Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary

The sky was clear, but the view was murky, when our alarms went off fifteen minutes before dawn. We gamely waited for the sun to rise, and saw the Nanda Devi peak faintly. As we sipped our early morning tea, the man who brought it told us that the view was brilliant a couple of weeks ago, but had turned murky since cyclone Hudhud struck the coast. I’d taken a record shot of the peak, and a little image processing could elicit this view.

We left for the Binsar sanctuary immediately. Just before we got into the car, The Family spotted a gray-headed warbler. It was a twenty minute drive to Binsar, and we had to wake the gatekeeper once we reached. There is an entry fee to the park but it turned out that you have to read the fine print carefully and argue the interpretation of the various rates at the ticket counter. We did not know this, and just paid single-entry fees. Just as we prepared to drive in two yellow throated martens streaked across a meadow in front of us. I thought to myself “Mongoose”, but did not voice it because I knew it was too large to be one. We identified it by a chart we found at the gate.

The gatekeeper told us to go to the Tourist Department guest house where we could find a guide and walk up to highest point in the sanctuary: Zero Point. We drove up slowly, keeping an eye out for the birds we could hear all around us. Most of the way the road stuck close to rock walls, allowing only limited angles of view. We saw a couple of whistling thrushes before we arrived at the beautiful sunny meadow you see above. There was water trickling down one side, and the combination of trees and open grass meant that this could be a good spot for birding.

Streaked laughing thrush

It was. We kept coming back to the place and saw a large part of our eventual bird list here. I see that we noted down mountain hawk-eagle, Himalayan buzzard, Himalayan vulture, gray-backed tit, brown-fronted woodpecker, scarlet Minivet, streaked laughing-thrush, white-throated laughing-thrush, rufous Sibia, great Barbet and a dark-sided flycatcher as being in this one place in one day! Three of them were lifers.

We approached the meadow from three different directions on the succeeding days with our guide around Binsar, Sundar Singh, and saw black-headed Jays, Eurasian Jays, red-billed blue magpies, green-backed tits, a crested serpent eagle, and a white-tailed nut-hatch. This was also the meadow where I lost my footing and slipped down a slope to sprain my leg and bring the holidays to an end. But that was four days later, and just a day before we were supposed to leave.

But on our first visit we continued up to the guest house and asked for guides. One told us to order our lunch before going off on our walk. We did that, and then he told us to have tea before going on a walk. It was getting pretty late, and we were impatient. While we had tea The Family asked the chaiwalla whether there was a guide who could take us up immediately. That was how we met Sundar Singh.

A common punch (Dodona durga), seen near Zero Point. Thank you for the ID Peter

The protected oak forest of Binsar is not where you go to view mammals. Rather it is a lovely place for birds and insects, and walks. The easy 500 meter walk to Zero Point was a good start. The shaded path is bordered by mossy trees, and in the leaves and mud around, you can spot insects and slugs, if you pause to look. The morning’s haze had got worse when we reached the top, about 2500 meters high. The high Himalayas were not visible at all. In fact, we never got a good view of the Nanda Devi range during the week. We walked back in time for lunch. As we waited, we saw an Eurasian Jay for the first time in our lives, and a black-headed Jay soon after.

Being able to spot something in the wild is a matter of practice. In the last decade The Family has grown adept at spotting birds. I forget to look unless I’m with her, and even then I often do not spot the odd colours and shapes that are tell-tales for her. But I’ve become used to following a butterfly with my eye as it flutters by to see where it lands. As a result I managed to photograph this pale clouded yellow (Colias hylae) while telling her to look at it. She looked at the camera display and back at the bush before she saw it.

We loved Binsar and kept going back to it. The next day we climbed up to the Zero Point and then followed Sundar on a six kilometer hike through the forest and back to our favourite meadow. After the first view of the martens we did not see any mammals for a long while. From Zero Point we heard the distant cough of a leopard in a valley. Occasionally we heard the bark of the Muntjac. On our fourth day in Binsar we saw a leopard kill by the road. A family of jackals was feasting on the remains but ran away when it saw our car. I tried very hard to take a long shot of the jackals, but they were too wary.

Instead we saw more birds: spectacular Koklass pheasants with their green heads stalked a slope, unaware of us standing on the road to watch them, and two scaly-bellied woodpeckers, the male with a red head easily told from the black-headed female, foraging in the grass, unconcerned by the car standing nearby. There were many butterflies to be seen, from the ubiquitous Indian tortoiseshell (Aglais caschmirensis), sulphurs, grass yellows, to the unsual and unidentified. Binsar remains a place which we could visit again.