nanoboy
Well-Known Member
Haha. Classic. What is the context of the 'good night' sign? In the west, we don't have signs of that nature other than 'welcome' and 'good bye' I think.
Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part three: 2013-2014
- Thread starter Chlidonias
- Start date
Haha. Classic. What is the context of the 'good night' sign? In the west, we don't have signs of that nature other than 'welcome' and 'good bye' I think.
it was just a little metal sign sitting on the desk in the room.
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
The latest place I have been is the town of Ruoergai (aka Zoige), up in the high-altitude grasslands on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau but still located within Sichuan. Because of its locality it has its ups and downs with access for foreigners. Most birders who come to China do so on organised tours because, as you may have noticed, doing it independently is a bit trickier. You need some stamina and humour and the ability to not curl up in a corner somewhere and start crying like a little baby. Relative to the number of birders who come to China, few do it independently and even fewer try to go to Ruoergai. I knew of a couple back in 2009 who made it to the town only to be intercepted by the police and sent back to Songpan in a taxi; and then another one just this May wasn't even allowed to buy a bus ticket for there. Meanwhile the tours seem to get there with no issues. For myself, there were no issues. Well that's not entirely true: there was a power cut in Songpan so I couldn't buy the bus ticket the day before and they told me to come back in the morning and buy it then. That was the only hiccup in getting there. So, as of right now, you can go birding in Ruoergai easily!
I wasn't really going there for birds though, I was more after mammals. In fact the sole reason Ruoergai was in the itinerary was because of a trip report by Richard Webb on the Mammalwatching site where he saw truckloads of Tibetan foxes and wolves as well as a Pallas' cat. The cat was still a long-shot of course, but it sounded like Tibetan foxes were as good as guaranteed and that sealed it for me. I don't know if he was extraordinarily lucky, though, or if I was extraordinarily unlucky, or (most probably) a combination of the two, but I did very poorly indeed in the mammal department. No doubt it helped that he had the expert guidance of a local bird guide from Chengdu and I was going solo, but even with covering a lot of ground over a number of days I saw literally one fox and no wolves. I did see a bunch of new birds though, even when not really concentrating specifically on birding. It really is a superb area for birds.
Ruoergai is about three hours bus ride from Songpan (on the way back it took about two and a half hours). It is an average sort of town, nothing unlikeable about it but nothing particularly likeable either. Sort of middle of the road. My plan was to try and find a local driver to get around because it is a huge area, and bearing in mind that nobody in Ruoergai speaks English that would have had some interesting results, but as fortune would have it a girl from Chengdu arrived at Emma's Guesthouse in Songpan the same day as me on her way to Ruoergai where she was planning on hiring a driver to get around, and she was keen to team up to bring the cost down. It wasn't ideal because she wasn't looking for animals but it helped get everything sorted for me there to start with. Her English name was Nine (as in Seven of Nine but without the Seven of).
The bus left Songpan at 10am, and climbed quickly higher into the mountains. There were altitude signs every so often by the roadside. We passed 3500 metres within maybe half an hour. Just after 3850 metres I saw a common magpie hunched up like a puff-ball on a power-line. There were trilingual roadsigns all along the way (Chinese, Tibetan and English) about Buckle up, Don't drink and drive, Don't drive when tired. Very good to see. Best sign though were the Animals Crossing ones which had the English translation of “Zoology Channels”. The land all around Ruoergai is national parks and grassland reserves and wetland reserves and alpine forest reserves, but it is also one massive pasture. Yaks were everywhere! I would have seen several thousand every single day I was up there. I like yaks a lot. When seen galloping across the hills they look curiously like running bears. They communicate by grunting (their scientific name is Bos grunniens, which means “grunting ox”) and even though they are benign beasts the grunting always sounded hostile to me. If I were to farm anything it would be yaks. There were also regular cows, and hybrid yak-cows which are odd-looking animals. Lots of horses. And sheep. Weird, weird sheep. They had normal woolly bodies but naked goofy heads – I kept thinking they looked like sheep with goats' heads – and bizarre long corkscrew horns going almost horizontally out from either side of the head.
We stayed at the Shu Guang Hotel which is about 100 metres from the bus station. A twin room was 100 Yuan; later after Nine went back to Chengdu I got a single room with no bathroom for 50 Yuan and then a single with bathroom for 80 Yuan. Nine arranged the drivers during the stay which removed all the hassle for me. We/I had three drivers over the days: first day was Bocho, second and third days was Joshi, and for the last two days I had Mr. Ze (all those names are spelled phonetically as I interpreted them).
Nine wanted to go see a local sight called The First Meander Of The Yellow River (or The First Bend or The First Crook, depending on the sign), which is west of town. The start isn't right here at Ruoergai but it is where the river hits the plateau and once on the flat land begins to meander in loops. At sunset the whole river glows yellow which is what she wanted to see. I figured I would see some animals along the way, so she organised Bocho for the afternoon to take us there and back for 200 Yuan. The prices for taxis and private cars here are mostly dependent on the destination, not on length of time, so you can hire a driver for the day for the same or almost the same price as it would cost just to go to a place and back. Pretty handy really. Not many animals were seen. I kept an eye out the whole ride but nothing mammaly was seen. A Tibetan partridge running across the road was “new bird number one” though. Neither Bocho nor Nine seemed to get the idea of me wanting to stop for animals – she even asked why I would want to go to the same place twice when I said I would be making return visits to certain areas to look for foxes and birds. This had me worried for how things would go overall, but my time with Mr. Ze later turned out fine. At the First Meander site, there is a long boardwalk up the hillside with platforms for viewing. I saw a few black-lipped pikas around here but only a few. There was a while to wait for sunset, so while Nine went off and took photos I amused myself by watching the hills with my binoculars. I saw some ring-necked pheasants and a male hen harrier rather distantly, but then discovered that not far below the platform I was on there was a little thicket of knee-high scrub which seemed to be a favourite spot for little birds. Hume's groundpeckers were hopping about pecking at the ground; these used to be called Hume's ground-jays and are also called Hume's ground-tits, but groundpecker fits perfectly with the way they hammer their bills into the earth like woodpeckers do into trees. Godlewski's buntings and Oriental skylarks made numerous appearances, and there were also a few robin accentors in there as well. A female hen harrier made a close pass of the platform before being mobbed by a couple of kestrels. Way down the hill at the little village azure-winged magpies could be seen flying between the buildings which was a surprise (I didn't expect them this high). The temperature dropped rapidly as the day drew to a close, but there was no glowing river because the sky was clouded over.
The plan for the next day was sort of half mine and half Nine's. The area where Richard Webb found all the foxes and wolves was north of Ruoergai, and Nine wanted to go stay in a little town called Langmusi which was north. It didn't bother me which town I stayed in so the two plans fitted together all right and I figured I could treat this day as a sort of scouting mission to see where places were for when I had my own driver. She got the driver called Joshi for 200 Yuan for the day and we headed out at 7am. Halfway to Langmusi is Flower Lake which I thought would be good for birds, and it is a tourist spot, so it worked for both of us. Upland buzzards and saker falcons are really common up here. I had seen both in Mongolia but the upland buzzards only in flight so I hadn't appreciated just how big they are. They look like eagles! About every tenth power pole seemed to be an upland buzzard perch. There were probably other raptors as well, but I couldn't stop for every one. It was on the road this morning that I saw a Tibetan fox trotting across the fields. I didn't get a photo but wasn't worried because I thought I would be seeing loads of them over the next few days – how wrong I was!!
The gates at Flower Lake were still closed up when we arrived (it opens at 9am) but we walked in anyway. At the gates amongst the tree sparrows I saw a robin accentor, and later in the day saw another one with tree sparrows, so I guess it pays to look at the sparrow flocks when there. The lake itself is five kilometres from the road but there is a good concrete road the entire way along which the buses run (you aren't allowed private vehicles in). The fields by the entrance were alive with black-lipped pikas. There would have been hundreds or thousands of them right there, scuttling all over the grass between their burrows. There were also birds everywhere but mostly of just a few species. Hume's groundpeckers and horned larks were common, and also white-rumped and rufous-necked snowfinches. I had been expecting snowfinches to be small, like sparrows, but they are large like larks. The white-rumped snowfinches are ridiculously amusing. They like to collect in little groups and assume a very strange posture – body raised upright but the head tucked down, the white rump feathers puffed up, and the wings drooped to the ground – and then they chase each other in circles. When not doing the Quasimodo Dance, they look all white and fluffy, like a yeti would if it were a little bird. It was freezing cold here. My nose was running all the time and felt like it was about to fall off. I spent far too long trying to get photos of the pikas so didn't walk far before the gates opened and the first bus came through, on which we caught a ride to the lake (we paid our entry fee, which included the bus, on the way out: 105 Yuan, which was more than I thought it would have been). From the bus I saw my first black-necked cranes which are the speciality of the area. The lake was brilliant. There is a big looping boardwalk and raised hides for watching the birds from. Ruddy shelducks were in big flocks, their noise sounding oddly like a penguin colony. I had been hoping to see even just a couple of them, so to see a hundred-odd was great. Amongst the other birds were lots and lots of gadwalls (one of my new favourite ducks – drably-coloured but so elegant with it), greylag geese and coots, and smaller numbers of Eurasian teal, pintails, whooper swans, tufted ducks, common pochards, crested grebes, grey herons, and my first “real” wild mallard (as opposed to the manky introduced ones in New Zealand and elsewhere). There were no doubt other species of ducks in there but many of them were distant and I'm not very experienced at identifying the “common” European waterfowl! A common kingfisher zipped past, water pipits bounced around on the boardwalks, a Pallas' gull wandered past, a couple of white-tailed eagles could be seen over the far reed-beds. It was all very very satisfying.
The next stop, albeit a reluctant one for the driver, was on a side road just past the toll gate where Richard Webb had seen his Pallas' cat. I didn't think it likely I would actually see it – it may be in an entirely different part of its territory, or it may have died or been killed since last year – but it would have been stupid not to check. I found the spot he describes in his report but of course there was no cat there. If I was at exactly the right place then it seems a local family has set up their tents right next to it which didn't help. It also didn't help that Joshi told Nine that he knows that animal I was looking for but it's not a cat; it is a very fat animal that cannot be found in winter. It took me a while to figure out he was actually talking about marmots (which are currently hibernating) and I tried explaining this but it basically became the silly foreigner looking for an animal that can't be found in winter!
Langmusi, where we stayed the night, is a tiny Tibetan village but one which must be written up in Lonely Planet because that seems to be where all the tourists are going. There are lots of red-billed choughs there also; the people there literally do have choughs on their house roofs! Joshi took us to a local gorge which cost 30 Yuan entry. I only went because there might be birds there. At first I thought I was going to be disappointed but once we got past the religious trappings (streamers strung everywhere and bits of prayer papers littering the ground) it turned into a nice scrubby canyon where I saw white-throated redstarts and my first white-browed tit-warblers, as well as Himalayan griffon vultures soaring overhead. The white-browed tit-warbler require googling a photo: that shade of purple is just fantastic on a bird!
The next day was pretty much wasted, although I saw a sika deer at the end so that was all right. We had been going to go back to Ruoergai in the morning and then Nine would go back to Chengdu and I would do my own thing after she had explained to a new driver what I was up to. But Joshi rang her and said he had six other people who wanted to go to a place called Jah Gah Nah (spelled phonetically again because I couldn't find it on the map) which was north of Langmusi at Tie Bu which is where sika deer are found. Joshi said there was forest there, Nine wanted to go there, and I hoped to see a sika, so we joined in and went back to Ruoergai in the evening instead. The six were all Chinese tourists (two of whom were going to Chengdu as well, so they shared the cost of the taxi back to Ruoergai that night), but two French tourists came along as well, so it ended up only costing a small amount per person. The place we went turned out to be a trail up a large and rather spectacular gorge. Not much was seen up there bird-wise, although hill pigeons were a nice addition to the trip, and I spotted a distant group of five or six female bharal which I could identify immediately thanks to the process I went through with them at Wanglang Nature Reserve. When we went back to the car some of the group headed off to the local village, so I went back to searching the scrub near the road for birds. There were lots of them round there but they were hard to get good looks at and lots of them were streaky female finchy things which I couldn't identify. New birds were plain laughing thrush and beautiful rosefinch. A real surprise was a hair-crested drongo in some pine trees with Elliot's laughing thrushes. I think there were actually two because I could hear one calling unseen from inside the trees, but the visible one was very visible indeed. I hadn't expected drongos this high up at all! Then there were a lot of really attractive female finches or buntings which had me completely stumped. I had seen and photographed three of these birds all together the day before in the gorge at Langmusi but couldn't find them in the field guide, so I figured I might be able to ID them later with the help of Google. Here I saw lots of them in the same place as male Godlewski's buntings but they didn't look anything like the females of those. I got some photos of these ones as well, and back in Songpan when I was trying to ID rosefinches on the internet I unexpectedly discovered that these birds were female white-browed rosefinches! I only managed to get a look at a couple of males of these, but the females seemed super-abundant. On the drive back to Langmusi we saw a lone sika deer in some fields.
Nine went back to Chengdu the next morning (the hotel can arrange to take people straight from Ruoergai to Chengdu – and presumably vice versa – if the owners are making the trip themselves anyway). The evening before we had found a new driver called Mr. Ze because Joshi was busy for the next few days and when we tried to get Bocho he said that if I was going past the toll gate (where the Pallas' cat site was) then he wanted more money, even though the site is literally a few hundred metres past the toll gate and I could have just walked through to get there. When we said no he got in a stink and went off and apparently rang a bunch of other drivers and said not to take me anywhere! Mr. Ze turned out to be great. He didn't speak any English but Nine told him what I wanted to do (roughly “drive, stop, stop, drive, stop, stop, stop, looking for animals”) and after the first couple of stops, where I would get out and scan the surrounding hills, he started pointing out good vantage points for stopping and was scanning the land himself while driving. If anyone else is going there independently I have his phone number (but you'd need a Chinese-speaking in-betweener to arrange what you want to do to start off with).
The plan I had for the two days on my own was to basically follow Richard Webb's track, driving in the morning north of Ruoergai to Flower Lake and on to the Pallas' cat site, and then the second part of the day go to an alpine forest site called Baxi to the east of Ruoergai where he had seen serow and tufted deer. The very first stop we made to scan the hills produced a group of five small deer which made a very good impression on Mr. Ze because they couldn't even be seen without the binoculars and he must have thought I had magic eyes when it was actually a complete fluke. The problem was that I couldn't work out what sort of deer they were! I took a lot of photos and zoomed in on them but they were so distant that it didn't confirm anything. It was like the bharal sighting at Wanglang again! However they obviously weren't sika because they were too small and the wrong colour, so that really only left Siberian roe deer. They were about the right size, sort of the right colour, and they had really obvious white rumps. I was thinking they shouldn't be out in the open country like they were because roe are forest deer, but there were no other suitable deer to choose from. I put them down as Siberian roe with a question mark.
Despite numerous stops all along the way to Flower Lake and side-tracks up side tracks, no other mammals were seen. Lots of birds, including black-necked cranes, lapwings and small flocks of white-cheeked starlings on the fence lines, but no foxes or wolves. At one point I saw five or six Himalayan griffon vultures and cinereous vultures sitting on a hillside which was nice (as opposed to only seeing them gliding from below) and then round the next bend found a whole flock of about thirty of them squabbling over what was probably a wolf kill. The hills round about had even more sitting watching, so there were probably about sixty vultures all in the one small area. I had a good scan to see if there were any wolves somewhere nearby or if any foxes had turned up to scavenge, but no such luck. Flower Lake was just as good as the last visit. I was of course hoping there might be a Tibetan fox or a Pallas' cat stalking the billions of pikas by the entrance but no. At the lake itself there were most of the same birds as last time, but I also added several great white egrets amongst the grey herons, a couple of great cormorants, a few little grebes, and new amongst the ducks were Eurasian wigeon, a couple of ferruginous pochards and a single female red-crested pochard. One of the white-tailed eagles was fishing and kept inadvertently scaring all the ducks into flight with each pass. The Pallas' cat site was again a no-show for the cat, and we went a bit further north to a town for food. Here I saw a massive flock of literally hundreds of red-billed choughs circling from the ground high into the sky like a bird tornado. Really really impressive but impossible to get a photo of. The drive back towards Ruoergai turned up a fantastic lammergeier just near the road, undoubtably one of the best birds of prey!
We stopped off in Ruoergai on the way to Baxi and picked up Mr. Ze's mother and either his hot wife or his hot daughter, I wasn't quite sure which. I guess I was the entertainment for the day. Baxi was a bit disappointing this day. I wasn't sure where to go (the next day I found the spot Richard Webb went to) so we drove through the little town of Baxi and continued on until I found some forest, and then found a track up a valley. The only good birds seen were a small flock of twites which are great little birds, and beautiful rosefinches. No mammals.
Last day in Ruoergai was a repeat of the day before except I didn't go into the Flower Lake area. I may have seen a new duck or two but I decided to save my money. First animals seen (apart for ravens and tree sparrows) were the “roe deer” in the same place as before, except this time one was on the ridge and the horns were plainly visible through the binoculars. It wasn't a deer at all, it was a male Tibetan gazelle – not something I expected to see! Lower down on the next hill were two females within easy binocular range, but no good for photos. Then there were all the usual birds, including lots of black-necked cranes and a huge flock of Pallas' gulls (it looked like a couple of hundred of them). Really today was pretty poor, and of course no foxes or wolves or Pallas' cat.
Baxi was much better for birds than the day before. The road we took heads up through a couple of villages towards the forest. We went all the way to where the seal ended at the last village and parked there, and then just up the dirt road is a foot-track which goes up through some dirt fields and then up a valley. Once in the valley, on your left is scrubby hillside and on your right dense pine forest. There were all sorts of passerines up here, including Godlewski's and little buntings, twites, blue-fronted and white-throated redstarts, and white-browed tit-warblers. Two birds I was on the look-out for were blue eared pheasants and Sichuan jays. I didn't see any pheasants, but as I was walking I saw what had to be a jay fly between some trees further up the slope. I scrambled up there and managed to spy two or three Sichuan jays (they were moving around a bit and while I was looking at one the other(s) would be moving so I'm not sure how many there were). Sichuan jays are rare and localised endemics so I was happy to see them here. There was a yak trail on this slope so I followed this for a bit but yaks are insane with their ability to climb vertical hillsides that I can barely negotiate so after a while I went back down. Continuing along the main trail it started to snow but I don't let things like that stop me! When I got to some yak corrals I turned back because it was about 5pm and it gets dark at 6pm. A little way back down the trail I had seen a couple of white-cheeked laughing thrushes, another rare and localised endemic, but the views weren't the greatest so I was being extra-sneaky on the way back past the bushes where they had been. The laughing thrushes weren't there but I saw a grey-crested tit in the low willow scrub on the downward slope. Something else was also moving in the willows so I put my binoculars on it in case it was some tit I hadn't seen yet.....and it turned out to be a Chinese grouse clambering about in the branches feeding on the leaves. It either didn't realise I was there or didn't care because I approached fairly close and managed to get some photos through the branches. Truly beautiful bird, one of those ones where the paintings in field guides just don't do them justice. Further on down the trail I saw a Sichuan tit (I'm not sure of the identity of the ones at Tangjiahe and Wanglang, but I know the Baxi ones are Sichuan tits at least, so it finally goes on the list). Then a large flock of birds flew into a nearby patch of bushes, which turned out to be a mixed batch of Goldlewski's buntings, robin accentors, and my first pine buntings. Again, no mammals at Baxi for me.
On the way out we got stuck behind loggers. The road up here has a couple of concrete blocks at the entrance to stop trucks getting in, so what the people do instead is take the logs out on small trailers pulled by little tiny tractors so they can fit between the blocks. The logs are carefully cut to a length of about eight-tenths of the road width which totally prevents anyone passing them. It was very slow! In Baxi we stopped at a place for dinner. In the next room a Chinese-language movie was playing, mostly involving screaming and gunfire, and something about it made me think of Terminator 2, perhaps the pacing of it. So I was thinking how amusing it would be to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger dubbed into Chinese when I heard the distinctive Terminator music! Then I heard the music from the Tech Noir club – it was the first Terminator movie. Because I knew which part of the movie it was up to I was waiting for the next of Arnold's lines but he only has 16 lines in the whole movie, the next one being where he goes to the police station and says “I'm a friend of Sarah Connor, may I see her please” (followed by “I'll be back”) and unfortunately we had finished and left before then.
Now I am back in Songpan. Not a lot of mammals at Ruoergai but an enjoyable time nonetheless.
I wasn't really going there for birds though, I was more after mammals. In fact the sole reason Ruoergai was in the itinerary was because of a trip report by Richard Webb on the Mammalwatching site where he saw truckloads of Tibetan foxes and wolves as well as a Pallas' cat. The cat was still a long-shot of course, but it sounded like Tibetan foxes were as good as guaranteed and that sealed it for me. I don't know if he was extraordinarily lucky, though, or if I was extraordinarily unlucky, or (most probably) a combination of the two, but I did very poorly indeed in the mammal department. No doubt it helped that he had the expert guidance of a local bird guide from Chengdu and I was going solo, but even with covering a lot of ground over a number of days I saw literally one fox and no wolves. I did see a bunch of new birds though, even when not really concentrating specifically on birding. It really is a superb area for birds.
Ruoergai is about three hours bus ride from Songpan (on the way back it took about two and a half hours). It is an average sort of town, nothing unlikeable about it but nothing particularly likeable either. Sort of middle of the road. My plan was to try and find a local driver to get around because it is a huge area, and bearing in mind that nobody in Ruoergai speaks English that would have had some interesting results, but as fortune would have it a girl from Chengdu arrived at Emma's Guesthouse in Songpan the same day as me on her way to Ruoergai where she was planning on hiring a driver to get around, and she was keen to team up to bring the cost down. It wasn't ideal because she wasn't looking for animals but it helped get everything sorted for me there to start with. Her English name was Nine (as in Seven of Nine but without the Seven of).
The bus left Songpan at 10am, and climbed quickly higher into the mountains. There were altitude signs every so often by the roadside. We passed 3500 metres within maybe half an hour. Just after 3850 metres I saw a common magpie hunched up like a puff-ball on a power-line. There were trilingual roadsigns all along the way (Chinese, Tibetan and English) about Buckle up, Don't drink and drive, Don't drive when tired. Very good to see. Best sign though were the Animals Crossing ones which had the English translation of “Zoology Channels”. The land all around Ruoergai is national parks and grassland reserves and wetland reserves and alpine forest reserves, but it is also one massive pasture. Yaks were everywhere! I would have seen several thousand every single day I was up there. I like yaks a lot. When seen galloping across the hills they look curiously like running bears. They communicate by grunting (their scientific name is Bos grunniens, which means “grunting ox”) and even though they are benign beasts the grunting always sounded hostile to me. If I were to farm anything it would be yaks. There were also regular cows, and hybrid yak-cows which are odd-looking animals. Lots of horses. And sheep. Weird, weird sheep. They had normal woolly bodies but naked goofy heads – I kept thinking they looked like sheep with goats' heads – and bizarre long corkscrew horns going almost horizontally out from either side of the head.
We stayed at the Shu Guang Hotel which is about 100 metres from the bus station. A twin room was 100 Yuan; later after Nine went back to Chengdu I got a single room with no bathroom for 50 Yuan and then a single with bathroom for 80 Yuan. Nine arranged the drivers during the stay which removed all the hassle for me. We/I had three drivers over the days: first day was Bocho, second and third days was Joshi, and for the last two days I had Mr. Ze (all those names are spelled phonetically as I interpreted them).
Nine wanted to go see a local sight called The First Meander Of The Yellow River (or The First Bend or The First Crook, depending on the sign), which is west of town. The start isn't right here at Ruoergai but it is where the river hits the plateau and once on the flat land begins to meander in loops. At sunset the whole river glows yellow which is what she wanted to see. I figured I would see some animals along the way, so she organised Bocho for the afternoon to take us there and back for 200 Yuan. The prices for taxis and private cars here are mostly dependent on the destination, not on length of time, so you can hire a driver for the day for the same or almost the same price as it would cost just to go to a place and back. Pretty handy really. Not many animals were seen. I kept an eye out the whole ride but nothing mammaly was seen. A Tibetan partridge running across the road was “new bird number one” though. Neither Bocho nor Nine seemed to get the idea of me wanting to stop for animals – she even asked why I would want to go to the same place twice when I said I would be making return visits to certain areas to look for foxes and birds. This had me worried for how things would go overall, but my time with Mr. Ze later turned out fine. At the First Meander site, there is a long boardwalk up the hillside with platforms for viewing. I saw a few black-lipped pikas around here but only a few. There was a while to wait for sunset, so while Nine went off and took photos I amused myself by watching the hills with my binoculars. I saw some ring-necked pheasants and a male hen harrier rather distantly, but then discovered that not far below the platform I was on there was a little thicket of knee-high scrub which seemed to be a favourite spot for little birds. Hume's groundpeckers were hopping about pecking at the ground; these used to be called Hume's ground-jays and are also called Hume's ground-tits, but groundpecker fits perfectly with the way they hammer their bills into the earth like woodpeckers do into trees. Godlewski's buntings and Oriental skylarks made numerous appearances, and there were also a few robin accentors in there as well. A female hen harrier made a close pass of the platform before being mobbed by a couple of kestrels. Way down the hill at the little village azure-winged magpies could be seen flying between the buildings which was a surprise (I didn't expect them this high). The temperature dropped rapidly as the day drew to a close, but there was no glowing river because the sky was clouded over.
The plan for the next day was sort of half mine and half Nine's. The area where Richard Webb found all the foxes and wolves was north of Ruoergai, and Nine wanted to go stay in a little town called Langmusi which was north. It didn't bother me which town I stayed in so the two plans fitted together all right and I figured I could treat this day as a sort of scouting mission to see where places were for when I had my own driver. She got the driver called Joshi for 200 Yuan for the day and we headed out at 7am. Halfway to Langmusi is Flower Lake which I thought would be good for birds, and it is a tourist spot, so it worked for both of us. Upland buzzards and saker falcons are really common up here. I had seen both in Mongolia but the upland buzzards only in flight so I hadn't appreciated just how big they are. They look like eagles! About every tenth power pole seemed to be an upland buzzard perch. There were probably other raptors as well, but I couldn't stop for every one. It was on the road this morning that I saw a Tibetan fox trotting across the fields. I didn't get a photo but wasn't worried because I thought I would be seeing loads of them over the next few days – how wrong I was!!
The gates at Flower Lake were still closed up when we arrived (it opens at 9am) but we walked in anyway. At the gates amongst the tree sparrows I saw a robin accentor, and later in the day saw another one with tree sparrows, so I guess it pays to look at the sparrow flocks when there. The lake itself is five kilometres from the road but there is a good concrete road the entire way along which the buses run (you aren't allowed private vehicles in). The fields by the entrance were alive with black-lipped pikas. There would have been hundreds or thousands of them right there, scuttling all over the grass between their burrows. There were also birds everywhere but mostly of just a few species. Hume's groundpeckers and horned larks were common, and also white-rumped and rufous-necked snowfinches. I had been expecting snowfinches to be small, like sparrows, but they are large like larks. The white-rumped snowfinches are ridiculously amusing. They like to collect in little groups and assume a very strange posture – body raised upright but the head tucked down, the white rump feathers puffed up, and the wings drooped to the ground – and then they chase each other in circles. When not doing the Quasimodo Dance, they look all white and fluffy, like a yeti would if it were a little bird. It was freezing cold here. My nose was running all the time and felt like it was about to fall off. I spent far too long trying to get photos of the pikas so didn't walk far before the gates opened and the first bus came through, on which we caught a ride to the lake (we paid our entry fee, which included the bus, on the way out: 105 Yuan, which was more than I thought it would have been). From the bus I saw my first black-necked cranes which are the speciality of the area. The lake was brilliant. There is a big looping boardwalk and raised hides for watching the birds from. Ruddy shelducks were in big flocks, their noise sounding oddly like a penguin colony. I had been hoping to see even just a couple of them, so to see a hundred-odd was great. Amongst the other birds were lots and lots of gadwalls (one of my new favourite ducks – drably-coloured but so elegant with it), greylag geese and coots, and smaller numbers of Eurasian teal, pintails, whooper swans, tufted ducks, common pochards, crested grebes, grey herons, and my first “real” wild mallard (as opposed to the manky introduced ones in New Zealand and elsewhere). There were no doubt other species of ducks in there but many of them were distant and I'm not very experienced at identifying the “common” European waterfowl! A common kingfisher zipped past, water pipits bounced around on the boardwalks, a Pallas' gull wandered past, a couple of white-tailed eagles could be seen over the far reed-beds. It was all very very satisfying.
The next stop, albeit a reluctant one for the driver, was on a side road just past the toll gate where Richard Webb had seen his Pallas' cat. I didn't think it likely I would actually see it – it may be in an entirely different part of its territory, or it may have died or been killed since last year – but it would have been stupid not to check. I found the spot he describes in his report but of course there was no cat there. If I was at exactly the right place then it seems a local family has set up their tents right next to it which didn't help. It also didn't help that Joshi told Nine that he knows that animal I was looking for but it's not a cat; it is a very fat animal that cannot be found in winter. It took me a while to figure out he was actually talking about marmots (which are currently hibernating) and I tried explaining this but it basically became the silly foreigner looking for an animal that can't be found in winter!
Langmusi, where we stayed the night, is a tiny Tibetan village but one which must be written up in Lonely Planet because that seems to be where all the tourists are going. There are lots of red-billed choughs there also; the people there literally do have choughs on their house roofs! Joshi took us to a local gorge which cost 30 Yuan entry. I only went because there might be birds there. At first I thought I was going to be disappointed but once we got past the religious trappings (streamers strung everywhere and bits of prayer papers littering the ground) it turned into a nice scrubby canyon where I saw white-throated redstarts and my first white-browed tit-warblers, as well as Himalayan griffon vultures soaring overhead. The white-browed tit-warbler require googling a photo: that shade of purple is just fantastic on a bird!
The next day was pretty much wasted, although I saw a sika deer at the end so that was all right. We had been going to go back to Ruoergai in the morning and then Nine would go back to Chengdu and I would do my own thing after she had explained to a new driver what I was up to. But Joshi rang her and said he had six other people who wanted to go to a place called Jah Gah Nah (spelled phonetically again because I couldn't find it on the map) which was north of Langmusi at Tie Bu which is where sika deer are found. Joshi said there was forest there, Nine wanted to go there, and I hoped to see a sika, so we joined in and went back to Ruoergai in the evening instead. The six were all Chinese tourists (two of whom were going to Chengdu as well, so they shared the cost of the taxi back to Ruoergai that night), but two French tourists came along as well, so it ended up only costing a small amount per person. The place we went turned out to be a trail up a large and rather spectacular gorge. Not much was seen up there bird-wise, although hill pigeons were a nice addition to the trip, and I spotted a distant group of five or six female bharal which I could identify immediately thanks to the process I went through with them at Wanglang Nature Reserve. When we went back to the car some of the group headed off to the local village, so I went back to searching the scrub near the road for birds. There were lots of them round there but they were hard to get good looks at and lots of them were streaky female finchy things which I couldn't identify. New birds were plain laughing thrush and beautiful rosefinch. A real surprise was a hair-crested drongo in some pine trees with Elliot's laughing thrushes. I think there were actually two because I could hear one calling unseen from inside the trees, but the visible one was very visible indeed. I hadn't expected drongos this high up at all! Then there were a lot of really attractive female finches or buntings which had me completely stumped. I had seen and photographed three of these birds all together the day before in the gorge at Langmusi but couldn't find them in the field guide, so I figured I might be able to ID them later with the help of Google. Here I saw lots of them in the same place as male Godlewski's buntings but they didn't look anything like the females of those. I got some photos of these ones as well, and back in Songpan when I was trying to ID rosefinches on the internet I unexpectedly discovered that these birds were female white-browed rosefinches! I only managed to get a look at a couple of males of these, but the females seemed super-abundant. On the drive back to Langmusi we saw a lone sika deer in some fields.
Nine went back to Chengdu the next morning (the hotel can arrange to take people straight from Ruoergai to Chengdu – and presumably vice versa – if the owners are making the trip themselves anyway). The evening before we had found a new driver called Mr. Ze because Joshi was busy for the next few days and when we tried to get Bocho he said that if I was going past the toll gate (where the Pallas' cat site was) then he wanted more money, even though the site is literally a few hundred metres past the toll gate and I could have just walked through to get there. When we said no he got in a stink and went off and apparently rang a bunch of other drivers and said not to take me anywhere! Mr. Ze turned out to be great. He didn't speak any English but Nine told him what I wanted to do (roughly “drive, stop, stop, drive, stop, stop, stop, looking for animals”) and after the first couple of stops, where I would get out and scan the surrounding hills, he started pointing out good vantage points for stopping and was scanning the land himself while driving. If anyone else is going there independently I have his phone number (but you'd need a Chinese-speaking in-betweener to arrange what you want to do to start off with).
The plan I had for the two days on my own was to basically follow Richard Webb's track, driving in the morning north of Ruoergai to Flower Lake and on to the Pallas' cat site, and then the second part of the day go to an alpine forest site called Baxi to the east of Ruoergai where he had seen serow and tufted deer. The very first stop we made to scan the hills produced a group of five small deer which made a very good impression on Mr. Ze because they couldn't even be seen without the binoculars and he must have thought I had magic eyes when it was actually a complete fluke. The problem was that I couldn't work out what sort of deer they were! I took a lot of photos and zoomed in on them but they were so distant that it didn't confirm anything. It was like the bharal sighting at Wanglang again! However they obviously weren't sika because they were too small and the wrong colour, so that really only left Siberian roe deer. They were about the right size, sort of the right colour, and they had really obvious white rumps. I was thinking they shouldn't be out in the open country like they were because roe are forest deer, but there were no other suitable deer to choose from. I put them down as Siberian roe with a question mark.
Despite numerous stops all along the way to Flower Lake and side-tracks up side tracks, no other mammals were seen. Lots of birds, including black-necked cranes, lapwings and small flocks of white-cheeked starlings on the fence lines, but no foxes or wolves. At one point I saw five or six Himalayan griffon vultures and cinereous vultures sitting on a hillside which was nice (as opposed to only seeing them gliding from below) and then round the next bend found a whole flock of about thirty of them squabbling over what was probably a wolf kill. The hills round about had even more sitting watching, so there were probably about sixty vultures all in the one small area. I had a good scan to see if there were any wolves somewhere nearby or if any foxes had turned up to scavenge, but no such luck. Flower Lake was just as good as the last visit. I was of course hoping there might be a Tibetan fox or a Pallas' cat stalking the billions of pikas by the entrance but no. At the lake itself there were most of the same birds as last time, but I also added several great white egrets amongst the grey herons, a couple of great cormorants, a few little grebes, and new amongst the ducks were Eurasian wigeon, a couple of ferruginous pochards and a single female red-crested pochard. One of the white-tailed eagles was fishing and kept inadvertently scaring all the ducks into flight with each pass. The Pallas' cat site was again a no-show for the cat, and we went a bit further north to a town for food. Here I saw a massive flock of literally hundreds of red-billed choughs circling from the ground high into the sky like a bird tornado. Really really impressive but impossible to get a photo of. The drive back towards Ruoergai turned up a fantastic lammergeier just near the road, undoubtably one of the best birds of prey!
We stopped off in Ruoergai on the way to Baxi and picked up Mr. Ze's mother and either his hot wife or his hot daughter, I wasn't quite sure which. I guess I was the entertainment for the day. Baxi was a bit disappointing this day. I wasn't sure where to go (the next day I found the spot Richard Webb went to) so we drove through the little town of Baxi and continued on until I found some forest, and then found a track up a valley. The only good birds seen were a small flock of twites which are great little birds, and beautiful rosefinches. No mammals.
Last day in Ruoergai was a repeat of the day before except I didn't go into the Flower Lake area. I may have seen a new duck or two but I decided to save my money. First animals seen (apart for ravens and tree sparrows) were the “roe deer” in the same place as before, except this time one was on the ridge and the horns were plainly visible through the binoculars. It wasn't a deer at all, it was a male Tibetan gazelle – not something I expected to see! Lower down on the next hill were two females within easy binocular range, but no good for photos. Then there were all the usual birds, including lots of black-necked cranes and a huge flock of Pallas' gulls (it looked like a couple of hundred of them). Really today was pretty poor, and of course no foxes or wolves or Pallas' cat.
Baxi was much better for birds than the day before. The road we took heads up through a couple of villages towards the forest. We went all the way to where the seal ended at the last village and parked there, and then just up the dirt road is a foot-track which goes up through some dirt fields and then up a valley. Once in the valley, on your left is scrubby hillside and on your right dense pine forest. There were all sorts of passerines up here, including Godlewski's and little buntings, twites, blue-fronted and white-throated redstarts, and white-browed tit-warblers. Two birds I was on the look-out for were blue eared pheasants and Sichuan jays. I didn't see any pheasants, but as I was walking I saw what had to be a jay fly between some trees further up the slope. I scrambled up there and managed to spy two or three Sichuan jays (they were moving around a bit and while I was looking at one the other(s) would be moving so I'm not sure how many there were). Sichuan jays are rare and localised endemics so I was happy to see them here. There was a yak trail on this slope so I followed this for a bit but yaks are insane with their ability to climb vertical hillsides that I can barely negotiate so after a while I went back down. Continuing along the main trail it started to snow but I don't let things like that stop me! When I got to some yak corrals I turned back because it was about 5pm and it gets dark at 6pm. A little way back down the trail I had seen a couple of white-cheeked laughing thrushes, another rare and localised endemic, but the views weren't the greatest so I was being extra-sneaky on the way back past the bushes where they had been. The laughing thrushes weren't there but I saw a grey-crested tit in the low willow scrub on the downward slope. Something else was also moving in the willows so I put my binoculars on it in case it was some tit I hadn't seen yet.....and it turned out to be a Chinese grouse clambering about in the branches feeding on the leaves. It either didn't realise I was there or didn't care because I approached fairly close and managed to get some photos through the branches. Truly beautiful bird, one of those ones where the paintings in field guides just don't do them justice. Further on down the trail I saw a Sichuan tit (I'm not sure of the identity of the ones at Tangjiahe and Wanglang, but I know the Baxi ones are Sichuan tits at least, so it finally goes on the list). Then a large flock of birds flew into a nearby patch of bushes, which turned out to be a mixed batch of Goldlewski's buntings, robin accentors, and my first pine buntings. Again, no mammals at Baxi for me.
On the way out we got stuck behind loggers. The road up here has a couple of concrete blocks at the entrance to stop trucks getting in, so what the people do instead is take the logs out on small trailers pulled by little tiny tractors so they can fit between the blocks. The logs are carefully cut to a length of about eight-tenths of the road width which totally prevents anyone passing them. It was very slow! In Baxi we stopped at a place for dinner. In the next room a Chinese-language movie was playing, mostly involving screaming and gunfire, and something about it made me think of Terminator 2, perhaps the pacing of it. So I was thinking how amusing it would be to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger dubbed into Chinese when I heard the distinctive Terminator music! Then I heard the music from the Tech Noir club – it was the first Terminator movie. Because I knew which part of the movie it was up to I was waiting for the next of Arnold's lines but he only has 16 lines in the whole movie, the next one being where he goes to the police station and says “I'm a friend of Sarah Connor, may I see her please” (followed by “I'll be back”) and unfortunately we had finished and left before then.
Now I am back in Songpan. Not a lot of mammals at Ruoergai but an enjoyable time nonetheless.
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I've just put a few photos in the China Wildlife gallery as well, including the hog badger and bharal.
I forgot to mention I put my new bird and mammal lists for the last few places (Tangjiahe, Wanglang and Ruoergai) in the Zoochat Big Year 2013 thread. Some really nice birds in there, well worth googling some of them if not familiar with how they look.
I just got my visa renewed today in Songpan (it only takes a few hours here, in contrast to somewhere like Chengdu where it takes seven days), so my first 45 days in China is up and the next 30 days starts now.....
I just got my visa renewed today in Songpan (it only takes a few hours here, in contrast to somewhere like Chengdu where it takes seven days), so my first 45 days in China is up and the next 30 days starts now.....
southwards, I plan on going to Wolong/Balang Shan (for pheasants, which I don't seem to be having much luck with!); and then Labahe, southwest-ish of Chengdu, for red panda if it is open (it closed earlier in the year for construction work right in the prime red panda locality, but apparently it is open again so I'll try my luck).
I'd rather see a red panda than a giant panda actually!
I am really liking your descriptions and am able to follow most of your trip on Google earth.
I was surprised to see where google earth thinks Wanglang Nature Reserve is there is a town on the bend of a river. On the east bank of the river it looks like the steep hill is terraced in rice paddies. Down by the river there appears to be many small paddocks. South east of the town there is also a hill by itself with a building on top. Is this right or is Google earth sending me to a different location.
I was surprised to see where google earth thinks Wanglang Nature Reserve is there is a town on the bend of a river. On the east bank of the river it looks like the steep hill is terraced in rice paddies. Down by the river there appears to be many small paddocks. South east of the town there is also a hill by itself with a building on top. Is this right or is Google earth sending me to a different location.
that sounds completely wrong! Have a search for Pingwu (or Ping Wu) which is north of Chengdu (way up in north Sichuan) and east of Songpan. The road that leads towards Wanglang goes north (ish) from Pingwu in the direction of Jiuzhaigou, and you should be able to find a huge dam (a flooded valley) which the road skirts around the right side of after the turn-off from the main road.
However there is a tiny Tibetan village about halfway along the road to Wanglang, so that might be the town on Google Earth?
Do people regularly see red pandas or are they elusive like the giant panda and almost never seen?
Now you have four of my favourite Chinese bird species on your list: grandala, white-browed tit warbler, maroon-backed accentor and red winged wall-creeper 
Just enjoy your trip! At least you could see wolf, panda, Pallas' cat even Tibetan fox (in the future) in the zoo, but it will be nearly impossible to see many of the bird species in the zoos around the world. And although I had spent five weeks in the mountains of west Sichuan, I had never managed to see even one bharal, Tibetan fox or sika deer (I had seen some tufted deer and alpine musk deer instead).
Just enjoy your trip! At least you could see wolf, panda, Pallas' cat even Tibetan fox (in the future) in the zoo, but it will be nearly impossible to see many of the bird species in the zoos around the world. And although I had spent five weeks in the mountains of west Sichuan, I had never managed to see even one bharal, Tibetan fox or sika deer (I had seen some tufted deer and alpine musk deer instead).
it has been pointed out to me that the Yellow River is not the same as the Yangtze River, so apologies for that. I had been going to check before posting but I never got round to it and it stayed in the final draft.....Chlidonias said:
the window for viewing red pandas is very narrow: late October to mid-November when the trees are bereft of leaves and the pandas are fattening up on berries before winter. There are just a few "reliable" sites (as reliable as can be with red pandas), notably Wawu Shan and Labahe. Both sites were closed to the public earlier this year but apparently Labahe is open again. There are some other places in the same general area but they are either pure chance or very difficult to get to. So I'm pinning my hopes on Labahe!!DavidBrown said:
that's the way I like to look at things too. The mammals can usually be seen in a zoo somewhere but the birds usually not! I can't decide which accentor I like best though: maroon-backed, rufous-breasted, or robin accentor....Now you have four of my favourite Chinese bird species on your list: grandala, white-browed tit warbler, maroon-backed accentor and red winged wall-creeper
The last driver I had at Ruoergai showed me a photo on his phone of a group of sika deer in the street (I think at Langmusi or somewhere nearby)!!