They are on their anemone

Grape-leaf anemone (Eriocapitella vitifolia) were growing at the edge of the path. We were coming down Phulchowki in the south of Kathmandu. I did a double take. It is a flower of the late summer. You expect to see it in August and, maybe, in September. How was it growing here in early November? Could it be something else? Not a chance. The form of the flower, the shape of the leaves, everything pointed to this one species of anemone. The seasons are topsy turvy of course, but this late a flowering!

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.

Dalhousie Blue Bells

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.

Honey trap

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.

A micro-flower of Nepal

A plant that I saw growing by the road down Phulchowki looked like it was about to bud. Each bud was less than half a centimeter across. “Definitely one of the Aster family,” I thought to myself as I took the macro. Not at all, as I found when I looked at the photo. The balls were made of many, really many, tiny flowers, as you can see. Each flower is less than 100 microns long. The plant is not in the family Asteraceae. The inner flowers have begun to open up, the outer buds in each ball-like inflorescence are yet to open. My camera sees things more clearly than my eye.

I had photos of the whole plant, and you can see the shape of the deeply lobed leaves here. The leaves are a couple of centimeters long, so this photo gives you a better sense of the scale of the flowers. The branching stem reminded me of knotweed. I looked through whatever flower-finders I could find. Nothing identifies these microscopic flowers. Most guides concentrate on flowers that the human eye can see. But they are insufficient today, when a pocket-sized camera can resolve what needed a low-powered microscope earlier.

I usually set the camera on focus stacking mode when I take macros of these tiny things. As a result I caught a caterpillar perched on the branch. The little crawler was about a centimeter long, so that gives you a scale of things. I have a hard time identifying moths. Identifying the caterpillar is just impossible for me.

Autumn with bells on it

We’d decided to spend a morning climbing Phulchowki in Kathmandu while doing some birding. That was a bit of a washout. We spotted a few birds, but just a few. But the wildflower haul was terrific. When I came across these lovely bells hanging on an otherwise dry bush I was pretty sure that I would be able to identify it later. If it had been red or orange I would have immediately put it down as a species of Aeschynanthus. The dry bush was over a meter high, with an upright central stem from which branches went out at regular intervals. I couldn’t find this in a field guide, but eventually an app pointed me in the right direction: genus Isodon. It is likely to be Isodon lophanthoides, whose Nepali name is Masino chapte.

Raithaane

What you see in the photo above is a pie filled with juju dhau. The crust is made from tsampa, a flour made from roasted barley. It is a signature dish in the wonderful eatery in Kathmandu called Raithaane. We went there for lunch the day before Diwali. Unlike in an India city, when Diwali is a time of overflowing crowds in shops and restaurants, Kathmandu sleeps in Diwali. It is a private festival, and everything shuts down.

The restaurant was open for its last service in a week. A skeleton staff manned the open kitchen. Raithaane is doing sterling work in collecting old recipes from across Nepal for its kitchen. We liked what we ate and drank, and wished we’d thought of eating there a couple of times more. There’s always our next trip to look forward to.

I’m travelling in a really odd place where no network reaches. I will take a look at your posts and telegrams as soon as I’m able to.

Bharatpur, Nepal

As we walked out of the forest trail we’d walked for an hour before sunset near Chitwan National Park, a tractor overloaded with hay beat us to the exit gate. I guessed that like all the national parks and wildlife reserves in India, Nepal perhaps also designates a core zone and a buffer zone around it. In India the core zone excludes human exploitation, but the buffer zone protects traditional rights which local villages had while prohibiting new development. Hay meant fields, which meant agriculture. That would not be permitted within the wildlife protection area.

Outside was the town of Bharatpur in Nepal. A jeep waited to take us back to our hotel. An interesting sight nearby was the so-called Umbrella Street, a promenade covered with cheerful rainbow coloured umbrellas in a food court. This would be full of families and children on holidays, I guessed. Bharatpur is on the terai, and in summer it would be hot. The umbrellas would be even more welcome then.

Just before we left the buffer zone I saw a little temple to one side of the road. This was more indication that traditional rights of the villagers are still protected here. Within a kilometer from the gate we began to see two-storeyed structures along the road. The ground floors were invariably given over to commerce: anything from groceries and food to clothes and tents. This was one of the main trade routes with India, and our driver said that at times it was chock-a-block with trucks. Still there were people who put out wheat by the roadside to dry. Bharatpur had a pleasant small-town vibe if this road was typical.

I’m travelling in a really odd place where no network reaches. I will take a look at your posts and telegrams as soon as I’m able to.

Oops! Reverse. Reverse. Reverse.

When you visit Nepal’s famous Chitwan National Park you look forward to seeing rhinos. We’ve seen them in national parks in India before, so we know that they are bad-tempered and unpredictable beasts which can easily outrun jeeps. So when you are trundling along a narrow path in the forest one afternoon the last thing you want to see is a rhino moving towards you with another jeep behind it.

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The driver immediately stepped on the brakes. It took me a second to realize that the situation was more complicated than it had appeared at first sight: the big animal was a mother and there were two cubs behind her. Rhinos depend on smell and sound more than sight. So you can see where her attention is by the way her ears are pointed.

When she began to look at the sides of the track for an opening I breathed a sign of relief. The suddenly there was a volley of loud clicks near me as a companion on the jeep began to take burst shots of the animals. Immediately the rhino’s head and ears turned towards our jeep. The naturalist looked stricken.

Another volley of clicks, and the rhino began to move towards us. In modern cameras the sounds are electronic and have nothing to do with the shutter. I keep my camera silent because I do not want it to disturb wildlife, or to create situations like this. As the beast came closer it must have smelled the engine and humans and decided that in spite of the strange sounds there was no danger to the cubs.

I could let out the breath I was holding as the mother turned to follow her cubs to a trail that she had already spotted before we saw the trio. As we passed the other jeep on the otherwise deserted track, we waved at each other. I could imagine the mother rhino grumbling to herself as she moved off to a swampy soak “Hardly any peace in the afternoons these days.”

I’m travelling in a really odd place where no network reaches. I will take a look at your posts and telegrams as soon as I’m able to.

Diwali mela in Nagarkot

Nagarkot is a village which lies on the rim of the Kathmandu valley and is famous for its views of the Himalayas. Last year, on the cold and overcast evening before Diwali we found a village fair going full blast in the school ground of the village. A village fair will have two things in common across the world: music and dance, and food. There was music and a little bit of dancing, but a better knowledge of Nepali would have helped us to enjoy the songs more. They seemed to be poking fun at local events. So we drifted off to inspect the food.

There was a big crowd around a couple who were frying eggs over parathas or a large tawa. “Looks interesting,” I said. I’m a sucker for eggs at the roadside. “There’s a special dinner for us today,” The Fmily reminded me. Next to the couple another roadside cook’s business had stalled somewhat. I wonder what it is that makes people wait for service at one place whereas the place next door does poorly. Is the quality so very different? After the reminder I wasn’t ready to make a comparative test of the quality on offer.

Instead I moved on to the bakery nearby. It was also doing roaring business. They had a nice big espresso machine, so I thought I would have one. Four pairs of young hands were involved in each order. One checked the machine, another ground the beans and filled the portafilter. One took cups from the warming rack, and the fourth served up the coffee as soon as one of the others had put a tiny biscuit on the saucer. Four young girls grinned up at me and asked “Did you like the coffee, sir?” “I’m sure I’ll like it when I taste it,” I replied and smiled back. A Diwali mela needs all hands on board.

One last time around Patan Darbar Square

In the last two weeks I’ve shown lots of photos from around Patan’s Darbar square, and written a lot about it. Here I wanted to bring together a few final photos from the place. Most of the buildings are the traditional Newar fired brick and wood constructions. The lone stone temple visible here was the Krishna temple. In the twilight the dark stone set off the warm light on the second floor where a ceremony was in progress.

One of the reasons that I’ll have to go back is so see the palace. It shuts at five, so by the time we reached, not only was the gate closed, but the last tourists had left. Patan is reputedly the oldest Buddhist city in the world. It is said to be older than Patna (Pataliputra), the erstwhile capital of Magadha, which spread the religion across Asia. I don’t know what evidence there is in support of this claim. I have time to dig a little deeper into this history before I return.

Whatever the prehistory of the settlement, the early modern temples that dot the square in front of the palace are beautiful. Among the structures restored after the 2015 earthquare is the Vishwanath temple. These two stunning wooden pieces are from there: a window on the left, a door and its lintel on the right.