Category: Kyrgyzstan

 July 9 2018. Tien Shan Mountains, Kyrgyzstan. To set the scene, this was the first day of our expedition into a remote corner of the Tien Shan Mountains to look for evidence of Snow Leopards. We were twelve plus our scientist, local guides, and staff, seventeen in all.  Our base camp of three yurts and a village of two-man tents (one each) was at the end of a nine hour drive across and through a snow-capped mountain range into West Karakuul Valley a wide expanse that lies metres deep in snow for half the year.  The backdrop to our days, this miles-wide glaciated hollow, now knee-deep green with lush pasture, thick with brilliant flowers (including many species of wild onions) and peopled by nomad herdsmen and their families. From every tributary valley ice-cold meltwater poured out of springs or tumbled from the toes of glaciers becoming rivulets, streams and cascades interlaced and gathering into the fast tumbling river in the main valley floor.

Citrine Wagtail were always exotics to me, as birds of China and Central Asia they were always impossibly out of my reach and only ever seen in photos and field guides. But here I was, suddenly now in Central Asia of all places, and on our first day, our day of the long drive in, I saw my Citrine Wagtail, a long-nurtured ambition come to life.

This, my first, Citrine Wagtail came as we made our slow, grinding way to our base camp.  It had been an eight-hour journey that had started in congested Bishkek, had climbed a zigzagging truck route to a high mountain pass and eventually made its way down to the West Karakuul Valley. Now the road, such as it was, was bone-rattling, little more than a herders track at times and there was another hour to go.

Perhaps not surprisingly one of our work-horse Toyota Land Cruisers blew out a tire.  While an energetic crew worked at changing wheels a glimpse of bright yellow drew me to the icy river nearby: it was an adult male Citrine Wagtail.  It soon became obvious that they were the commonest bird in the lower levels of the valleys around us, anywhere you might describe as a wet meadow.  It was Bird of the Day without question and despite seeing dozens over the next two weeks, adults and fledglings, they are wagtails and their tails do just that, wag up and down. It was hard not to be charmed by them every time.

July 7 2018, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.   Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, is a young city and hot and dusty in July. It owes its founding to early twentieth century Russian expansionism and efforts to populate this land with permanent settlements rather than nomadic herders. It’s a busy city, with civic pride evident in its vast public plazas, heroic statues and imposing government buildings. Although well treed and having the magnificent setting of a snow-capped mountain range not far to the south it should be an elegant place, but it’s a bit soviet-utilitarian in style. But safe, I found that I could walk anywhere at any time without risk or arousing the unwelcome curiosity that an evident tourist often does. (Even when crossing the wide streets, drivers give lots of careful respect to pedestrians).

I was there on this date waiting to join a twelve-person strong volunteer expedition organized by Biosphere Expeditions and heading  into the Tien Shan mountains to look for evidence of Snow Leopards.  I had a couple of days to myself and naturally wondered what birds I might find; the reality was, not many.

Within walking distance of my inexpensive, but to me luxurious, hotel there were Common Mynas at every turn; they are a sociable bird and tend to be a bit garrulous and before very long they hardly merited a second look.

The hotel was on an unimportant side street, roughly paved and bordered by defensive sheet steel fences and neglected apple and walnut trees. As I walked the road one early morning a bird flew up from the road to a weedy tangle and stayed long enough for me to get a decent un-binoculared look at it. It was clearly a shrike of some kind but hard to tell much more than that. It flew again as I approached and showed an expanse of muted orange across its upper wings and back, that was enough information for me to later identify it as a Long-tailed Shrike, a fairly common bird of urban settings. I came to realize that it is valued for its prolonged soft, melodious and inventive song, music that often pervaded the neighbourhood and in its rambling reminded me of our familiar Northern Mockingbird.

I was quite excited by it for several reasons: I had identified it (always a good start); It was a new bird in a new country; It was shrike, (nifty birds that are few and far between in my world).  It was like finding a corner bit of a jigsaw puzzle, that piece that anchors a sense of place, something to build on.

In the next few weeks I saw several shrikes, not all as easily identified; in fact none of them, although I suspect they included Asian Grey Shrike and/or Great Grey Shrike. One of the month’s recurring difficulties was that many birds of all species were just-out-of-the-nest juveniles and hard to identify. But on one of the last of my days in Kyrgyzstan my companion and I disturbed the above roadside Long-tailed Shrike. It was singing softly until we when pulled up beside it and opened our car doors, with that flew across the road to watch us from a safe distance and perched obligingly for photographs.