Haldwani to Bhimtal

The terrain changes around Haldwani. The endless plains of Uttar Pradesh begin to crinkle and rise. We travelled through the plains in the heat of the day. As we climbed, the afternoon lengthened into evening. We stopped at a bakery in Haldwani for tea. Two schoolgirls discussed their new young physics teacher. A couple drank tea with their heads so close that their cups were in danger of clinking against each other. Three young men carrying their biking helmets chatted over a large plate of cakes.

The Family selected cakes. It took little thought to choose tea over instant coffee. I was impatient to start: we were going to miss the golden hour, that couple of hours before sunrise when the light is so beautiful that you can make a great photo out of a garbage heap. The remainder of the drive took longer than I had estimated, because we had to leave the main Haldwani-Nainital road very soon for a smaller road to Naukuchital, where we planned to spend the night. Then, just before sunset we arrived at Bhimtal.

The lake district of Kumaon is almost 2 kilometers above sea level. Bhimtal is the biggest of the famous lakes in this region. I’d flicked through images of Bhimtal before leaving, so I recognized it immediately from the little island which houses an aquarium. We never managed to visit this, unfortunately. That’s one thing we must work into our next trip.

I grew up on stories of Kumaon’s lake district. A grand-uncle had a bungalow there for many years, and would make a yearly trip alone up to the mountains. On his return we would spend dinners mesmerized by stories of him meeting Nilgai on walks from Sattal to Bhimtal, and what to do if you ever meet a leopard (shine a torch at his eyes; not something I plan to do), and how green chilis, which he crunched with his dinner, were much better in the hills. The quiet and nearly deserted lakeside of Bhimtal brought back echoes of those memories. But times have changed, the boatman rowing nearby had reminders of modernity on his boat.

Garhmukteshwar to Haldwani

A fast drive through Uttar Pradesh is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sensual overload. You can drive for hours without seeing people. There are signs of humanity all around you: bicycles abandoned for a while, tilled fields, well laid out lines of trees marking land boundaries, but no people.

And then you come into a small town, where there will be a great bustle of cars and scooters, of people selling food, or just standing around and chatting. In the little time that I spent taking this panoramic shot of an unremarkable cross road, a small crowd gathered around me. Their pride in their town was reinforced by looking, over and over, at my photo on the tiny LCD screen of my camera. Or maybe I was misreading their interest, maybe they looked at the photo so intently because they wanted to see what a fresh eye found in this familiar chowk.

The countryside is not wild at all. There are seldom many birds apart from the usual crows and magpie robins. One of the most remarkable exceptions was a skyful of pariah kites, cheel, as we passed the enormous garbage dump outside Rampur. There will be a few butterflies, like this Cabbage White. Uttar Pradesh is densely populated, contrary to what your eyes tell you. These are the subtle signs you need to read.

Occassionally you might see someone selling fresh produce by the wayside. Perhaps cabbages, perhaps guavas. I always thought that guavas served out by roadside fruit sellers with rock salt was peculiarly Indian, until I bought exactly the same combination from an old lady in Vietnam.

Interestingly, there is not too much roadside commerce. Other states have many more fruit sellers by the road. But then they have many more people on the road. It is interesting to ask why. I have different answers from different people. Some say that people take buses between villages and towns, and these do not stop randomly at roadsides. Maybe. Another person put it down to lawlessness. That’s unlikely to be generally true. Relative lack of affluence is another theory. Maybe partly. Perhaps it is a combination of these and more.

So you will have to get into a town to eat. Even the tired, dusty, small towns often have a reasonable restaurant or two. We walked into one in Rampur and had pretty good dal, roti and tandoori chicken. And, of course, remarkable kitsch.

Kutpai Valparai

Valparai is situated in the middle of tea estates and at the edge of a protected forest. This makes it easy to spot birds and mammals. Since butterflies do not normally travel very far, the monoculture of the estates reduces the visible diversity. As the last of my posts on Valparai, I just list the birds, animals and butterflies we saw.

Mammals

During the time we were there, elephants, leopards and civet cats were spotted; we were just not lucky enough to see them.

Nilgiri tahr

Malabar giant squirrel

Malabar langur

Lion-tailed macaque

1. Wild pigs: we saw these as we passed through the Anamallai tiger reserve on the way to Valparai.
2. Indian gray Mongoose: quick glimpses, but one stood still long enough for The Family to catch it on her phone.
3. Hares: saw lots of them at night
4. Lion-tailed macaques: saw one band at close quarters. In this region they appear to be habituated to humans.
5. Malabar langurs: saw a band feeding near a road. Very shy, they flee when they see humans.
6. Gaur: many family groups visible grazing in the tea estates. In this region they are totally habituated to humans.
7. Barking deer: shy creature. Saw one crossing a tea field.
8. Malabar giant squirrel: heard them very often, and saw them feeding and sleeping on trees near the road.
9. Nilgiri tahr: saw them on the Pollachi-Valpari road near the 8th bend. There are posted tahr crossings at the 9th and 13th bends.

Birds

I’m not good at birds; I spot some only when there are birders with me spotting away. The Family is good at it, and she says we missed many of the smaller birds. We also heard birds which we did not see: the raquet-tailed drongo was one. So there are large holes in our lists. Still, we had nine lifers; this is birder-speak for seeing a species for the first time.

Great hornbill

Malabar Imperial-pigeon

Chestnut-headed bee-eater

Plum-headed parakeet (female)

Streak throated woodpecker

Indian Scimitar babbler

Long-tailed shrike

The usual suspects

1. Magpie robin
2. Oriental turtle dove
3. Spotted dove
4. Red-whiskered bulbul
5. Red-vented bulbul
6. Common crow
7. Common myna
8. Hill myna
9. Brahminy kite
10. Gray hornbill
11. Small blue kingfisher
12. Little egret
13. Indian pond-heron

Somewhat less usual, but seen across the country

1. Streak-throated woodpecker
2. Flame-backed woodpecker
3. Long-tailed shrike
4. Scimitar babbler
5. Chestnut-headed bee-eater
6. Great hornbill
7. Gray jungle fowl
8. White-breasted water hen
9. Brown fish-owl
10. Spotted owlet
11. Plum-headed parakeet
12. Crested serpent-eagle
13. Black-shouldered kite
14. Scarlet minivet
15. Besra
16. Crimson-backed sunbird
17. Grey-bellied cuckoo

Not common: endemic to the western ghats

1. Malabar whistling thrush
2. Malabar parakeet
3. Malabar Imperial-pigeon
4. Grey-headed bulbul
5. Rufous babbler
6. White-cheeked barbet

Butterflies

We didn’t really stop to look at butterflies, so the chances are that we managed to list only what we knew well.

Tamil spotted flat

Red Helen

1. Many bush browns and grass yellows
2. Common tiger
3. Glassy tiger
4. Danaid eggfly
5. Common crow
6. Red Helen
7. Great orange tip
8. Tamil spotted flat

Contrary to my fears before I left, we were not beset by leeches even once during our walks. I’m sure they lurk in various places. It is just that it is possible to see whatever we did without coming into contact with these pests even once.

Breakfast and butterflies

In Valparai breakfast was always late and large. Our mornings started a little before sunrise. We would gulp down a quick cup of tea and a couple of biscuits before leaving for a round of bird-watching. The real breakfast would start at about nine, after we got back. It always began with a ritual serving of fresh fruits. I was really amazed at the skill with which the kitchen produced bananas sliced into two precisely equal longitudinal halves. I tried this at home, and failed miserably. Then there were idlis with the famous Tamil gunpowder and coconut chutney, perhaps dosas or adai with sambar or appams with stew, and any amount of toast with eggs. Everything was very well done. Even the bread was surprisingly good.

On our second morning we arrived at breakfast to find a dark butterfly fluttering around our table. The Family asked me for an identification, and I was a little stumped. I hemmed and said it was not a moth but a butterfly, one of the variety called skippers. The only way to be certain is to look at the antennae: skippers have ones which are shaped like hockey sticks. But I couldn’t get beyond that. Very tentatively I said “rice swift”, knowing this was wrong. I took a photograph for later identification. ID wasn’t so easy: it could have been the weirdly named “restricted demon” except that it had too few spots. After a couple of other false leads I finally saw the pefect match. It is the Tamil spotted flat. It is common in the Nilgiris.

It fluttered repeatedly against the window glass, so I decided to do a good deed and opened the window to let it out. It fluttered on to the flower bed just outside. A bulbul darted in, picked it up and flew off. The Family and I looked at each other, and settled in for breakfast.

Competitive grazing

In Valparai we saw four different kinds of wild plant-eating animals: the huge Gaur (aka Indian bison), the shy barking deer (Indian Muntjac), the rare Nilgiri tahr, and the Nilgiri langur. There were also domesticated cows and buffalos, and a very small number of domestic goats. If all the grazers eat the same food, then the one that eats fastest could starve the others to death. There is the unlikely possibility that the common food plant grows really rapidly, so no species dies out. The more likely possibility is that the different animals eat different plants. In fact, as I looked this up I found that biologists use the word grazing for eating grass, and browsing for eating shrubs and bushes. So avoiding conflict by eating differently is well recognized.

We frequently saw family groups of Gaur grazing among tea bushes, heads down, except when they looked up to keep an eye on us. In forests we found Gaurs to be more cautious, but here on the tea estate they seem to be used to humans. On watching closely, it appeared that Gaur did not touch the tea, preferring to eat grasses, and perhaps other plants, which grew around the tea. I walked among the tea bushes at one point and found that the paths had little other than grass. So this cousin of cattle was eating mainly grass, although they are known to eat a variety of plant material. Maybe they don’t like tea; I don’t much like Nilgiri tea myself.

The barking deer (Indian Muntjac) is a very shy creature. We were lucky to spot one from a road above a sunken meadow. It did not bolt because it never noticed us. It moved through a patch of tea, over the grass, which it completely ignored, looking for something else. An article in the journal Mammalia explains that 80% of its diet comes from shrubs, flowering bushes and trees. Grasses make up only a small part of its diet. The Gaur and the Muntjac occupy the same range but eat differently. This is the classic strategy of two herbivores in the same geography: one grazes, the other browses.

We saw a family of Nilgiri tahr which munched on grass for a while, but then started eating flowers of Lantana bushes growing by the road. An article in the journal of the BNHS claims that this is common. The tahr eats mostly grass, but also a wide variety of flowering bushes. It avoids competition with other herbivores by the fact of being nimble and eating in places where the others cannot reach.

Langurs follow the same strategy. They browse leaves high up on trees, and so avoid competition with other wild herbivores in these places. Domesticated cattle are not so lucky: they eat the same plants that Gaur eat. Sometimes they are seen feeding side by side, and apparently there is occassional conflict. The Gaur is huge: often over a ton in weight and its shoulders are man-high. In a conflict, it is bound to win over domestic cattle. This does not appear to be a serious problem in Valparai, since most people here are involved in tea production and not farming.

A dead white man

Statue of G. A. Carver Marsh (b 13 Aug 1862, d 1st Feb 1934)

Dead white men, dead white males, or dead white
European males (DWEM) are the famous deceased
European males that are often the focus of
academic studies of history and Western culture.
(Wikipedia)

Nilgiri teas are the least aromatic of the Indian teas. On our trip to Valparai I kept coming across the various ways in which the plantations which grow this insipid leaf had devastated the rain-forests of the Nilgiris. We stayed in a bungalow built for the manager of one of these estates, so I keep my complaints a little muted.

But as we left Valparai and began on the 40 hairpin bends which cross the Anamallais, The Family spotted a viewpoint with this statue. Had we found the culprit: the man responsible for this ecological devastation, the Hitler of the hills? The inscription at the base of the statue identified the man as G. A. Carver Marsh. Clearly famous in his lifetime, his memory is slowly fading. I am unable to find his full name. And of the many things he must have been known for in his lifetime, I can only find the following reference in the book Madras Miscelleny by Muthaiah S., “The Anamallais may have been opened up by G. A. Carver Marsh, perhaps the only pioneering planter remembered in South India by a statue (at a road bend near his Paralai estate) but it was three planters from Ceylon, E. J. Martin, O. A. Bannantine and Unwin Maclure, who first planted tea there”.

Such is fame. All the blame I was laying on this dead man must now be redistributed. When you dig deeper, you see that coffee plantations predated tea in this region. So perhaps the blame gets diluted further.

Even such a clear case of devastation cannot be traced back cleanly to a single original cause. The best one can say now it that it was the economics of a mercantile empire which destroyed this region. What then is Mr. Carver Marsh to be remembered for?

A shy johnny

The Nilgiri langurs we came across were very private. There was a large tribe of them foraging on trees by the road near Valparai. As soon as our car stopped, the nearest ones fled further into the forest. I got off and tried to photograph the ones in the next tree, and they fled as well. This happened over and over again. I got a couple of shots of one by hiding behind a thick bush and sighting through a narrow opening between its thorny branches. The only clear shot was of one sleeping on a high branch of a tree very far away (below).

A Nilgiri langur sleeps on a branch of a tree as far from a road as it can get. I guess it finds this posture comfortable.

These monkeys have a glossy dark body with a light golden brown head, and would look lovely in photos. The morning light was just right, but the subjects were shy. This was so frustrating and strange! The lion-tailed macaques we saw would walk right next to us without even looking at us. So it could not only be the indirect conflict of lost habitats which was influencing the behaviour of the langurs. I just had to google this.

The answer was simple: exactly as I’d thought, they were traditionally hunted, as they continue to be. Traditional medicine uses their body parts as medicines and aphrodisiac. Since the passage of laws protecting them the trade has gone underground and presumably trade volumes of so-called medicines have decreased.

An important reference seems to be the 2011 studbook, but arkive is a good place for a shorter description. I learnt from the studbook that the classification of langurs is still an open question. There may be as few as 5000 individuals, and even the higher estimates still give a total population of no more than 15000. It is a pity that this beautiful monkey is so hard to see.

Super Sunday

Valparai is a good base for birding and wildlife sighting. Although the ecology in the immediate neighbourhood is massively disturbed by the monoculture of tea, it is a buffer zone for the nearby Annamalai tiger reserve forest. With the boom in nature tourism in India, tea estates in this region have begun to create boutique hotels which are geared to this traffic.

In our last few hours we had a number of lucky sightings. Going from left to right and top to bottom are pictures of one of the endangered Nilgiri tahr (Nilgiritragus hylocrius) a small herd of which crossed the road as we drove back to Coimbatore airport, a Malabar parakeet (aka the blue-winged parakeet, Psittacula columboides) seen at a distance and against the light but a lifer, a view of the confusing grey-bellied cuckoo (Cacomantis passerinus; thanks for ID help Doe-eyes), a member of a very shy band of the black-bodied Nilgiri langur (Trachypithecus johnii) which is slowly losing its habitat to humans.

Like us humans, most animals and birds seem to have a fairly routine life. So an individual will usually be found at one or three usual places. That’s why a local guide helps. S/he knows where a hornbill has been nesting, or parrots come every day at a certain time to feed. We were lucky to have Murugan with us. He was a fount of local knowledge, and had enough interest in birds to be carrying a well-used copy of a Tamil edition of “Birds of Southern India” by Grimmett and Inskipp. More than that, he never tried to hurry us on to somewhere, but neither did he stop suggesting what he knew would be great sights. I wish we knew more than a few words of Tamil. It would have been good to have longer conversations with him.

Temple festival: Valparai

Festival of Murugan, Valparai. 4 April, 2015.

Engineering macaque safety

Lion-tailed macaques are found only in the western ghats of India. They were in the list of most endangered monkeys and apes till 2012. In that year the IUCN found that various state governments had taken conservation steps and the population had turned around. Now it is classified merely as endangered.

Our guide, Murugan, is full of information about the local wildlife. Whatever I can check independently is fairly correct. According to him there are three tribes of macaques in the locality. The largest has about 90 members, then there is another with about 35. The one which we saw is the smallest, with about 20.

A villager led The Family to where some members of this band were exploring a trash heap. They dug through it fairly systematically and found various discarded fruits and vegetables to eat. The Family shares trips with her phone. She approached less than a human body length to take photos. I was tense, but these macaques are so used to humans that they ignored her.

Lion-tailed macaques are not larger than two feet (60 cms). Apparently they live up to 20 years.

Man-monkey conflict usually arises due to such closeness. One sees evidence of this in cities, where monkeys have discovered high energy foods like potato wafers, biscuits and aerated drinks. I had seen such a conflict once when my niece, then five years old, would not let go of a bottle of Pepsi which a bigger langoor wanted. An undiplomatic incident was averted when she obeyed her mother’s instructions to let go.

Nothing like that happened here. The only danger we were in came when two male macaques started fighting, and forgot that a human was between them. The same villager shooed them away. The Family decided to tip him for saving her. Normally I don’t like to tip for normal human kindness. But maybe she was right in this case: when you set up an economics where the well-being of the macaques brings cash rewards to local villages, then it could lead to innovative non-zero sum solutions to possible future conflicts.