I’m rereading Peter Matthiessen’s, The Snow leopard,* the story of his arduous hike through the western Himalayas of Nepal in the early 1970s in search of the illusive and much endangered snow leopard. He walked for over 400 kilometres with George Schaller, the zoologist famous for his work in East Africa, from Pokhara through the Himalayas in the shadows of Annapurna and Dhaulgiri (two of the highest peaks in the Himalayas), way up to the Tibetan border.
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They walked all the way, with Nepalese sherpas and porters. It’s a remarkable story, beautifully related, but there was one aspect that appeals to me in particular, his detailed and obviously very knowledgeable observations of plants and birds.
At nearly 5000 metres he spots an African hoopoe, a bird he grew familiar with in East Africa. Indeed, Ken Newman points out that our familiar hoopoe is found throughout much of Africa and Europe and
right across Asia.** It is certainly a welcome visitor at the Hide.
A little lower down altitude-wise Matthiessen sees drongos, rollers, barbets, egrets and crows, all familiar to us birders, and even an Egyptian vulture. At one point he sees over a rushing stream cascading out of the upper Himalayas, a common sandpiper, ‘Down the river comes a common sandpiper, the Eurasian kin of the spotted sandpiper back home; it teeters and flits from boulder to black boulder, bound for warm mud margins to the south.
I have seen this jaunty bird in many places, from Galway to New Guinea, and am cheered a little when I meet it again here.’
Roberts points out that the common sandpiper is found throughout southern Africa, north to Europe and Asia, as far as Japan, seasonally migrating to Africa and even Australia (presumably why it is called the ‘common’ sandpiper).***
We can’t claim to have hiked the Himalayas (thank you, no), but we have been to Kathmandu and surrounds and taken an extraordinary flight in a little aeroplane along the Himalayas to Mount Everest and back. We also went by road up to the so-called Friendship Bridge between Tibet and Nepal, not a very friendly reception from the Chinese side, but that’s another story.
Peter Mathiessen’s quest is for the snow leopard, just a sighting would do, but I won’t spoil things should you decide to seek out this oldish book and find out for yourself. However, the snow leopards are there, albeit extremely rare. Its range is in the towering mountains of Asia: Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, China and far eastern Russia.****
Sadly, this extraordinary animal is still poached for its fur and its body parts, which are still valued in traditional Asian medicine.
And finally, I picked this up the other day, a 9-year-old girl’s message to Santa, ‘Stop here, leave presents, take brother’. Now, all I have to say regarding the upcoming New Year is, Khotso! Pula! Peace and Rain!
*The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen, Picador, London, 1978. **Newman’s Birds of Southern Africa, Kenneth Newman, Struik, Cape Town, 2010. ***Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa, Gordan Lindsay
Mclean, John Voelcker Bird Book Fund, Cape Town, 1985. ****Encyclopedia of Mammals, Editor: David Macdonald, Oxford University Press, 2001.
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