But I like to walk over wet sand and shallow water with my camera in hand.
It is a silent place, and you can lose yourself in contemplating the patterns in front of you. These are some that I got back from the beaches of Neil Island in the Andamans.
Near Siliguri, at a place called Phulbari, there is a crossing between India and Bangladesh. We reached in the evening after the crossing had closed. There was a fish stall very close to the crossing. A this time there were no people to buy anything. It was stocked with large iceboxes made of thermocol, and a sample of the fish available was laid out for inspection. The two people manning the stall were happy to talk even after I said that I was not a customer.
He identified the fish for me: magur (catfish), chingdi (prawns), pabda, and shol. I can’t recognize the fish that is eaten in Bengal, but I knew catfish and prawns, and I know the taste of pabda. I was surprised to learn that technically it is also a catfish, sometimes called butterfish. I found later that shol is called a snakehead murrel; I could not remember its taste. I asked “Where does the fish come from?” The answer was obvious. “Across the border,” he said. Fish is one of the things that Bangladesh exports, and the appetite for fish in Bengal is prodigious.
Origami or flower? With a dahlia captured in black and white it can be hard to tell the difference. Is the presence of the spider (which looks like Dendrolycosa putiana, an inhabitant of south and southeast Asia) enough to tell you that it is a true flower seen in a garden? Or are you still undecided?
When you go for a walk on a wooded hillside in autumn you should expect to see that many of the plants have gone to seed. This is so even if the hill is called Phulchowki, which means a custom house of flowers. Perhaps especially so. But this is a good time to notice something that you the profusion of colour of a month earlier may have hidden. Every flowering plant is an invitation to pollinators to come and help it have sex. The honey pot under the flower’s sexual organs is the payoff for the pollinator. But the cone of the flower is often also a trap for the creature. Spiders lie in wait inside the cone.
In the featured photo you can see a flower is wilting away, its job done. But a hopeful spider still lurks in its debris, with its feelers strung across the collapsing mass. The mchanics of the hunt are now laid bare: it hides high up under the sexual organs, to jump down on its prey as it burrows down for the honey pot. The hillside was the realm of jumping spiders, as you can see from the numerous tripwires spread among the plants. Which means that in the right season there will be spiderhunters here: many species of those tiny birds with long curves beaks which can grab a spider even if it retreats deep inside a flower. The web of nutrition spread wider than we could see: from under our feet where the fallen leaves were rotting away, to the sky above.
The rain stopped at night, and our morning in Khimseeka dawned bright and cold. We were prepared for the cold. So the lovely day was a wonderful gift after two continuous days of rain. Even before the sun had cleared the ridge behind us, we were out with cameras and binoculars watching the many birds which were out to make the best of the light. The early birder catches the bird, of course.
This was our first time in this region, so many of the birds I saw were lifers. (If you are wondering, a lifer is your first sighting of a new species.) There were people in our group who had come to these parts of the hills before. For all of us though, there was a special target that day: a hide at the edge of the forest a short walk away. We took the single road down.
The above photo shows the landscape around the hide. A thick undergrowth comes close to where we sat. There is about five meters of clearance in front to give us a view of the birds which come out. This rainforest and its undergrowth is full of cryptic birds which are rarely seen. We saw a couple of them in the hour and a half that we spent here. I have separate posts about them in the BoW series.
The morning well spent, we walked back uphill for the short stretch, with an eye out for the little warblers, tits, nuthatches, tree creepers, sunbirds, flycatchers and spiderhunters that this forest abounds in. But there was more, we saw a piculet as well. It was no surprise. When I see a tree like the one in this photo, I have no doubt at all that it is full of insects. In fact, it must be so full of insects that it can sustain several bird waves a day.
Our walk ended at the door of our home for the night: this charming house in the forest. You can see the concrete ground floor, and the wattle and daub structure above it. There can be a lot of rain here, so the roof is pitched high. Unfortunately there are sometimes little gaps between the walls and the frames of doors and windows, so the nights are cold. Still, it was charming enough that we didn’t mind one night in the place. Between the lovely forest and the wonderful food which our hosts made for every meal, I wouldn’t mind spending a couple of nights here some time again. When I said this The Family agreed.
Don't hold your breath 