pheasants on the roof of the world

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You may have noticed, if you have been paying close enough attention, that I cannot find exotic pheasants. The sum total for the trip up to this point has been two species, namely a pair of blood pheasants at Wanglang and lots of ring-necked pheasants all over the place. At Tangjiahe I missed golden pheasants; at Wanglang I missed koklass and blue eared pheasants; at Baxi I missed the same; at Labahe I missed Lady Amherst's pheasant and Temminck's tragopans. So it was with some misgivings that I stuck to my plan of going to Balang Shan. The sole reason birders go there is to see gamebirds, in this case white eared, blood and koklass pheasants, Chinese monals, Tibetan snowcocks and snow partridges (and lower down at Wolong, golden pheasants). You may start guessing now as to how many of those species I saw whilst there.

Balang Shan is a mountain some way out of Chengdu (“shan” means mountain, hence the proliferation of Sichuan place names like Emei Shan, Wawu Shan, Erlang Shan, etc). The place for the pheasants is actually the pass which crosses the mountain, and there are two towns for which to base oneself for the search. Wolong is on the east end of the pass and Rilong is on the west end. Wolong was the site of the most famous giant panda breeding centre in China but it was destroyed in the 2008 earthquake and all the pandas were moved to Bifengxia by Ya'an and to the Chengdu Panda Base (the latter is where all the tourists now go to hug a panda). The town sort of collapsed a bit after that because of the total loss of tourist revenue but it still exists and you can still stay in hotels there. There is some good forest right near Wolong as well in which golden pheasants can be found. I had been planning on staying at Wolong because it is quite close to Chengdu (hence less travel time) and then hiring a driver to take me up to the Balang Shan pass, but with some last-minute reading I found that the town of Rilong, at about 3200 metres altitude, appeared to be much closer to the pheasant area (although actually it is about the same distance in reality) and I figured that would mean less expense to get to with a driver. So the day before leaving Chengdu I changed my mind from Wolong to Rilong, and quickly found out the bus routes. The helpful girl at the reception of my Chengdu hostel, Mr. Panda (that's the hostel name, not the girl's name), rang the bus stations and we found that currently there is just one bus per day from Chengdu to get to Rilong, but that bus goes first to a town called Xiao Jin and from there I had to get a second bus to Rilong. The person on the phone stressed that you cannot get direct to Rilong on the Xiao Jin bus.

The bus left the Chadianzi bus station in Chengdu at 6.30am. I asked at the bus station before leaving if I could get to Rilong direct but the answer was no, there was no direct bus, I had to go to Xiao Jin and then get another bus to Rilong. I knew that the bus went through the Balang Shan pass to get to Xiao Jin so I guessed Rilong must lie down a side road or something. It took nine hours to get to Xiao Jin. The pass is incredibly winding and really is insanely high. It tops out at 4600 metres and the mountain peaks around are up above 5000 and 6000 metres. And it is all completely open, no forest, so you look out the bus window and all you see is a straight drop a couple of hundred feet to a lower part of the road you came along earlier. The bus got into Xiao Jin just after 3.30pm and I found a bus to Rilong which left at 4pm. Much as I had suspected really, the bus then went for two hours back along the very road I had just come in on and stopped in Rilong which was one of the very towns I had passed through four hours before. Just a little annoying!! However the bus driver dropped me at the Riyue Youth Hostel where the staff speak some English which was a great help in then arranging a driver for the next morning to get to “the pheasant zone”, so silver linings and all that. The hostel was closing for the winter in a couple of days so I could only stay two nights, but that was alright because I was planning on staying in Rilong two nights for Balang Shan, and then transferring over to Wolong for a couple of nights just for golden pheasant. The downside to the hostel closing for the winter in a couple of days was that they didn't have much in the way of food left for their restaurant!

The cost of getting a car from Rilong to Balang Shan was 260 Yuan (about NZ$52), considerably less than what I had been told for the cost from the Wolong side (about NZ$160!), so that was good. The driver picked me up early in the morning so I could get up there by dawn. Rilong is at around the 140km mark on the S303 road and the stretch of road where everyone goes for pheasants is at the 94-92km mark. Handily, there are prominent kilometre markers all along the road. Less handily, I found out later in the day that the kilometre markers have all changed position so the 94-92km in the older bird reports are apparently no longer the same as the 94-92km markers on the road today! Anyway, as the sky lightened it was as clear as could be and I was glad it wasn't raining or snowing or foggy or any of those other things which hamper mountain birding. Then we got to the 100km marker and entered the thickest fog layer I have been in in a long time. We got to the 92km marker and the visibility was about twenty feet. Nevertheless, being mountain fog, it came and went in waves, so a hillside would be clear for a few minutes and then obscured again, then another hillside might be clear for a few minutes, and so on. I walked down the road for about a kilometre, then back up the road to about km96. Nothing! Literally nothing. Except yaks but they don't count. Heading back to the van, at about km93 I saw my first birds for the day, a pair of white-cheeked starlings which hopped on up the road ahead of me, as starlings do. Not a happy morning for one of the starlings though: out of nowhere a Eurasian sparrowhawk came screaming in and ended its life. Then just below me on the slope I saw a pheasant scuttling across the grass. From the shape and the patch of white I caught, I thought it was a Chinese monal, but when I got my binoculars on it it turned out to be a male koklass pheasant, one of the species I had missed at Wanglang. Then the fog came back and the pheasant was gone.

I debated whether we should drive back up the road where I knew there was no fog, or keep heading down where it may or may not be clear. I decided to go down for a bit first, and then go back up. Good choice as it turned out. There's a tunnel at about 91 km, currently blocked at either end so you take a side road around the hill, and on the other side we stopped so I could have a scan of the slopes. There was less fog here than higher up but it was still thick, and there was nothing there but large-billed crows. As I was about to get back in the van I saw someone non-Chinese walking up the road towards us. His first words were “you must be Israel” – and indeed I was. It turned out to be a bird guide from Chengdu called Sid (the one who had taken Richard Webb to Ruoergai). I had been wondering if I was going to be running into him at some point. And that is how I found out that the kilometre markers have been changed, and that in fact the pheasant area where the monals and white eared pheasants are best seen is right here on the opposite side of the tunnel from Rilong. Sid had actually just seen a Chinese monal before I arrived, way up the slope, during gaps in the fog but of the white eared pheasants there had been not a peep. We waited a while, then Sid and his client went off after snowcocks. I saw a gorgeous male white-winged grosbeak really well, perched on top of some pine trees just down the slope, which made me happy. The fog never cleared from the place where the monals were, so after a bit I headed back towards Rilong. At km96 where the fog had started to dissipate, I sent the van ahead to km99 and walked those three kilometres to see what I could see, the entirety of which turned out to be one lammergeier, one Himalayan buzzard being attacked by one common kestrel, two hill pigeons, and a small group of yellow-billed choughs (which I had been hoping to see, because I had so far on this trip only seen the far more common red-billed choughs). At somewhere around about km113 we caught up with Sid again at a hillside where the snowcocks are usually seen. Not today they weren't. It was a pretty bad morning for gamebirds all round really. There were flocks of what Sid said were plain mountain finches there too but I never got a proper look at them except in flight so I didn't count them. On the way back to Rilong I stopped at a spot with pine trees which I think was the one Sid said was good for crested tit-warblers and Przewalski's nuthatches, two species I haven't seen. I didn't see them, but I was rather surprised to see a Siberian chipmunk! I didn't think they were here but it certainly wasn't a Tamiops and some googling shows they are found at Mengbi Shan which isn't a world away so it must have been one. This was the first chipmunk I had seen in China, and means that I have now seen them in all three of the countries of this trip so far (South Korea, Russia and now China).

Back in Rilong in the early afternoon I stopped for some food back at the hostel. I knew that right in Rilong there was the entrance to a reserve called Changpinggou which I thought I might go to for a couple of hours birding. I knew (from John and Jemi Holmes' 2006 trip report) that from the entrance you have to take a bus for 7km to the start of a boardwalk and that there is apparently some good birdy habitat up there. At the hostel they told me that the entry fee was 90 Yuan and that the last bus back from the boardwalk was at 5.30pm, so I figured I would have about two hours up there. The entrance, very conveniently, was only 400 metres from the hostel! I went to the ticket office and asked what time the next bus was. They said 4.30pm. I looked at my watch and it was only 3.20pm. I went back to the hostel instead.

My plan for the second day was to go look for the alpine pheasants again at Balang Shan in the morning and then go straight from there to Wolong where I would stay for a couple of nights to look for golden pheasants. There is no bus in or out of Wolong any more due to the condition of the road. Instead there are shared taxis, the cost per person being 150 Yuan (NZ$30) from Rilong. However there is only one per day, at 9am, which didn't fit in with me wanting to look for pheasants first. The other option was just to pay for a whole car for one person which is 500 Yuan (NZ$100). This was a lot of money for me but I would have been paying 260 Yuan for the Balang Shan jaunt anyway, plus the 150 Yuan for the shared taxi would make 410 Yuan, so I figured 500 is not much more and it would allow me to stop where-ever I wanted along the way.

The same driver picked me up in the morning, except this time he didn't have his blue van, he had an ambulance. And that's not some local slang term, it was an actual ambulance with lights and everything. It's probably the best sort of vehicle for me to be travelling in anyway. First stop was the snowcock slope at c.km113. Sid had said the snowcocks and snow partridges come out here when the morning sun hits the slope. The morning was much colder than the previous one, and there was a lot more snow everywhere. I hopped about on the side of the road trying to keep warm, not very successfully I may add! It was bone-numbingly cold. It was a good thing all my stuff was in the ambulance because it meant I could get a second pair of woollen socks to put on. And still my toes felt like they were going to fall off! Alpine accentors buzzed around nearby (my fourth accentor of the trip) and the flocks of plain mountain finches were back except this time they obligingly kept landing near the road enabling me to look at them properly (and even get some photos!). It was a bit better when the sun poked high enough over the opposite mountain to hit the road and take the chill off me, but still no gamebirds showed up. After an hour and a half I was just too cold, despite the sun, and I gave up. There were still the other pheasants to look for after all.

We drove over the pass and saw the same thing as yesterday morning – a great mass of fog lower down the mountains. This fog layer just seems to sit right at the “pheasant zone” – not above, not below, only right where I want to look for pheasants! At km95 I got out and sent the ambulance ahead to km92. In this stretch was where Jens saw his pheasants and I saw the koklass yesterday, so it was worth a walk. The fog began at about km94 and was far thicker than the morning before. There was literally about ten feet of visibility. It was so thick that the headlights from cars and trucks just thirty feet away were invisible, which didn't make me feel very safe, especially with some of the drivers going at the same speed they would have been in clear conditions! And unlike yesterday, there were few gaps in the fog; it was pretty much just a 3km walk through pea soup. I did see the white-cheeked starling from the morning before, now all alone which was sad, and then about thirty metres further on the sparrowhawk sitting on a powerline. Once back in the ambulance we drove to the other side of the tunnel and parked once more. There's a good viewing point just along the road from the tunnel and from here I could hear white eared pheasants calling to each other to keep in contact in the fog. A fat lot of good that does me!! But then the fog just all vanished from that particular area, leaving the whole hillside below me clear. Of the pheasants there was no sign, and they had stopped calling. I wandered around the edge of the viewing spot looking down everywhere I could; no pheasants. Then I thought I might walk up the road a little more and maybe I could see some different bits of the hillside. I did that.....and there was a party of white eared pheasants! They were quite a long way down the hill but through the binoculars I could watch them foraging about amongst the bushes. There were about ten or so of them. I got some distant “record shots” with my camera, but they aren't very good (by which I mean they are really bad). The pheasants actually weren't far above a lower stretch of the road and I wondered if I should drive down there and try to see them closer, or whether I should stay up here and keep looking for the monals. Tough decision, but the monals won out. Not for too long though, because the fog never got any better and the high areas above the road where the monals were never became clear at all, so after another half an hour I made the call to give up on them. I did see a peregrine falcon though, perched on a tree, so that species is finally on my life list!! I had mentally noted the spot on the lower stretch of road closest to where the white eared pheasants were, which due to the extremely winding nature of the road turned out to actually be about seven or eight kilometres drive, and once there I headed up the slope to see if I could sneak up on them. Here was where I discovered that trying to scramble quickly up a very steep mountainside at an altitude of 4000-odd metres is a little exhausting! The driver, still down on the road, spotted the pheasants moving off across the hill towards the bushes and called out where they were. Then I had to move even faster, and by the time I saw the birds I was puffing so hard I couldn't focus the camera!! I managed to get a lot of very blurry photos and maybe a couple of average ones. But I saw them a lot closer than before so I was happy.

Next stop: Wolong. I found a hotel with a room for 50 Yuan. There were collared finchbills in the trees outside my window. Behind the town is a steep hillside covered in scraggly pine plantation and scrubby forest. This was where golden pheasants were supposed to be common and why I was here. I wandered along the main road until I found what seemed to be an access trail and headed in. What I found was not a lot! Under the pines moving around was easy because there was no undergrowth, but all the other trails seemed to be very rough indeed. Some were obviously used but others not so much. Basically I did what I often do, and found what appeared to be trails and then treated them as if they were trails! What then happens is that I spend a lot of time worming through vines and thickets and not really getting anywhere bird-wise. For three hours I struggled about all over the hill, with the only birds seen being a few babblers (streak-throated fulvettas, Elliot's laughing thrushes and a group of Chinese babax – the last one was a lifer so I was happy with that one at least). Then I got sick of it and decided to go back to the hotel. I found the trail I came in on and when almost back at the road I made a split-second choice to try a little trail which I had ignored coming in because it had appeared to head down towards the road again. I walked along it and it petered out and disappeared after just a couple of minutes. Up the slope I saw some small brown bird bobbing behind the base of a small tree, probably a laughing thrush of some sort digging in the leaf litter. I had a look through my binoculars – and discovered the “small bird” was actually the end of the tail of a female golden pheasant! And behind her was another female golden pheasant! I don't think they had seen me but they knew something was wrong, because they put their heads up and flicked their tails, and then walked quickly up the slope and into the undergrowth higher up. They didn't run, just walked in that brisk way you have when you feel like there's something creepy happening but don't want to freak out and run just yet. I clambered up the hill after them but I was a lot slower than they were. It was the sort of steepness where if someone was standing a couple of feet in front of you, their feet would be level with your eyes. The pheasants had gone by the time I got up there of course, but I found myself back on a higher part of the trail I had just come down from. That's the kind of hill this is, where a bird the size of a pheasant can be literally a couple of metres below you and you have no idea at all that it is there. I went back to the hotel extra happy. They may not have been male golden pheasants but they were still golden pheasants, and that made three pheasant species in two days for me, which by my standards is downright astonishing!

Just near Wolong is a reserve called Wuyipeng. The entrance is only 5km up the road so the next morning I walked there. It was a bit of a late start (9am) because of having to wait for the hotel's restaurant to open for breakfast and some food for lunch. Along the way I saw some more Chinese babax and other common birds. Wolong sits at about the 45-ish km mark on the S303, and Wuyipeng is dead on the 50km mark. There's a little foot-bridge across the river on the left of the road, although the way to get to the bridge took some finding because you have to wend between people's houses to get there. On the other side of the bridge take the rough foot-track directly to the left which soon leads to a paved road and about 50 metres to the right along the paved road is a narrow track (on your left) signposted for Wuyipeng. There's actually a larger bridge (able to take cars) further along the river and the paved road connects to that, so you could come that way as well. There are a couple of signposts at the entrance to the track saying something like “Nature Reserve Core Area: No Unauthorised Entry” but I ignored them given that there were vegetable plots on either side. If people can farm there with no permit then I can enter with no permit! That's my philosophy. Up the track a little bit next to a cabbage plot there was a barrier of branches but I climbed over it and continued. There were two trails then, one going left downhill and one straight ahead uphill, so I took the uphill one because if there's an easy trail and a hard trail my brain stops working and I always take the hard trail.

It wasn't really that hard, just upwards. There were a couple of slips to negotiate but nothing major. Coming back down was more difficult than going up because some bits were so steep. The forest is really nice there, mostly pine at the bottom, then turning to bamboo higher up. Not many birds though. I saw some black-faced and Elliot's laughing thrushes, and a flock of the lovely sooty tits which I haven't seen since Tangjiahe.The only new bird for the day was barred laughing thrush, which are gorgeous birds. I really like laughing thrushes. Some are a bit plain – like the plain laughing thrush Garrulax davidi – but most are very attractive birds, not always brightly coloured but always very elegant and smartly-attired. But I was mainly at Wuyipeng to find a male golden pheasant to go with the females from the day before. About two-thirds of the way up I paused at a bend, and just as I did so I saw a male golden pheasant just inside the bamboo at the next bend. Shockingly brightly coloured. How they don't get eaten by everything in existence I don't know. Like the females yesterday I don't know if he even knew I was there, he was just stalking slowly through the bamboo, pecking here and there. There was no point trying to get a photo where he was, behind all the bamboo, but I could see him easily enough with the binoculars. I have seen probably hundreds of golden pheasants in aviaries but nothing compares to seeing a male one in the wild slipping through a bamboo forest on a Chinese mountainside!!

Earlier in this post I mentioned how it costs so much more to get to Balang Shan from Wolong than from Rilong. Walking back to Wolong from Wuyipeng I was offered a lift, for 100 Yuan. “Get off mate, it's only 5km!” was along the lines of my reply. He put the price down to 50 Yuan but I'm not desperate to throw money away so I continued walking. A few minutes later someone else offered me a lift for 50 Yuan. The moral of the story is that if you are an independent birder who needs to hire a driver to get to Balang Shan, then stay in Rilong and not Wolong!!

To get back to Chengdu from Wolong you take a 4WD shared-taxi for 50 Yuan to the town of Dujiangyan two hours away, and then a half-hour bullet train to Chengdu's North Railway Station or a one hour bus to the Chadianzi Bus Station (I took the bus because the taxi stop is just round the corner from the bus station). Most of the way to Dujiangyan looks like the earthquake happened yesterday. Many parts of the road are simply one-lane tracks bulldozed through rubble. There are a few long tunnels along the way and it is a bit freaky going through them and seeing boulders and other debris lying along the walls. Even five years later you can still get an idea of the magnitude of the quake from the results on the landscape. What is really sobering though, is that somewhere like Labahe is spending millions on completely unnecessary and superfluous hotels while just a couple of hours away there are towns without even proper roads connecting them to the outside world.

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