One more year

I have decided to extend my stay here until December 2009. I have had a great summer and want the opportunity to explore more, work is going well, but only now do I feel I am getting to grips with it and hope to make real progress next year, and there seem likely to be some good birding opportunities next summer.

Into the Taiga

At the end of August we traveled north (to the bit of Mongolia that sticks up into Russia if you look at a map). The attraction was the taiga forest, part of the great siberian forests and one of largest undeveloped wildernesses on the planet, and a small, 300 or so, community of nomadic reindeer herders.

The journey was straightforward if long, and involved train, bus, a jeep and finally a 7 hour horse trek, - it was worth the effort. The landscape was stunning, forests, lakes, peat bogs, sedge bogs, open grassland and great river valleys. The reindeer people, the tsaaten, are one of most endangered indigenous communities . I had reservations about travelling as a tourist to visit such a community. However we arranged our travel trough a tsaaten community centre which has been established to help them gain some money from tourism so we used local guides, stayed with local community and 25% of our fees went to a community fund.

Horse-riding was fun, through forest, up rocky hillsides, across streams and most challenging bogs. The horses tended to sink in the bogs and i went over the top when my horses front legs sank, but I had a soft if damp landing.

In the taiga birds were scarce; whooper swan and white-winged scoter on the lakes, pintail snipe in bogs, hazel hen and goshawk in forests. Passerines included dusky warbler, red-throated flycatcher, little bunting, olive backed pipit.

Jalman Meadows

Mary Anne and I spent 3 nights at a ger camp 3 hours drive from Ulaanbaatar in Khan Henti protected Area, a large reserve of forest and steppe extending north to the Russian border. The camp makes great effort to minimise environmental impact whilst providing quality service, so there are solar panels, a wind generator, a ger library with a excellent selection of books on Mongolia. We enjoyed horse riding, a trip with an ox cart taking a raft upstream and then drifting downstream in the raft, wonderful starry skies and walking in the countryside.

At work in Gobi

I spent 4 days in Gobi visiting Mercy Corps tourism clients and local government staff. The aims of the trip were to look at the training needs of both the ger camp owners and government staff. The ger camps were a mixed bunch, some needed little advice, others probably should never have started the business. One of the difficulties these new businesses have is making enough profit to reinvest. Between 30& 80% of family income comes from tourism and this money is needed to support basic livelihood

Barheaded Geese

The office was closed for 10 days around the Mongolian National holiday Naadam so I decided to join the World Conservation Society team studying avian influenza in wild birds in the north of Mongolia. I met up with them in Murun and we travelled to Erhel Nuur, a brackish lake just under an hours drive from Murun. Erhel Nuur was the site of two outbreaks of avian influenza, in whooper swans. After pitching camp we split into three teams and walked around the lake shore looking for dead birds. This is repeated three times a year a part of annual monitoring for avian influenza. There were only six long dead birds, but plenty of living ones. The lake is an important site for moulting waterfowl; there were 120+ whooper swans, 2000 pochard. Other waterfowl included ruddy shelduck, goldeneye, shoveller, pintail, teal, tufted duck, wigeon, gadwall. Southward wader migration was just beginning and there were curlew, wood sandpiper, green sandpiper, common sandpiper, redshank, spotted redshank, unidentified stints and avocet. The next day Martin picked out 4 falcated duck on the shoreline and we headed north to the Darkhad depression, a 10 hour drive to the north and close to the Russian border so we needed border permits. We camped overnight in a broad valley where the previous year there had been a Lammergeir. In the morning I was woken by the persistent call of Blyth’s Pipit, and Pacific Swifts screaming if front of their cliff nests.. The density of birds in Mongolian steppe is often low. Why are there so few harriers and short eared owl in Mongolia when they are abundant in seemingly similar habitat in Kazakhstan? Is it because the grassland is so over grazed and just too short?
We arrived at Darkhad the next day, pitched camp, -there were 8 students, 4 drivers, 2 cooks, 6 biologists an myself and explored the immediate area. There were flocks of bar heads on the river may be 3 or 4 hundred in total but few whooper swans, the other target species. A young white tailed eagle was still in its nest but surely ready for its first flight, common tern fished in the river and goldeneye and gadwall were on the river and pools. But there were relatively few passerines,- horned lark on the grassland, tree sparrows in the copse where earlier in the year Martin had seen lesser spotted woodpecker (I have seen more lesser spotted woodpeckers in 6 months in Mongolia than during the last 6 years birding in southern England) and heard Tengalms’ Owl.
I stayed with the team for 3 nights and we had two catches of bar heads, and left before a newly built pen was tested. In all we caught more than 70 birds. For each bird samples were taken of blood, from throat and before they were fitted with an individually marked neck collar. The collars mean the birds can be followed on their migration. Last year bar heads from Darkhad were seen in India during winter.

All quiet

The state of emergency has come and gone and the burnt out buildings of the Mongolian Revolutionary Party are now on the tourist trail, and there is a regular stream of tourists taking pictures, like those attached.
It is difficult to know what will happen. On the evening of the riot I had to walk past the demonstration to get home, and tho my eyes smarted a bit from remnants of tear gas, there seemed to be more people watching than participating.
Now everyone is preparing for the national holiday Naadam.

Bad bird pics

Bad pics make identification a challenge, so can you id all these species?