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Nepal — Tiger Trace

Michael Warren travelled on our ‘Nepal — A Birdwatching Tour’ holiday in March/April, and wrote three engaging pieces about his trip. We have included two of them here, ‘Tiger Trace’, on the search for Tiger in Chitwan National Park, and ‘Heights and Kites in Kathmandu’ a beautiful and reflective piece set in Kathmandu at the start of his holiday.

We have spent the last two days driving and walking Tiger territory here in Chitwan National Park. This morning, whilst others sleep on and before the sun is fully up, I join our guiding ornithologist through misty savannah on the banks of the Narayani. A 9-foot Marsh Mugger crocodile is half submerged with a fleshy limb clamped in its jaws. We push slowly through tall grasses (the tallest in the world are here in the Terai-Duar lowlands) quietly searching for rare cisticolas and grassbirds. A little ahead of us is a local guide and his protective bamboo rod.

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Zitting Cisticola

In the sand, he kneels to examine. Pug marks. Tiger. He lays a pen beside the indentations to indicate the size of the creature’s print. ‘Last night,’ he says, pointing back along the path. ‘It came through.’ Two evenings before, riding out high and safe on elephants’ backs, we’d come across a crisp and mealy carcass, almost a week old beneath a putrid haze of flies and nearly black from sun. Another lay half covered in high grass nearby, fresher, the stench carrying to some way off.

It’s not difficult to see why predators fascinate us: a creature that can be part-tamed, or captured at least, but which remains well on the distant side of loveable or predictable, of that we think we can come to know. Minacious and fierce, striped or barred, fire in the eye. The largest Royal Bengal Tiger population anywhere in Nepal — 125 of just 2,500 or so in the subcontinent — lives here in Chitwan, an internationally important park in the inner terai. But they are no easier to see for that. The most elusive of creatures, fiendishly difficult to locate, they can be right there, camouflaged perfectly in dense undergrowth or the slightest stand of grass, and you’ll never see them. They will see you.

Yesterday we took a day-long, dusty journey through the reserve, driving narrow tracks through subtropical riverine forests. The leaf litter is ankle-deep here, dry and tiger-orange, beneath big-leaved Sal and Rhino Trees, Saj, Rosewood, the sailing buttress roots of Kopak. Thick strangler vines coil like pythons round trunks, slowly suffocating their hosts. Way up, langurs, old man-grey and quizzical, swing easily from branch to branch. We spot a predator’s prey well enough, deer herds keeping mostly to the shadowy spaces among and between the understorey. There are four species here: the small and numerous Hog Deer; Muntjacs; the elegant Spotted Deer (or Chital), akin to the European Fallow; and the biggest, a Tiger’s favourite, the dusky, skittish Sambars.

In late afternoon, the cicadas are lulled, light shifts and the air is pungent with jasmine. We happened upon a small flock of Great Hornbills — 10 perhaps — planing one after the other through the canopy into the tree tops. They picked and fed delicately on finicky fruit with their preposterous turmeric bills, which look double the size for those huge casques (the bizarre appendage on the upper mandible used for aerial jousting) so that the whole thing looks like some ludicrous high society hat.

We never expected to see Tigers. And we did not. Why should we? To see the Tiger would be exhilaration, a marvel, but to not see it somehow seemed as it should be too. It is never our right. This beast deserves our committed protection — we are, after all, largely responsible for its grievous demise — but also deserves its isolation, its right to be and to be unseen. I will make do with enigmatic traces that signal its absent presence: sandy depressions of movement just last night, the remains of attack and kill, uneasy yelps and alarms from deeper into the forest. It is here.

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Giant Hornbill

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Oriental Magpie-robin

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Sambar Deer

Heights & Kites in Kathmandu

At the hotel I head up for the highest point. Even on the rooftop there is more — it spirals up three levels, each appearing just as you make the last, well beyond most buildings’ top floors. The air is spice and warmth. Up here I am with the kites who turn on the city’s rising heat, and monsoon-washed House Crows who fuss raucously from roof to roof. Birds are always lodestars to new places; I begin with them.

It’s a habit I’ve adopted in many cities, but here seeking height feels doubly instinctive, mimicking the birds’ advantage. Nepal is the land of heights — from sea level to the highest point on Earth in under 200 kilometres, the world’s rooftop; a country with the highest elevation in the world reaching up to Tibet, the globe’s highest region. It’s a yearning for height that brings thousands here in the peak season to attempt ascents, or trek along the great Himalayan wall — Annapurna, Machhapuchhare, Langtang. Nepal has eight of the world’s tallest mountains and over 250 peaks over 20,000 feet. Everest (or Chomolungma as the sherpas call it — Goddess Mother) is the highest and most famous of them all, of course. It reaches beyond the clouds five miles into the sky — near aircraft cruising level at 8,848 metres, 29,029 feet — where there is so little oxygen and the air so cold humans cannot ordinarily survive, though many take on the dangers to reach its summit. And it’s still rising: colossal tectonic movements drive the subcontinent further under Eurasia and the snowy mountains upwards, upwards.

This time, our travels in Nepal will take us no further north than the foothills of the Kathmandu Valley, but my preparations have still been fervid viewing and reading on Himalayan adventures, of sherpas, of Hillary and Norgay, Mallory and Irvine, of the disastrous 1996 Everest expedition, and high-flying Bar-headed Geese whose lungs can cope with rarefied air at Everest height — twice that — on their annual migration to the lowlands of India and the Nepal terai, to where we will travel in a few days. I’ve brought mountain literature, too, on Snow Leopards, on Tibetan monasteries and wilderness.

From this rooftop in a city 4,600 feet above sea level, I watch for birds — bulbuls and magpierobins, swifts and sparrows. Their bother and busyness make me think of the bustle down there, all that dense, high-rise living; mucky children, cadaverous dogs; of grand civic monuments tumbled in earthquake or unrest; chickens scratching at earth in between cars, and their dead kin garrotted and gutted to bleed in the street. A flock of Great White Egrets flaps past. Below our bedroom window, a man cooks in a battered pot on a wood fire at the doorway to a corrugated shed.
Kathmandu, formed at the confluence of two rivers where an ancient lake once existed, is the heart of a country of commingled and harmonious differences. Here are Buddhism and Hinduism, Christianity and Islam; Tibetan peoples from the north and Aryan tribes from the great plains of the Ganges that meld like all elements in nirvana; the many into one, single minds into universal mind, as ‘waves do not derive from water … [but] are water, in fleeting forms that are not the same and yet not different’ (Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard). Here we will seek all that difference and beauty, of people, foods and lands, of birds.

To find out about our 'Nepal - A Birdwatching Tour' please click here.
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Durbar Square, Kathmandu