But wait, there's more: Ruoergai II
Three days ago I got my brand new tourist visa for another thirty days in China. I had been a bit disappointed in the poor mammal results of my trip to Ruoergai, and seeing it is less than three hours from Songpan and I probably won't be coming back here again, I decided to give it another quick go before heading southwards. It would have been silly not to. So the day after getting my visa renewed I was back on the bus to Ruoergai for two nights. Sometimes it just takes a second try to make things work out, so this was either going to be a fantastic plan or a complete waste of time. I got the same driver, Mr. Ze, and we were supposed to be spending the first afternoon covering the north of town (where the foxes and cats “are”), and the next day in the same area and in Baxi (where the forest is). However it wouldn't be a Chlidonias trip without a car crash in there somewhere.....
Last time I was in Ruoergai it was cold but there was not really any snow to speak of. This time it was snowing most of the way there from Songpan and the road was a little treacherous. The sheep-laden truck lying tipped over beside the road and the car ploughed into a cliff-face weren't exactly confidence-builders! Mr. Ze was waiting for me at the bus station and after I'd checked into the hotel we set off. I really wasn't expecting anything much because even fox-hunter extraordinaire Richard Webb said that when it snowed it made it harder to find the foxes. From inside the van the weather didn't look too bad, but as soon as I'd step outside at a stop it was like being pelted with icicles. I can't blame the foxes for not being out; even the yaks and the Jim Henson sheep didn't look happy. We were only out searching for maybe an hour ourselves, seeing only a few birds and black-lipped pikas (which look very odd running about on the snow – a mammal that size looks like it should be hibernating!) We would have been out for the entire afternoon but as we were coming off a little half-laned bridge we were hit amidships by a motorcycle-tractor-thing. I don't know what they are called but it is basically a great solid steel cage welded onto a motorbike with some extra wheels and a bigger engine. I guess if you imagine a old-style pick-up truck but with the front of a motorbike attached to the front instead of the car-cab, and with the whole thing about the size of a Morris Minor, that'd be about right. The guy obviously wasn't watching where he was going if he missed seeing a van in front of him. I'm surprised he didn't kill himself – the impact threw us around inside the van, so how he stayed on his bike seat I have no idea. I'm even more surprised that he just kept on going! Everything off our driver's side that could come off was now on the road, the door was askew, the rear doors wouldn't open because the one on the impact side had been jammed inside the other one, and the whole side looked like someone had take a grinder to it. After we sorted ourselves out we gave chase. He refused to stop until I stuck my head out the window and yelled at him, and then I think he thought “oh hell, I hit a car with a tourist in it!!”. The guy was huge, he looked like a Tibetan version of The Kurgan from Highlander, and when he stopped he pulled a metal bar from his bike, and his mate pulled up too on another one of the tractor-bikes and started taking a knotted length of rope out of his jacket. I thought it was going to be all on and I'd end up next in a Chinese prison, but instead my driver and them just started yelling at each other. For the next two hours. It turned out The Kurgan hadn't got off lightly himself: he could barely walk on the leg which had been on the impact side so he must have done it some serious damage. In the end he was just sitting on the side of the road not able to stand any more. And that was the afternoon over. We drove the van back to town and left it in a garage.
Mr. Ze couldn't take me out the next day obviously, so he had arranged another driver for me who turned out to also be very good at what I wanted. (I have his number too, if anyone is going solo to Ruoergai and wants a choice of driver; unfortunately I can't for the life of me remember his name). It had been snowing all night and everything was white, but there were no falls during the day which was good, and by afternoon the sky was all blue. I was really not holding out any hope for today, but at the very first stop we made I spotted a red fox. Like the gazelles at the first stop with Mr. Ze last time, I think this made a good impression on the new driver, as if I had magically just “known” there would be a fox there. Next stop, another red fox! Third stop, a third red fox!! All of them were pretty far off – far enough that you needed binoculars to watch them – but this was looking good! The next two stops showed up only boring old birds: you know, black-necked cranes and boring things like that. Actually, almost every stop had cranes, that's how common they are here! Then a very good stop, where I saw on one hill a red fox and on the neighbouring hill not one Tibetan fox but two Tibetan foxes, spread out on different patches searching about in the snow for food. The blanket of white the snow made over everything really helped picked them out against it! The next two stops also had a Tibetan fox at each. Like the red foxes none of them were close so I never did get to take any photos of them (apart for distant “record shots”) but by 9am I had seen four red foxes and four Tibetan foxes, so it was a good morning!
We stopped at Flower Lake and I took the bus in to see what sort of ducks might be around. I was literally the only visitor there. The boardwalks were ankle-deep in snow – almost knee-deep in select places where the snow had collected against steps. The next people didn't arrive until 11am as I was leaving. The waterfowl were all the same as last visits except I also saw a female shoveller. Sliding around on the ice between the reeds were a few passerines, one of particular interest (as a “new” bird for me) being a red-throated thrush. As I was heading back along the last stretch of boardwalk to where the bus was waiting, out of the snow suddenly popped a mountain weasel! I was so surprised I just gawped at it for a second as it stood up on its hind legs staring back at me, before my brain kicked into gear and I lifted my binoculars to see what sort of weasel it was. What was really dumb of me is that for some stupid reason I had put my camera into my shoulder bag as I was heading to the bus, instead of having it round my neck, so I'm thinking “please stay there, please stay there, please stay there” as I'm pulling the camera out, getting off the lens cap, turning it on, extending the zoom, lifting it to my eye, trying to focus....and all the while the weasel is just standing there waiting. Good little fella. So I got one photo of it standing and then a bunch of it squatting back, then it had a little roll in the snow on its back, as weasels do I guess, and then it went back down the hole in the snow between two of the boardwalk planks and that was it. Really really really happy with that sighting! There were little weasel footprints in patches all along the rest of the boardwalk, where it looked as if he was using the underside of the boardwalk as his runway but popping up every so often to have a scan of the surroundings. Just like me looking for Tibetan foxes! I am one with the weasel.
There was no way I wasn't going to check out the Pallas' cat site next but my luck unfortunately wasn't that good today! After lunch back in Ruoergai we headed east to the forests at Baxi. We went back to the same place I was last time, where I walked up the valley. Surprisingly there was not much snow up here at all, and none at all on the trail itself. There were loads of passerines around, all the usual sorts (all really nice birds, mind you, like blue-fronted and white-throated redstarts, and white-browed and long-tailed rosefinches, but all ones I had been seeing quite a lot of lately up in the mountains). The selection was particularly good just past the yak corrals where there were rufous-breasted and robin accentors seemingly everywhere amongst the rosefinches and redstarts. But they weren't as exciting as the Gansu pika! I only saw it by complete accident when I was looking at a bird and it scuttled past the binocular view. I saw it pause for a brief second and then it dived into the grass and disappeared. Gansu pikas are forest pikas, not open-country ones like the black-lipped pikas, and they are tiny, only about half the size of the “normal” pikas. Because they are solitary and live in ground-cover they are far more difficult to spot than the open country ones. There wasn't much happening on the trail beyond the yak corrals so I headed back again. When I got to the spot where the pika was I saw it dash off into cover again. I waited, and after just a couple of minutes it reappeared. I snapped a few photos, branches and grass in the way, and then tried edging to a better position. The pika sat there and watched me but didn't move, and I ended up getting some really good photos of it. It was a bit unexpected actually!
So that was Ruoergai part two! A far more successful one-day than the whole other attempt as far as mammals went. I didn't see the Pallas' cat but that was more or less expected. I doubt I'll be in any more Pallas' cat territories from now on in this trip, so I will have to settle for now with the eye-shine I got in Mongolia. I wanted to see one in the wild before I'm forty and while I didn't “see” it the way I wanted to, I did at least “find” one in the wild which is as good as anything.
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