Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  Cofounder of the International Crane Foundation, the ornithologist George Archibald has time for everyone. Here he talks with a young monk at a dzong, Bhutan, 2012.

  Twice a year the Black-necked Cranes make the journey over the high Himalayas from Tibet to Bhutan and back. It is a primal event. Aldo Leopold put it this way, writing about Sandhill Cranes a half a world away:

  Out of some far recess of the sky the tinkling of little bells…then a clear blast…and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks and cries…at last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds as they sweep a final arc of sky and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds…such a place holds a paleontological patent of nobility.

  Ed and I had accompanied George once on his annual pilgrimage to Nebraska, where every March 600,000 Sandhill Cranes and a few whoopers stop over on the sandy islands of the Platte River to fuel up before they head off for Canada. It is one of the great migrations on the planet and an astonishing sight to witness when the birds circle down by the thousands and pack in together for the night, as they have for millennia.

  The Phobjikha Valley in central Bhutan has been the wintering spot of Black-necked Cranes for just as long. We watched as hundreds descended at dusk to their roosting spots near ponds on the valley floor. They are legally protected in Bhutan, China, and India. The Phobjikha residents watch over the cranes, keeping the waterways clear for them and chasing away dogs and foxes. The government of Bhutan has even agreed to change the power lines that string across the valley, sometimes catching the cranes by their necks, by burying the lines underground. Tourism is a growing industry, and the cranes are a real draw.

  At 4:30 the next morning four of us walked the valley edges through frost-covered fields and over tiny sparkling streams, our way lit by a million stars above, brighter than I have ever seen. We were intent on counting the roosting birds before they headed for their feeding grounds at first light. George and a young Bhutanese fellow from the local Royal Society for Protection of Nature did counts through their scopes and a colleague and I tallied the numbers.

  Prayer flags wave in the wind as we wait in Phobjikha Valley for the cranes to fly in for the night.

  We waited on the chill grass for the birds to stir, and by 5:30 they were lifting off in family groups of three and four, honking their departure. My fingers didn’t bend well in the cold, scratching the pencil point across the notepad. George and Jigme did four counts before they reached a consensus of three hundred adults and thirty-eight chicks, a successful fledge rate. The cold was penetrating our bones, so three of us headed back over the sunlit fields and streams, passing grazing horses with their colts and a few cranes with their gangling “colts,” as they are called, picking at wheat chaff. George stayed behind to watch and photograph his beloved cranes as he always does, an acolyte at the altar of creation.

  The bird I most wanted to see in the Himalayas, if not in the world, was not a crane. It was a pheasant. These mountains are known for spectacular pheasants, and to my mind the most spectacular of them all is the Monal Pheasant. I had seen the bird before in the captivity of the Bronx Zoo, where it made a well-worn path in its six-by-six-foot enclosure racing madly back and forth in front of a wall of wire. This was not the wild bird of my dreams, but it gave me an indication of the colors to come. I told Hishey of my fervent wish. He promised nothing.

  Black-necked Cranes and their “colts”

  Our mammal list grew daily with glimpses of Yellow-throated Martens, Assam Macaques, Gorals, Striped Squirrels, Capped Langurs, and Red Foxes. A troop of endangered Golden Langurs greeted us one afternoon as we alighted from the van for a walk through falling autumn leaves. The long blond tail of the primate gave him away as it hung straight down through the foliage. A mother and her baby, clothed in a mantle of softest palomino plush, leapt twenty feet from one tree to another, using their tails for balance. This is a primate that lives almost exclusively in these sixty square miles of Bhutan and northern Assam. Its population is stable today and has even increased dramatically in Assam because the villagers are intent on reforesting the land and being guardians of India’s rarest primate. They know that when the langurs thrive, they thrive.

  Hishey decided we needed some “forest bathing,” a hike through majestic trees and over tiny streams blanketed with ferns. The “bathing” part comes from the increased oxygen the greenery releases and which the Bhutanese believe is instantly beneficial to well-being. It certainly felt good to be out in the lovely sun-dappled forest, and there were lots of songbirds greeting us, as well as the mournful piping of a Hill Partridge hidden in a grassy clearing. Suddenly we heard a rush of air from large beating wings as two huge Rufous-necked Hornbills landed noisily in a tree above. Then they glided to another tree and began tearing into some yellow fruit with their heavy beaks, a third again as long as their heads. Two stunning males sported the rufous-colored neck, head, and belly, contrasting with glossy black wings and a tail tipped with white. The color around their eyes was a startling turquoise blue, and their long white beaks were marked with vertical black stripes, suggesting applied war paint. It is said that you can tell the age of the bird by the number of stripes. I counted seven on one of them. Soon they were joined by four more hornbills. This was a great sight; the birds are threatened throughout their range and are extinct in Nepal and very rare in Thailand, where I had seen one before. But here in Bhutan they had not been hunted for their feathers nor their beaks. Here they were threatened by the logging of the big old deciduous trees they needed for nesting and food. Within a few days we saw seventeen of these remarkable birds, some flying over mountain passes at twelve thousand feet. The oddest sight of all was of a male Rufous-necked Hornbill sitting on a branch clutching an uncommon Parti-colored Squirrel in its beak and beating it to death against the trunk of the tree, its neck thrashing from side to side repeatedly. So much for thinking the hornbill is a fruitarian!

  It was deeply satisfying to be in a place on earth where mammals, birds, and insects are held sacred by human beings, or at the very least respected as sentient beings equal to us. I wonder when we became killers. I can understand killing for sustenance and killing out of fear of being killed. There are spearheads in the bodies of Mastodons that roamed the Seattle area more than 13,500 years ago. Some scientists even believe we helped drive these early Elephants to extinction. When did we begin to kill for sport and commerce? Did it arise out of warring with other peoples? The need for trading animal parts? Is our nature basically bellicose?

  In 1959 when I was a young student just arrived in Britain to study for my junior year at the University of Edinburgh, I made contact with an English girl I had met the previous summer in the United States. Little did I know she lived in a castle in the Midlands dating from 1066, and that I would be invited to go on a “shoot” that Saturday with her knighted father and a few dozen others. The gentlemen, outfitted in tweed and herringbone, spread out in a line on the ancient fields, their guns at the ready, while “beaters” pounded the bushes to flush the birds. Pheasants, quail, snipes, and songbirds rose with a stunned swirl into the sky and shotguns blasted away. At day’s end two hundred dead birds were packed side by side down the length of the driveway, testament to the virile exploits of the afternoon.

  I was horrified but said nothing. I was nineteen and adhered to the maxim “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” A kindly, eccentric old lady, with a silk purse trailing off one wrist, approached me in the great hall when everyone was sipping sherry and downing congratulatory pints. She smiled sweetly. How was I enjoying my time so far? I ventured that the birds seemed to have no chance and that the number of them killed seemed excessive—far more than we could possibly eat. She whooped a bit, in sympathy with my tender perspective: “Oh, blood sports, my dear, that’s all that matters.”

  I never forgot it. She seemed to encapsulate it all in that single statement: this is how men are, this is what excites them, get us
ed to it.

  I am not a softie. I do not wince when animals or fish are gutted; I have caught and gutted a fair share myself. And I am not a vegetarian, while I applaud those who are. Yes, I am conflicted. If all life is sacred I would not be eating or killing anything with eyes. I would not slap at blackflies or mosquitoes. So I am as predatory as the next man or woman. But I would give the animals a fighting chance—a sporting chance. In this day and age when so many species are in decline and fully 50 percent of our great mammals are threatened with extinction the balance is uneasy. My own predatory nature has been tempered through the decades by an understanding that we are all part of the family of things. Or as John Muir put it, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

  The Bhutanese people seem to exist in harmony with nature. Is this because of a thousand years of Buddhist teaching? Is it because the king does not allow hunting or fishing? The king has also decreed that native dress must be worn in public places. The men look handsome in their short skirts, or ghos, and the women very beautiful in their woven kiris; it certainly adds to the allure of the country for tourists. But the younger generation is chafing at these restrictions, particularly under the new democracy and in the main city of Thimpu.

  I want to believe the Bhutanese are kinder and gentler than the rest of us. It gives me hope that we can save the threatened creatures of the planet, that we are evolving as human beings and can coexist with wildlife in the future. But with a burgeoning global population I have grave doubts.

  Even in Bhutan the specter of massive development of hydroelectric power threatens the most vulnerable of species. One bird on the top ten world list of those most threatened with extinction is the White-bellied Heron. We drove along the Puna Tsang Chu River up to the area of Tsekha village, where some of the last two hundred of these herons live. They prefer sandy gravel beds in the middle of the river, and as I peered through my binoculars I saw not one, but three of these tall, graceful birds resting on an island. They look like our Great Blue Heron but with a white belly and slimmer neck, and they have a longer beak. While the Great Blue is ubiquitous in North America, adapted to salt- and freshwater wetlands from the far north to the tropics, the White-bellied Heron exists only in these specific habitats on Himalayan foothill rivers, and nests in big chir pines along the banks. It is declining rapidly due to degradation of these sites, such as gravel removal from the rivers, and increased human traffic. And damming the rivers for hydropower causes the water level to rise and makes it harder for the Herons to catch fish. As they search farther afield for food they leave their eggs and young exposed to predators like eagles.

  The White-bellied Heron is one of twenty-five global species selected by the organization Save Our Species for immediate attention. We passed signs posted on nearby roads urging the government to “Save the White-bellied Heron.” The placement of dams and educating people about the unique status of this bird might make the difference. I invited some children to take a look at the Herons through the telescope. A little girl peeked through, and when she finally caught sight of the birds, she pulled back with a smile. I do not believe she had ever seen them before, even though she lived in a house just thirty feet away. If everyone had the gift of binoculars and scopes, the world would expand instantly.

  Bhutan’s leaders are trying to balance the needs of development with those of a sustainable environment. Prime Minister Jigme Thinley was on his way to see the site of a new hydro station and stopped for some meetings at the hotel we stayed at in Trongsa. My friend Hope Cooke had plied me with gifts to give to the PM and members of the royal family.

  In 1963 the American Hope Cooke became queen of Sikkim, east of Bhutan, when she married the king, or Chogyal, Palden Thondup Namgyal. Hope and I were fellow students at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1950s and later shared an apartment in New York City with two other collegemates when I was beginning my career as an actress. In the summer of 1961 Hope went to Darjeeling, India, where she met the future king of Sikkim in the bar of the Windamere Hotel. So began a magical saga of romance, royalty, and revolution.

  The wedding was a much-celebrated affair, augured by monks who had determined the most auspicious date. It fell at a time when I was performing in a play and could not leave for the weeklong ceremony halfway round the world. Photos were splashed over the pages of Life magazine and Hope’s beauty in her Sikkimese costume was heralded far and wide.

  During the course of her years as queen, Hope and her king visited his royal cousins in Bhutan, and Hope became particularly fond of the queen mother of Bhutan and her sister. Sikkim and Bhutan were the last two monarchies in the Himalayas—related families that had ruled for hundreds of years. Nepal fell to the Maoists. India threatened to take over Sikkim. Ultimately, in 1972, Hope fled with her children to the United States, never to return.

  When Hope heard I was going to Bhutan she followed custom by having me take gifts to the former queen and the prime minister. But she did not tell me how I was to find them. “Everyone knows,” is all she said. Hishey contacted his cousin, who was a local justice near Trongsa, and he talked with the PM’s chief of staff. Soon I was given an audience of ten minutes with the prime minister. He was pleased to hear about Hope and also about all the wildlife we were seeing. He said he loved nature, and hoped to leave an environmental legacy when he left office. I mentioned how special were the White-bellied Heron, the Black-necked Crane, the Rufous-necked Hornbill, and the Ibisbill, which also relied on gravelly riverbeds. How lucky Bhutan was to have these threatened species! Yes, he nodded. He didn’t say that there would be sacrifices made, not when the future relied on the damming of rivers for hydropower, but it was what we were both thinking. It is not possible to save everything. Progress, you know.

  With the prime minister of Bhutan, a man trying hard to balance development with environmentalism

  I thanked the prime minister for his time and gave him the gift from former Queen Hope. He gifted me with a handsome Coronation Coin of the young King Jigme Khesar. I rejoined my fellow travelers in the great six-hundred-year-old dzong, where the monks were celebrating the cleansing of spirits from the temple by dancing all day in elaborate costumes and scary masks. They were stunning in their bright blues and reds and golds as they whirled and whirled all day in the courtyard to drumbeats, bells, and horns. This dance has been danced for centuries. It is possible to save dances and costumes and grand buildings like the dzong. Is it not possible to save the White-bellied Heron? The words of the naturalist William Beebe played again in my mind like a mantra: “The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived…but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

  Hishey had a treat for us. One evening while we were eating our usual fare of rice, eggplant, cauliflower, and an addictive chili-pepper sauce, he said that whoever wished to rise before dawn and drive up a mountain to a small monastery at eleven thousand feet might be rewarded with the sight of a Monal Pheasant. He knew of an old monk who fed the birds as they came out of hiding at dawn and dusk. I could hardly contain my excitement.

  We wound through frost-covered fields, the backs of horses steaming in first light, roosters crowing the new day. Then we ascended for half an hour, arriving as the sun exploded over the mountaintop, spilling onto the red roofs of the monastery. We had barely alighted from the van when I saw the robed figure of an old man scattering seeds before him in a small barnyard. And there at his feet were eight Monal Pheasants.

  My heart was racing. I moved in slow motion with my Nikon at the ready. The group split in three directions, some to a wooden balcony, some to the edge of the monastery, while four of us crept up a little path to look down on the scene. Then the most extraordinary thing happened. Two male Monals moved across the tiny barnyard followed by a few hens. They hopped up onto the grassy path from below and made their way, pecking a
t the soil as they went, toward us! We did not move a muscle. The first cock pheasant went from the dark cloud of the building into a shaft of sunlight, and every feather radiated iridescence. It was electric. He simply glowed. The aqua rim of down surrounding his black eye morphed into pale metallic green, then poured into a deep turquoise to produce teal as it slid down his neck, hitting a bright ring of copper ruff and then a deep purply back. An improbable blue topknot spurted straight up out of his skull in the shape of tiny spoons. It is said that the Monal Pheasant sports thirteen different colors, which need the play of light to be truly seen. The bird sparkles when touched by sunlight.

  I stood motionless except for the click, click, click of my Nikon. I lowered the camera from my eye and watched amazed as the bird came closer and closer and finally moved right into my shadow. It was as if I had summoned him. Which I guess I had; he was the one I most wished to see. He pecked near my shoes for a minute or so and then turned, gathering his flock behind him and disappearing into the dry grass up the hill.

  Hishey was below in the courtyard. I came down and embraced him in gratitude, shaking with emotion. We were all jubilant. The day was crisp and bright, the monastery was peaceful and timeless, and the glory of the Monal Pheasant had been perfectly revealed.