The Green Ogre: chopta

Showing posts with label chopta. Show all posts

Wordless Wednesday: The hues of advancing autumn

Photo: Sahastrarashmi
Chopta, Garhwal Himalaya, Uttarakhand

Encounter: Chestnut-tailed Minla

Perhaps I had a karmic debt to pay the Chestnut-tailed Minla

Battered by my first ascent of the Garhwal Himalaya, I was listening to the lament of my creaking knees en route to Kunol from Wan when Sahastra, whose knees had served him well, and Jennifer, who imbibed superpowers from yoga, decided to adventurously explore the forest in search of white-throated laughingthrushes. While I beat about the bush aimlessly, they returned triumphant. There is nothing more psychologically demolishing than being physically downbeat as your birding compadres tick away lifers. But then, I was too numbed to even bleed to Jennifer's unkind cut.

“Did you see that?” she asked, pointing to a blur of colour in a bush that disappeared instantly.

I shook my head. Did anyone here care about my knees?

“It used to be called the Bar-throated Siva,” she explained as we continued walking. “Such an apt name it was. Now they've gone and renamed it.”

Did I care? Oh, my knees!

“What do they call it now?” asked Sahastra, whose recent sighting of the laughingthrushes had placed him in a higher league and sharpened his curiosity in the natural world.

“Chestnut-tailed Minla,” said Jennifer, and ranted, “And no one even notices the colour of the tail.”

Somewhere in my pain-fogged brain that name triggered a flicker of memory. But nothing came of it except a sore spot at having missed another lifer. Sahastra and Jennifer exchanged notes on the renaming and reclassification of birds, a discussion that culminated with them dousing Pam Rasmussen with buckets of vitriol. I returned to listening to the creaking of my knees.

On my next trip to Garhwal in 2009, Sahastra and I rounded the bend beyond the hamlet of Chopta and were gazing upon the layered vista of valleys that unfolded before us from the serpentine road to Gopeshwar. Far above us, wreathed in mist, the spires of Tungnath peeped out into the sky.

We had almost been soaked by a sudden thunderstorm the previous evening and wanted to return to our lodgings before another similar predicament befell us. Suddenly, we were stopped dead in our tracks by an enormous mixed hunting party of grey-hooded warblers, black-throated, spot-winged and green-backed tits, along with variegated laughingthrushes. Among them, one oddball bird stood out. It was nothing like any I'd ever seen. Its throat was barred, it was colourful overall and I noticed nothing of the tail except that it was long. Sahastra, too, had trouble thumbing through his mental log to identify it instantly.

“This is that guy,” he said helpfully, “the one you missed.”

That hit a raw nerve instantly. “I know,” I hissed, overcome by elation. A birder doesn't forget a missed encounter easily. He goes back and pores over the page listing his forgone quarry and memorises its image until it shimmers in his mind's eye with envy and desire.

Perhaps it was the law of attraction, but the Chestnut-tailed Minla (Minla strigula) and I had finally met at the feet of Siva. What ironic coincidence!

Note: This picture was taken by Sandy on his trip with Sahastra. I couldn't join them then. Clearly, the Minla had no karmic accounts to settle with them and revealed itself happily.

Photograph: Sandeep Somasekharan

Encounter: Crimson Sunbird

A chance meeting with this charming sunbird kept our spirits high through the unpredictable Himalayan weather

In September 2010, on our way to the shrine of Madhyamaheshwar, we spent a night at the beautifully situated GMVN guest house at Ukhimath. It had been a year of catastrophic rains – an extremely heavy and extended monsoon had wreaked havoc on the roads and the landslides continued to pile up as more rain was forecast.

As we stood contemplating the ominous news that we had just received -- a part of the road leading to the starting point of our trek at the village of Uniana had been washed off -- we picked up a sunbird-like call from a bottle-brush tree beside the bungalow.

Could it be the Green-tailed Sunbird? I had seen it at Chopta (2,900m) but this (at 1,130 m) seemed a tad low for either the Green-tailed or the Fire-tailed Sunbird. But it was also high for the ubiquitous Purple Sunbird that is so common in the plains. As we stepped out to scan the tree, we spied the unmistakable scarlet breast that glowed as if on fire in the rays of the morning sun. It was the Crimson Sunbird (Aethopyga siparaja).

Though this sunbird is fairly common (it is found in the Western Himalayas, Sahyadris, and a race occurs in the Nicobar Islands), this was my first sighting. The bird was quite restless and kept flitting from the bottle brush tree to a large dense-canopied tree nearby. It made these sorties while vocalizing all the time.

The bird has a crimson patch on the mantle and a yellow spot just above the rump but from the view that we had, the scarlet breast and throat merged into a rather drab grey-olive belly. The tail is greenish and much longer than that of the Small Sunbird or Crimson-backed sunbird (Nectarinia minima) which also has a much less curved beak. The Crimson Sunbird is supposed to have a preference for red flowers which may have been the reason for its multiple sorties to the bottlebrush, a plant introduced from Australia. It’s also a favorite of the Purple Sunbird (Nectarinia asiatica).

Pretty soon the staff of the guest house got interested and took turns gazing at the beauty – which was present at Ukhimath year-round but which they had probably never looked at so closely. Beaming with pride at our joy of a lifer, they said: “Uttarakhand mein aapko bahut sundar pakshi dikhenge” (you will see very beautiful birds in Uttarakhand). We knew they were right and in the days ahead their lighthearted quip kept our hopes high as we we negotiated blocked roads, incessant rains and imminent landslides to bird persistently in the Himalaya.

The Crimson Sunbird is the unofficial national bird of Singapore.

Text: Sahastrarashmi

Photograph: Sandeep Somasekharan

Wordless Wednesday: The Last Musk Deer

In 2002, while in Chopta (part of Kedarnath Musk Deer Sanctuary), we had tried to visit the Musk Deer Breeding Centre but were denied access. They behaved as if it were a nuclear installation, a friend who was with me then had observed.

Later in August 2006 I was in Chopta with Gopi Sundar and Swati. We happened to visit the breeding centre and it turned out that all the deer (>12) had died out due to a disease outbreak, except one lone survivor (in the picture).

Photos: Sahastrarashmi / K S Gopi Sundar

Encounter: A monsoon brush with Cobra Lilies

A not-so-pale view of hills

I woke up to the sound of rain pounding the tin roof of the rented shack and the remnants of a nightmare lingering on. I dreamed that the mountain looming above us has suddenly sprung a gigantic waterfall, which is nonchalantly carrying my shack to the valley below. Though I am still cozy inside the sleeping bag, it is impossible to get rid of the feeling that the cold mist is out to get me. The bed beside the sleeping bag is damp and cold and the moment the shack’s door is opened the fog starts creeping in looking out for dry pockets, if any remain.

We are in Chopta and this is August. The Himalayan monsoon has made the place its own and we are part of the package. We have come here to bird and over the next few days we will be intimately acquainted with cold rain, rolling mists, tenacious leeches and precarious roads, often all four at the same time. It drizzles from dawn to dusk and pours at night time. The only birding afforded is a few brave moments in the drizzle and a short gift of sunshine usually in the evenings.

But in the special way that that Himalayas give back to a battered traveler there are rewards for those who endure (which we do).

A meadow teems with monsoon gifts

The trees are ghostly shapes overgrown with ferns and moss

There is the swoosh of an unseen Lammergeier approaching through the mist, restless tits and yuhinas flitting about the oak tops, yellow-breasted greenfinches taking off in a whirr from a snow patch in the meadow, Himalayan woodpeckers with their perfect Y markings, and the gorgeous rufous-bellied niltava in a feeding frenzy that a brief sunshine affords. There are plump but remarkably agile rufous-gorgetted flycatchers chasing winged quarries in dark glades, flower-draped meadows where we literally had to wade through scent, verditer flycatchers reminding us of the colour of the skies we could not see, a group of Himalayan Tahr on an impossible ledge, trees draped in dark-green wet moss which the white-tailed nuthatches rip apart hunting for grubs, the iridescent blue green-tailed sunbird with its purple sash glowing in the setting sun, slick black lichen-spattered crags, mist-soaked dripping ferns bursting out from crevices, and the mesmeric cobra lilies.

Cobra Lilies are in plenty and we are captivated. They grow below dripping rocky crags, besides brooks, at meadow edges and by the roadside. On first appearance they seem like some strange hybrid form of plant and snake and, as we get used to them, the feeling gets stronger. They are a mephistophelean prank of nature, a fitting substitute for the cobra in an environment too cold for it. Over the next few days we locate two species, both of which are hypnotically charming and no matter how many times we come across them, they have the power to stop us in our tracks and take closer awe-inspired looks.

Arisaema propinquum

Arisaema propinquum

Arisaema propinquum flowering

Arisaema tortuosum or Wallich's Cobra Lily has a remarkable resemblance to the cobra's hood. It grows to a height of about 30 cm and has a dark purple hood (spathe) striped with whitish green and a beautiful nettled pattern. The spathe ends in a short pointed tail much like a cobra with its tongue in check. The fruit is like a cob of corn, green at first and maturing to a bright orange red in fall much like a smoked-out painter's psychedelic rendering of corn.

Arisaema propinquum flower

The species is named after Nathaniel Wallich. Wallich was born in Copenhagen in 1786 and landed in the Dutch outpost of Frederiksnagore (Serampore) in Bengal in November 1808 where he was appointed as a surgeon. After the British ran over the Dutch colonies in India, Wallich after a brief stint in prison was appointed as assistant to William Roxburgh, the East India Company's botanist in Calcutta. This afforded him the opportunity to visit and study the flora and fauna of the subcontinent especially of Nepal and Burma (almost 20 species of flora and fauna are named after him including the Cheer Pheasant (Catreus wallichii). Later, following a stint with the Asiatic Society he was permanently associated with the East India Company's Botanical Garden at Calcutta, where he served from 1817 to 1846. During these years he published books, undertook expeditions, assisted plant hunters who stopped by at Calcutta and undertook a trip to Assam to evaluate the prospects of growing tea. He is remembered at the Kew gardens where his collections are held and a herbarium is named after him.

Arisaema jacquemontii

Jacquemont's Cobra Lily is more slender and serpentine. What it lacks by way of true likeness to the cobra's hood it makes up with its extremely delicate shape and elongated, lightly winding acute apex of the spathe, and its gregarious nature. A cluster of Jacquemont's Cobra Lilies has the surreal feel of slender green cobras dancing in the breeze with their long unforked tongues out to catch the raindrops.

A cluster of Arisaema jacquemontii

Arisaema jacquemontii or Jacquemont's Cobra Lily is named after Victor Jacquemont, a French botanist and geologist who travelled to india in 1828 on behalf of Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle and died in Bombay four years later aged 31. He was in the court of the charismatic Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh (the famed owner of the Koh-i-Noor diamond employed at least four Italian and French mercenary generals who had served in the Napoleanic wars in Europe) and records indicate that he travelled to Ladakh and Himalayas among other places. Several plants are named for him, including Acacia jacquemontii, the Himalayan White Birch (Betula jacquemontii), the Indian Tree Hazel (Corylus jacquemontii) and Afghan Cherry (Prunus jacquemontii).

The Cobra Lilies (normally used for the Asiatic species) are also sometimes referred to as Jack in the Pulpit. They belong to the genus Arisaema which (as per the website rareplants.de) “is made up of more than 250 herbaceous species, which are distributed throughout temperate to tropical areas on all continents with the exception of Australia, Europe and South America. Their main distributional range is located from the western Himalayas, southeast to China and Japan, whereas in North America only two to three species and in Central America some two species are known at present. The majority of Arisaema species grow in humus-rich, well-aerated soils in mountain meadows and slopes as well as open spots in lowland to high altitude woods, few species grow in pure loamy soils in sunny rock crevices. In general immature species are male, with maturity they change their sex to female. Several Cobra Lilies switch sex almost every other year in order to store enough energy for fruiting the following year after their male phase.”

Sex change is the peculiar characteristic that this genus possesses. According to the Wikipedia entry on the genus "Arisaema plants are typically male when small, and female or hermaphraditic when large, with a single plant capable of changing sex based on nutrition and genetics, and perhaps changing sex several times during its long life (20 years or more).”

The species is hardy and survives in temperatures as low as -18°C using the two pronged strategy of planting the adult tubers and corms deep down to prevent freezing and adaptation for using the winter snow for insulation. Chopta, which is situated at 2900 meters (9514 feet) and gets snowed out in the winters, is probably among the best places for these (another being the Valley of Flowers near Badrinath). The sub-continent is home to almost a dozen Arisaema species with one -- Arisaema tortuosum or Whipcord Cobra Lily -- distributed in the peninsula and Western Ghats.

I have avoided mid-monsoon visits to the Himalayas in the last few years and have not come across the cobra lilies since but autumn treks have consistently rewarded me with the sight of the bright orange cobs harbouring the black seeds. Its function accomplished, the hood would have withered off, but it is not too difficult to imagine it. An uncannily accurate feeling of the first encounter almost always follows.

Text by Sahastrarashmi (thanks to K S Gopi Sundar for identification help)

Photographs of Cobra Lilies by K S Gopi Sundar /Sahastrarashmi Other photographs by Sahastrarashmi

Chaukhamba, the four-pronged mountain of Garhwal

I was drawn to the massif gleaming in the horizon as it towered over the lesser ranges in the foreground

Chaukhamba (right) from Bedni Bugyal. The peak next to it is Shivling (near Gangotri).
Photo: Sahastrarashmi (2002)

In September 2009, Sahastra and I took a train from Delhi to Haridwar and ventured on our second trip together to the Himalayas. On the first leg we aimed to explore the trail to Tungnath, one of the five sacred shrines dedicated to Shiva (known as the Panch Kedar). We began by taking the trail to Deoria Tal from Ukhimath, a hillside town overlooking the Mandakini. As we discovered the next morning, the mountain river, one of the tributaries of the Ganga, was a glinting turquoise ribbon thousands of feet in the valley below. Yet its muffled roar sought us out like a persistent stage whisper.

We had spent an exhausting day riding a cramped made-for-the-mountains bus from Haridwar to Ukhimath via Rudraprayag, the confluence of the Mandakini and the Alaknanda rivers. At 4 pm the town, made respectively famous and notorious by by Jim Corbett and a man-eating leopard in the 1920s, was hot, muggy and swarming with flies. It didn't feel like we were in the Himalayas at all.

At Ukhimath we found some respite though it wasn't cold as we had expected (or hoped -- because the Himalayan cold is at once welcome and frightening). The peak of Kedarnath, lit by the embers of a long-gone sun, presided over a great part of the evening as we sat on the lawns of the GMVN guesthouse running over our plans for the next day.

Chaukhamba from Deoria Tal

A jeep driver dropped us off at Sari, the roadhead to Deoria Tal. Glad to be on foot again after many months, we began a laboured ascent to the lake as our city-slicker lungs acclimated to the altitude. Oak and rhododendron paved the fern-fringed path. Warblers abounded in the low canopy. As the sun came out, griffons began to circle overhead. On the sun-warmed rocks, Kashmir Rock Agamas sat motionless, their slaty blue limbs blending into the smooth stone beneath them. Some of them appeared to be making a meal of small flowers growing among the grass.

Kashmir Agamas basking in the sun

After climbing 4 km and about 3000 vertical feet, we arrived at a glade. Sahastra, who was walking ahead of me, exclaimed, "You must see this!" A gentle meadow began where the forest ended. The edges of a limpid lake reflected the charcoal sky. And ahead of it, presiding over the horizon, was a massif. It had to be Chaukhamba.

Chaukhamba -- the name literally means four pillars -- is one of the highest peaks in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand. The spires range in elevation from 23,419 feet (Chaukhamba 1) to 22,487 feet (Chaukhamba 4). The highest peak was first summited in 1952 by Lucien George and Victor Russenberger, two Swiss members of a French expedition (source: Wikipedia).

A Himalayan Woodpecker tries its luck on a slender tree

We admired the peak in awe for a long time and then explored the lake. A variety of warblers and flycatchers were in abundance. White wagtails chased insects in the grass while a Himalayan woodpecker knocked on wood for luck. Black-headed jays were almost tame, coming up to the kitchen shack for morsels.

Chaukhamba remained a persistent presence on our journey from Chopta to Tungnath and all the way up to Chandrashila, at 13,123 feet the highest peak on this trail.

Chaukhamba from the trail to Tungnath

Two years earlier, on a trek to Bedni Bugyal via Loharjung pass, I had encountered Chaukhamba for the first time. Climbing through an oak forest from the hamlet of Didana toward Ali Bugyal, I was drawn to a mountain gleaming in the horizon as it towered over the lesser ranges that had eclipsed it while we were at lower altitudes. I distinctly remembered its massive hulking form and the four spires. As we watched, clouds veiled the view and we did not see it again.

Chaukhamba has since dominated my memory of the Himalayas. Up until I glimpsed the serene and stately form of Nanda Devi from Auli. But that is another story.

Text and photos by Beej
Main photo by Sahastrarashmi

In the arms of Shiva - a trek to Tungnath

Only the peal of temple bells punctuates the stillness of the mountain air

This travelogue on my trek to Tungnath, the highest Shiva shrine in the world, has appeared as an India Abroad Magazine cover story with the dateline December 4, 2009.

India Abroad, owned by Rediff.com and published chiefly from New York, is the oldest and most widely read community newspaper among Indian-Americans in the United States.

To subscribe, or to order a copy or a back issue, please visit the India Abroad web page

In the arms of Shiva

Off National Highway 58 at Rudraprayag, about a mile’s drive from the uproarious junction of two mountain rivers in the Garhwal Himalayas, stands an unimposing walled garden planted with crotons and overgrown with invasive weeds. At its center a white concrete plaque unceremoniously marks the spot where an Indian-born hunter of Irish descent shot a leopard in 1926. Beside it, a signboard in the green-and-red flag colors of the Uttarakhand forest department informs us that this was no ordinary animal: the cat had haunted the valley for eight years and claimed 125 human lives.

A man-eating leopard in these unrepentant urban environs? I imagine a shadowy creature, dappled with rosettes, stalking me. It’s pointless: the growl I hear emanates from multi-utility vehicles zipping on the macadam behind me.

In the 1920s, long before the muddy glare of sodium-vapor lighting and the glowering beacons of wireless towers had confounded Mother Nature’s circadian rhythm, the Himalayan night must have offered more grist for the imagination. Under starlight, fancy eloped with fact and spawned many myths around the beast. But this much we know to be true: villagers refused to step out of their homes after sundown for fear of being the leopard’s next quarry. And that was bad news for Rudraprayag, an important halt on the routes to the sacred Hindu temples of Kedarnath and Badrinath.

When the British government in India announced a reward for killing the man-eater, bounty hunters turned in many leopards claiming each one to be the culprit. Meanwhile, the death toll mounted. In desperation the British Parliament turned to Edward James Corbett, a railway contractor and a crack shot who lived in Nainital in the adjoining Kumaon region. Jim Corbett accepted the offer on two conditions: that all rewards for killing the leopard be withdrawn, and that other hunters trailing the cat be ordered to stop. In his gripping memoir The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, Corbett chronicles his dramatic two-year pursuit of the big cat before he gunned it down at this very spot.

Every year a fair is held to commemorate Corbett’s achievement and some village elders cling to the belief that this specialist hunter of man-eaters and pioneer conservationist (India’s largest national park, the Corbett Tiger Reserve, is named after him) was a holy man sent to rid them of an evil spirit. The younger generation, however, seems to have grown unmindful of this aspect of the town’s history. My friend Sahas had to instruct our driver, a road-raging boor, to slow down lest he missed the memorial.

~~~

A Himalayan Griffon vulture soars above the temple of Tungnath. In his book Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage to the Many Sources of the Ganga, Stephen Alter invokes a legend that deems the vultures as one of the first beings of the primordial world. The vulture's egg represents the world - its upper dome the sky and its lower dome the earth; the watery fluid the oceans and the yolk the land.

Rudraprayag is today the headquarters of an eponymous district in the Tehri-Garhwal region of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. At 4 pm, it is hot and stuffy in the marketplace and the air is rank with diesel fumes. Flies flirt with my eyelashes and nostrils. At the drugstore where I stop to stock our first-aid kit, the teenage shopkeeper does not lift his eyes up from the playlist he is shuffling on his cell phone. Nearby, overflowing rubbish bins invite dogs and donkeys to rummage for surprises.

My delusion of the Corbettian Himalayan hamlet has evaporated and found a place alongside other disappointments – fetid gutters gurgling beside the highway, deforested landslide-scarred slopes crowned with modern temples the color of unappetizing confectionery, and hummocks of garbage and polythene bags where crows and kites bicker over morsels.

Yet, in other ways, Father Time has not grayed for the last thirty years. Tacked to the pillar of a wayside temple, a Garhwali film poster for Meru Gau [My Village] has artwork redolent of an age bygone when Indian cinema was besotted with nationalism. Vendors hawk vegetables and fruit on wooden carts, shooing away wandering cows that pause to inspect their wares. In a sooty teashop, a hirsute cook in a grimy sleeveless vest rolls parathas while his slick-haired apprentice shapes dough into cones, tucking a dollop of spiced potato into the hollow of each one. Sealing the ends, he drops his finished creations delicately into an enormous wok of sizzling oil that browns them into crisp samosas.

Three ceiling fans spin giddily inside the dormitory of the Rudra Guest House run by the Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam, a government-owned tourism agency that offers reliable budget accommodation. From its courtyard I take in an unbroken view of the gorge about a hundred feet below, where the deep-green Mandakini (which rises near Kedarnath) is consumed by the foamy wake of the silt-laden Alakananda, a major headstream of the Ganga that springs near Badrinath.

Washed by the sacred waters of two streams of faith, Rudraprayag is the fourth of the five sacred prayags, or confluences, of the Gangetic riverine system in the Himalayas. Forty-two miles southwest, at the final confluence in Devprayag, the Alakananda joins the clear waters of the Bhagirathi, the source stream of the Ganga which has flowed 435 miles from Gaumukh at the lip of the Gangotri glacier.

From Rudraprayag, our bus crosses the Mandakini and takes us 25 miles to Ukhimath, a village of terraced rice fields 4,500 feet above sea level. In October, before autumnal snowfall makes the trail to Kedarnath unwalkable, the deity is brought down in a ceremonial palanquin to the Omkareshwar Pith temple at Ukhimath and worshipped here till it is returned to the mountain shrine in mid-May. Another Shiva idol, from the shrine at Madhyamaheshwar, is also housed here in winter. Both Kedarnath and Madhyamaheshwar are among the five sacred Shiva shrines known collectively as the Panch Kedar (the Five Kedars – Kedar being a local name for Shiva). The others are Tungnath, Kalpeshwar and Rudranath.

Legend holds that the Pandavas, protagonists of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, having decimated their cousins the Kauravas in the great war at Kurukshetra, wished to atone for the sin of fratricide. They arrived in the Himalayas to seek Shiva’s blessings but the Lord, disgusted with the horror of war, changed form into a bull to avoid them. His pursuers saw through his disguise and gave chase. In the scuffle, the bull was dismembered. Its body parts reappeared in various regions of the Himalayas – the hump at Kedarnath, the arms at Tungnath, the face at Rudranath, the navel at Madhyamaheshwar and the locks at Kalpeshwar. The head, it is believed, emerged at the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, Nepal. Pilgrims consider a circuit of these shrines to be auspicious.

Our destination is Tungnath, the third Kedar, and my purpose is religious only in a pagan sense. To walk the wild Himalayas, breathe their bounteous air, encounter their wildlife, their trees and wildflowers, rivers and springs, and to be at the mercy of their elements is pilgrimage enough for us.

The timing of our trip is significant. In late September, the monsoon gathers its weakening winds to drench the Himalayas in a final burst of rain. Last November, I followed the monsoon on its return journey through the southern hills of Tamil Nadu (Chasing the Other Monsoon, India Abroad Magazine, May 1, 2009) and now, I am here to witness the spectacle of its retreat from the Himalayas.

Encounter - The Himalayan Monal

Even a peacock must bow to this unchallenged monarch of Himalayan fowls

In May 2007, on my first visit to the Uttarakhand Himalaya, the Himalayan Monal (Lophophorus impejanus) proved utterly elusive. Fighting altitude sickness in the foggy heights of Bedni Bugyal, I was offered a tachistoscopic glimpse of a metallic blue streak with a white rump and an orange tail. That's about all. Out of reluctant pride, I ticked my checklist. But all along, I felt guilty that my sighting was of such low quality that it hardly merited an entry. Payback time arrived two years later.

In the third week of September 2009, my friend Sahastra and I trekked through the alpine forests and grasslands of Chopta and Tungnath. Tungnath, at 12,073 feet, is the third of the five Kedars (where Shiva's dismembered body is believed to have fallen on earth) and the highest Shiva shrine in India. It is believed to have been built a thousand years ago.

At 12,073 ft, Tungnath is the highest Shiva shrine in India, and possibly in the world

The grey stone temple blends well into its backdrop: plunging cliffs watered by a trickle of sweet springs and rock faces slathered with alpine vegetation -- grasses, daisies, primula, gentian, marsh marigolds, docks, and arrangements of ferns, lichens and mosses that would chasten even the most sylvan of landscape artists. A few hundred feet below, the grassland (or bugyal, as it is known locally) is broken by shrubs like juniper and a dense undergrowth of dwarf rhododendron. Here, rufous-bellied tits and orange-flanked bush robins dart inconspicuously along with Hume's warblers and grey bushchats. Lower down, the grassland meets the first trees of the forest -- stands of fern-girded oak and the relatively inviolate deodars.

Mist cloaked the forest, making birding impossible

But it was not here that we spotted our first Monal. On a misty afternoon in Chopta, 4 km downhill at the base of the Tungnath trail, we took a walk along the road hoping to spot something. Two days ago, we had been gifted with the lucky sighting of three (first, one for sorrow and then two for joy) Yellow-throated Martens, whom I dubbed Marten, Luther and King. But this afternoon's pursuit appeared to be fruitless. The dense fog made photography impossible and walking dangerous. We kept to the road to avoid toppling off a cliff. Halting abruptly at a bend, where a shepherd's trail branched off into the forest, Sahastra hissed: "Pheasant!"

Sadly, the human eye does not come equipped with fog-lamps. We could tell the shape of a large brown bird, not quite peahen-sized, with a mottled back and a prominent white ring where its folded wings met the base of its tail. We froze to avoid flushing it but it ambled into the thicket and into the cover that the fog offered. That evening, a look at the pages of Grimskipp told us that it was indeed a female Monal. Not quite the appetiser we craved, but enough for a tick on the checklist. But that first morning at Tungnath was where the Himalayan Monal revealed itself to us. We saw two males foraging unconcernedly on the verge of the forest. And then we flushed two hens, which whirred up in the air like partridges, arced and descended into the oblivion of the rhododendron shrubbery. Thus encouraged, we descended into the shrubbery and were rewarded with the sight of three more male birds. We heard them call -- a loud, not unmusical bugling -- and saw them flash their white rumps in flight. We were quite overwhelmed by the glut of good fortune.

We returned to Tungnath again two days later, riding mules at the crack of dawn to get to the summit of Chandrashila (13,386 feet above MSL) in time to catch a glimpse of the snow-capped peaks of Trishul and Chaukhamba before the rising mists blotched them out. At a tea stop, a beautiful red fox slunk past us, its coat rich russet and slightly grizzled with a creamy white tip to the tail. Further up, we glimpsed a magnificent male Monal, and then another with two hens. We flushed another bird off a cliff edge, and its brilliant metallic blue plumage glimmered as it caught the sun. We felt so accomplished that we wanted to take the rest of the day off and laze. But like diligent birders, we put indolence aside and got down to work. Through the day, more Monals showed themselves to us. This was indeed a happy hunting ground for the state bird of Uttarakhand (and the national bird of Nepal).

That evening, we heard the Monal call as dusk darkened the Himalayan sky. On our second descent of Chandrashila, we saw more than three or four birds foraging late into the twilight. Early next morning, as we left Tungnath for Chopta, we came upon a Monal cock foraging at eye-popping proximity near a cliff edge. It seemed unperturbed by our presence and took a few unhurried steps as we approached. The sun was not yet up and the dawn light was very tricky. Sahastra called out metering instructions to me as I battled vertigo in my attempt to photograph the bird. As I struggled with the exposure, a hen walked into the frame. And for the next five minutes we had the time of our life as the cliffside became dotted with Monals -- at least three males and four females. Finally, my encounter with the Monal had been fulfilling. It was hard to leave the hills without a pang gnawing at my heart.