Valley of Potpourri - Autumn in the Valley of Flowers

In late September last year, I joined Sahastra and a group of four friends on a trek to the Valley of Flowers in Uttarakhand. When we reached there we were told that the season for flowers had slipped behind us by two weeks. We prepared for disappointment but instead discovered to our happy surprise that the Valley in September was fall's magical fairyland, ready to be tucked in for a long winter nap. This piece was published as the cover story in India Abroad Magazine, August 27, 2010.  

Autumn burnishes the Valley of Flowers with ochre, gold and fawn

WHEN I ARRIVED in the Valley of Flowers, Uttarakhand, I expected to experience the vistas I had gleaned from brochures and travelogues: Lush expanses of verdure embroidered with bright floral spangles. But the valley that greeted me was a picture of desiccation. The waist-high flowerbeds sported an autumnal burnish of ochre, gold and fawn as they braced for the inevitability of the Himalayan winter. 

The peak of Nar Parvat as seen from Ghangharia, 3 km from the Valley of Flowers. The cliff walls on either side of the valley rise thousands of feet.

A hypnotic hush lingered, tempered only by the muted roar of distant waterfalls, feeble bird calls and the wheezy whisper of the wind among the drying stalks. I also felt an overwhelming sense of isolation — ours was the only group traversing the white gravel path that snaked through the flowerbeds.

The last of the flower enthusiasts, who had braved the monsoon rains and the profusion of leeches, had departed weeks ago. The blossom-studded meadows that had charmed visitors from June to August were a distant memory. Gone were the much photographed Brahma Kamals (Rheum nobile) and cobra lilies. The violet primulas and buttery-yellow marsh marigolds had disappeared. The edelweiss had turned into ashen stars. The celebrated Himalayan Blue Poppies, which bloomed during the monsoon and held an inexplicable fascination for Japanese flower-seekers, had turned into membranous cups rattling with seeds. Pale pink balsams with translucent stems were still in flower though some already bristled with seed pods. Only the geraniums, hemmed in by natural hedgerows of lilac asters and mustard inulas, thrust out their cheery pink and white blooms to greet the sun.

The Valley as seen from the trail.
The heart of the Valley is a good hour's walk from this point.

In the monsoon of 1931 the English mountaineer Frank Sydney Smythe and his botanist colleague R L Holdsworth, who were descending after their pioneering conquest of Mount Kamet, accidentally entered the Bhyundar Valley. Through veils of mist they spied expansive carpets of blue primula, irises, wild roses, violets and anemones. ‘It was impossible to take a step without crushing a flower,’ Smythe wrote in a subsequent memoir.

A consummate mountaineer, writer and photographer venerated by many of his contemporaries, Smythe had climbed extensively in the Himalayas as well as in the Alps and the Canadian Rockies. He had attempted Mount Everest three times — twice with Hugh Ruttledge and once as a member of Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman’s 1938 expedition. Smythe wrote more than 27 books and travelogues before he died at 49 of complications induced by malaria.

Bursts of remnant colour light up a tawny field

Returning to London after his unexpected discovery, Smythe devoted himself to gardening, a hobby inspired by his serendipitous descent into the Bhyundar Valley. But the ‘Valley of Flowers’, as he had christened it, haunted him constantly. In 1937, he returned to explore the region and wrote of it in his book, The Valley of Flowers (Hodder, London, 1938).

Near its end is a chapter titled ‘Autumn in the Valley of Flowers’, which served as my lodestone, as I wandered in Smythe’s footsteps barely a week before the tourist season ended.

Encounter - Red-headed Bullfinch (in a wall-eating cameo!)

Maybe we had stumbled upon the beauty secrets of this gorgeous bird


Strolling around the temple premises of Madmaheswar I saw a small bird hopping playfully on the plinth beside the Pujariji’s (priest) quarters. Slightly larger than a swallow, it had a golden-yellow crown, thick black bill and large round eyes.

I crept up to it, only to see it fly away. I waited in the vicinity for what seemed to be forever, hoping it would return, and suddenly spied a rusty-red version of the same bird between the reeds. It struck me that the first one should be the female and this one would be the male. 

Again, my attempt to approach to photograph unsettled it and it flew away but this time to another building a little way off. And here, I noticed it pecking at the walls of the building. My first impression was that it was trying to eat insects off the wall. After a few minutes it flew away into the dense forest below. I dropped all hope of finding it again. Later, I'd identify them as a pair of Red-headed Bullfinches (Pyrrhula erythrocephala).

After our customary tea from the stall of Beerbal, the temple canteen proprietor, I was about to return to our accommodation when I noticed the female bird sitting at the plinth of the shack right ahead. This time I was lucky. My approach didn’t alarm them, and I could get a good look at both the male and female.

The male Red-headed Bullfinch...

...and his lady

As I watched, both the male and female took turns nibbling at the plastering of the shack wall. Yes, they were clearly taking bites out of the bright blue painted walls. Sahastra and I surmised that they were probably after the calcium from the lime, though we are not sure of the reason for this. 

...and the happy feeding moments

Can anybody throw some light on this unusual behaviour?

- Text and pictures by Sandeep Somasekharan

Le Question: What happened to the Sidewinder?

The Sidewinder is a rattlesnake that has adapted to life in the desert with unique sinusoidal-diagonal locomotion that enables it to negotiate smooth sand dunes with ease

This post concerns a certain question asked after a storytelling session at my son’s school, though this could be any child’s question to his or her teacher. 

The story concerned God and his miracles (which, incidentally, are almost always performed for the benefit of Homo sapiens). Here goes: A group of people who lived in a desert were starved of water (for obvious reasons). So they prayed to the rain god and encouraged piety and truthful living among their kin (I am not sure of the details: My son can be notoriously sketchy on the details but jumps onto the core of the matter like a pouncing tomcat). Anyway, the rain god smiled. There were copious rains for many years and eventually the desert was transformed into a lush tropical forest teeming with life. Rivers began to flow again and there were huge harvests. The tribe lived happily ever after. The story would have ended there except for one small question from the back of the class.

"Qu'est-il arrivé à la SideWinder?" (What happened to the Sidewinder?)

Shashwat was not just trying to show off his newfound knowledge of the desert and its denizens (picked up courtesy Sir David Attenborough’s BBC documentary series Planet Earth), the sidewinder being one of the most striking. Its sinusoidal-diagonal traverses across the dunes must have been etched in my son’s memory. But he had a genuine concern: What happens when one species benefits due to an unplanned intervention and others lose out. Or rather, why should this happen at all?

The question was not answered, but therein hangs an ethical dilemma with the anthropomorphic god and biased ethical systems. While we may confuse deserts with desertification, a child’s mind, yet to be clogged with concepts and cares, is perceptive enough to instinctively separate the two. Deserts are ecosystems that have evolved over millennia and their conversion to fertile farmland is akin to chopping down rainforests. It’s our instinctive (or indoctrinated?) association of environment with “green” that tips the odds against the protection of desert eco-systems. Desertification is the result of unsustainable living and often leads to loss of tree cover and arable land.

Demoiselle Cranes in the desert at Kichan, Rajasthan

The sidewinder in question would have endured a slow and agonizing death, its wonderful winding glides across the scorching sands slowly turning into painfully awkward slides on wet sands. A twisted and macabre version of Woman in Dunes played out in water.

Text by Sahastrarashmi

Photo of Sidewinder courtesy DK Clipart

Photo of Demoiselle Cranes at Kichan, Rajasthan by Sahastrarashmi

Encounter with the tiny giant - The Giant Wood Spider

Male and female spiders are not exactly lovey-dovey. The female ends up feeding on the male soon after mating or, in some cases, even before he mates with her.

Posted by Arun

Spiders have always fascinated me. These arachnids, even though they are considered a lesser order of creatures, have always been the awe-inspiring tigers of the miniature world to me. Among them there are tiny spiders the size of ants (or even smaller) and big ones that can hunt and devour birds. But until recently I did not have the good fortune to see the Giant Wood Spiders, which are commonly found in forests, wasteland and gardens.


The D-day came when I had gone for spotting vultures at Ramnagara. It was a cloudy morning with slight drizzle when I started climbing Ramadevarabetta. As I started searching for birds in the canopy, all I could find was spiders. Spiders all around -- big ones with equally big webs. They were the wood spiders, the giants themselves. I soon lost count of how many there were. In some areas where the canopy opened up, it was criss-crossed with the spiders and their webs. It was more than I could ask for!

A sky full of spiders!

While observing them, I found individuals of the same size and shape but different colours -- one was black and yellow, and the other black and reddish-brown/orange. Although I found this interesting, I didn't bother much, thinking that they could be just morphs and went on to take a few snaps of both. A couple of days after the trip, this difference in colour was still at the back of my mind. So I went ahead and did a little digging on the web (not the spiders', but the Internet). That's how I found that they were not just morphs but two different species of the genus Nephila. Nephila maculata and Nephila kuhlii Doleschall (courtesy: http://www.southindianspiders.org/).


Female Giant Wood Spiders (Nephila maculata) have a white carapace (upper front part) and a black abdomen with yellow longitudinal bands. Their legs are long, thin and black with yellow markings near the joints.

A female Giant Wood Spider

Female Black Wood Spiders (Nephila kuhlii Doleschall) have a black carapace and abdomen with thin, reddish-brown/orange and black legs.

Female and male Black Wood Spiders

Males of both species have the same colour -- reddish-brown/orange and are much smaller than the females. The male of the black wood spider can be seen in the above picture, perched on top of the female.


Speaking of sexes, male and female spiders are not exactly the 'lovey-dovey' type. Sexual cannibalism is very common among spiders; that is, the female ends up feeding on the male soon after mating or, in some cases, even before he mates with her. In the case of the giant and the black wood spiders, the males always linger around the female, usually at the edge of her web, waiting for the right opportunity. He gets just enough time to approach, entice and mate with her and make a hasty retreat or risk becoming one of her meals (check out "Safer sex with feeding females: sexual conflict in a cannibalistic spider" at http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/).


Here, among the tiny giants, are the dwarfs -- the males among the females!

Text and Photographs: Arun Menon 
Arun also blogs at Idle Mind