A stunning sight

Malkohas are skulkers. These non-parasitic cuckoos will sit concealed in canopies of trees. I’ve only seen them as they flutter from one treetop to another, or caught glimpses of one hidden inside foliage. Until the day when, on the road next to the Himalayan Darjeeling railroad near Rongtong, I saw two Green-billed Malkohas (Phaenicophaeus tristis) basking in the sun.

Well, I suppose everyone enjoys a lovely day in spring.

Chaudapheri camp

Chaudapheri camp is a way station on the Rache La trek. This is part of the old trade route that joined Bhutan, Sikkim, and the lowlands of Bengal. The camp’s odd name was explained as a travelers’ direction. This is the point you get to after fourteen turns on the road after leaving Lava. So I suppose this is a fairly old camping spot, much older than the forest rangers’ cabin that you see here.

The mule was dozing in the middle of the mud churned up by jeeps. After it noticed us it walked closer and, in its mulish way, wouldn’t go away until someone fed it banana skins. I was reminded of a description of mules I’d read, partly in preparation for this trip, “However, when it comes to the mountain paths on the roof of the world, the transport mule is about as nimble as the Fat Boy of Peckham on a tight-rope. He falls down; and when he falls down, he falls off; so do your boxes. It is better to use three mules to carry 360 lb. safely, than to employ two and watch them fall over a cliff.” (Frank Kingdon Ward, in In the Land of the Blue Poppies) In these days of 30 lb. limits on baggage, I suppose I’ll only ever get to use one fourth of a mule.

Rara avis


Picking at tigers’ claws

A Himalayan black bulbul (Hypsipetes leucocephalus) posed for a while on a tree next to the road. Perhaps unsatisfied with the ways the photos were turning out, it flew to a Tiger Claw (Indian coral tree , Erythrina variegata) in bloom. Just hold it there, Bulbul. Turn a bit, bit more. Right. Now chin up. Perfect. I’ll let you know when the photo’s published.

Damn. He didn’t give me his phone number. If you see him, just let him know. I met him at 1800 meters.

Walking an ancient route














The locals are friendly

We stopped outside a small village on our way down from the heights. We could hear an Asian barred owlet (Glaucidium cuculoides). We spotted it on a bare tree and saw it being mobbed by a few racket-tailed drongos, a mix of Dicrurus paradiseus and D. remifer. The show was over soon and we decided to walk on through the village.

All of these villages straggle down a fairly steep slope, so the road switches back several times to pass through them. We passed a house which seemed to be very busy, with lots of men coming and going. A few waved to us. We waved back and walked on. We passed the back of the house down-slope, and looked up to find a bunch of people at a window, looking at us. They broke into smiles for the camera. People were friendly, not like those racket-tailed drongos.

A wild orchid

The orchid Pleione humilis was very common in and around the upper reaches of the Neora Valley national park. All along the eastern Himalayas at altitudes between about 2 and 3 Kms above sea level, it is in flower in late winter and early spring. I’ve been to the right height also in Sikkim, Bhutan, and Assam, which are all parts of the normal range of this orchid, but missed the flowering because I usually go later in spring. The orchid grows on wood or moss, and likes to spend about a quarter of the day in sunlight, so the drooping white flowers are easily visible along roads. Each flower grows out of a different bulb, and each bulb has only a single leaf.

I’d noticed earlier that orchid fanciers are like orchard managers. Interested in tiny differences between varieties, and paying great attention to their differentiation. The greatest achievement that enthusiasts can think of is to have a variety named after them. This exasperates botanists, which is very evident when you read a paper from 1971 in the Kew Bulletin called The Cytology and Taxonomy of the Genus Pleione. Hunt and Vosa, the authors, write “About forty specific epithets have been published in the genus Pleione and considerable confusion exists among the names given to plants in cultivation. Understandable and acceptable differences of taxonomic opinion were confounded with outright mis-identification.” You don’t get more sarcastic in a scholarly publication! They conclude that there is no evidence for more than nine species in the genus Pleione.

Following the thread on cytology, I looked at a very interesting observation in a thirty years-old paper. There seem to be two different growth “habits” among Pleione species. Some are epiphytic, meaning they grow on trees or moss. The Pleione humilis in the featured photo is one of these. The others, which I haven’t seen, are terrestrial, meaning they grow on the ground. The habit depends on the shape of the chromosomes. Paired chromosomes are linked by a structure called a centromere. When this is at the middle of a pair, they are called metacentric chromosomes. Human chromosomes are metacentric, as a result of which the chromosome appears to be in the shape of an X when you see it in a microscope. When the centromere is at the end of a pair, then their visual appearance in a microscope is like an I. These are called telocentric chromosomes, and are rather uncommon in plants. The paper found that epiphytic Pleione have metacentric chromosomes, whereas the chromosomes of the terrestrial species in the genus are telocentric. I haven’t found papers which followed this up in the modern age of genomic analysis. Perhaps there are new taxa hiding in this genus.

Lava bazar








Meeting a master chef

One bite of the omelette that he had produced convinced me that the young man working away in the small kitchen was a master chef. The omelette was light and airy, creamy and fluffy. I had a strong desire to close my eyes as I savoured it. The ingredients were the usual Indian (I should say Nepali, because the cook was a Nepali speaking Indian) mix, chopped green chili and onion incorporated into the egg, but the fluffiness was one that I haven’t seen in any of the best breakfasts in India. Here in a little-regarded corner of the Himalayas, in a small restaurant in Lava Bazar, was the best omelette chef of the country!

The rest of the lunch was equally marvelous. Millennia of cultural exchange has made sure that the food of Nepal and India are not very different. So an inexperienced person like me cannot tell whether the simple but delicious food that was served to me was Bengali or Nepali. It was certainly served in the way that I know is Bengali or Odiya. A mound of rice on the plate, with a little green leafy vegetable as a starter. Then some dal (wonderfully light) and a mixed vegetable (again, light on the masala, and the freshness of the ingredients very evident). A plate of roasted papad was put on the table. Rice was topped up whenever you wanted. And finally the chicken arrived. Heavenly. You could just eat the potato which had been cooked into it, or even lick the gravy off your fingers, and be transported by the taste.

We went back the next day, of course, and the owner of the establishment had added a new experience for us. A plate of what looked like the puri of pani-puri. But when you bit into the crisp globe, you found that the thin shell was made of rice flour. A Nepali papad, I was told. It went down easy with a fiery paste of chili. Papad comes in so many different styles across the subcontinent that I’m still discovering new ones. Before leaving, I leaned across the counter to congratulate the cook. He smiled and asked me to come back. I will, and I hope the restaurant flourishes. I noticed the momos that he had made ready for the evening snack time. He saw me looking and pointed out one that he was proud of. “Rose,” he said and grinned. He was young, perhaps in his early or mid-twenties. I hope he is able to grow into his chosen profession. Because it is such a small establishment in a relatively unknown place, I’ll break a rule I set myself in this blog, and name the restaurant: it is called Sinchula. I may have the satisfaction of hearing from you about your experience there if you go, but nothing more.

Human landscapes

Neora valley is supposed to be one of the richest ecologies in the eastern Himalayas. On the walks through the mixed forests, seeing the layers of vegetation growing one over another, the insects, birds, squirrels, clamber through the undergrowth and canopy, knowing that most animals have heard me before I came and moved away, I had no doubt about it. But even in the middle of this, I found the landscape strangely humanized.

When I walked the Pipeline trail, the vegetation around me seemed entirely wild: a mixture of oak and deodar, bamboo and rhododendron. But then the trail itself encouraged a different kind of growth. A wall of rock rose very steeply on one side. I guess a narrow ledge was once shaped into a walking path by people at some time. The natural slope of the terrain has been changed quite dramatically on the cliff side of the road. The steepness prevents large trees from taking hold on the wall, and the humidity and light allows giant ferns to take root, and droop over the whole hillside. Along the sides of the road flowering shrubs and herbs take root, and fill the trail with the nuts and berries that they produce. The result is a concentration of birds, exactly what we were there for. One kind of human activity had created an ecological niche for another!

On the downhill side, the slope was gentler, and larger trees could grow. Their canopy started a little above our heads. Through breaks in the canopy, due to channels cut over hundreds of years by trickles of water from springs, I could see larger vistas. These ranges of hills are carved through by the small tributaries that merge into the Neora river far below. But before your eyes reach that level, your view snags on the clearings half visible through the early morning fog. Each contains a village. Humans are as important to the shape of this landscape as weather and geology.

Through such a gap I took one of the photos above. In the mist I saw something different from what the camera records. My brain is trained to see human activity, so the red roof of the building was very prominent in my vision. The camera is not a neural computer trained in the way as me, and it sees a different view, paying more attention to the nearer forest, a little less to the village in the lower slope, and even less to the villages on the further slopes. My eye seemed to flit from village to village, making sense of the houses and fields. Further along the trail I could look down at a village with terraced fields. Rice is an important crop here, and every house also has a vegetable patch. We had been eating really fresh food in the homestay.

The notion of keystone species in an ecology is an useful one. It could be an apex predator (like tigers), or a species that works the landscape diligently (like termites in Indian forests), or one that creates mutualism between species (like elephants). Such a species shapes the landscape around it by maintaining a balance of species. Humans are a keystone species, as I clearly saw on these walks. We probably started as mutualists, by domesticating a few species, then became landscape artists through the invention of agriculture, and through social organization dominated other predators to become the apex predator in any landscape. I wonder how the Himalayas would look like if we just left.

The featured photo of a sunny village perched at the edge of a cliff is a typical example of how we shaped landscapes even before industrial capitalism. A clearing surrounded by trees, houses within walking distance in the clearing, but separated from each other, that is a human layout that we all understand. This may be the configuration of landscape and society within which genus Homo evolved. I think it could be the landscape written into our genes: open land within a forest for safety, a band of people looking out for each other, but also subtly in competition for the fruits, berries, and small animals that such open spaces inside forests foster. In the featured photo you can probably just see that dark bird perched on a tree to the left of the village. The photo above is a zoom for a closer look at the maroon oriole (Oriolus traillii).