Jodi in China

In Shangri-la, in addition to schmoozing, I was able to spend a morning with my binoculars in the Shangri-la botanical gardens. This is an area of previously logged and grazed, but now regenerating shrub and forest land about 10 miles outside of the city that was purchased in 2001 by the botanical garden. Interestingly, in addition to the regenerating area of mostly pine trees and assorted shrubs, there are a couple of small patches of remnant natural forest that contain mature stands of fir, spruce, and rhododendron that are “sacred” sites. That is to say, these are areas that local people have left uncut because they visit these places as religious sites to make offerings and prayers in their Buddhist tradition. In the morning I spent hiking around the area with my binoculars, I was very interested to see that there are indeed a very diverse set of bird species that are occupying this mosaic of regenerating and mature forest. I am certainly no bird expert, and don’t really have a good field guide, so although I was unable to identify specific bird species, I was able to tell that there were different species in the different forest types. So, since then, I have become more interested in the possibility of researching differences in bird communities in the various forest and shrub habitats. I would like to investigate whether these sacred areas/mature forest remnants are an important means to promote biodiversity of birds and forest habitats in the study area.

So, after this trip to the botanical garden, and after a couple of days of schmoozing and preparations in Shangri-la, Michelle and I headed out for our first fieldtrip. Michelle is a botanist who is studying plant diversity in alpine ecosystems. Alpine ecosystems in this region are traditionally defined in this region as areas above 4000m (~12,000 feet). Tree-line in the region occurs right around 4000 meters, so Michelle is primarily interested in the plant diversity in the shrubs, meadows, and scree (rocky mountaintops) environments. I was pretty excited to go with her, because I had never been to an alpine area, I know nothing about them, and so I knew I was going to learn a lot.

There are several areas of alpine ecosystems near main roads. However, Michelle is pretty hardcore, and is interested in the most remote, unimpacted sites, because they contain the most diverse and interesting plants. So, it was going to be a several-days long adventure to get to and then spend time in, and then get back from, the sites that we wanted to visit.

We focused on visiting the summer pasture sites of the Adong village, a remote Tibetan village way up in the north of NW Yunnan, about as close as you get get to Tibet without actually being in Tibet. We hired a botanist from the Shangri-la botanical garden, Li Hong, to help us identify plant species and to help translate between the local Tibetan version of Mandarin and Michelle’s Mandarin. We all took a 8 hour bus, and then a 3 hour taxi, to get to Adong village. Michelle had visited this site before, and had hired a local villager to guide her to the sites. So upon arriving in the village, we located the same Tibetan guy, and asked whether he would be willing to guide us up to his family’s summer Yak pastures, along with two horses to carry our gear. Although his summer pastures, and the herding hut where his son lives and herds their yaks for the summer, were already vacated, he knew of a neighboring villager’s pastures and huts that were still occupied. So he agreed to guide us up to their hut and lead us all around the Adong village alpine territories for the next several days.

We stayed the night, the next day, and the next night in his big, beautiful Tibetan house in the village, as our guide made preparations for our journey. So, finally two days later, we set out at 8am for the 12 hour hike up to the alpine. And what a hike it was! We went from about 2300m in the village to 4200m, where the herder hut is. We passed through our guide’s village, another village higher up, and then a long stretch of beautiful mature forests of spruce, fir, birch, poplar, and oak trees, many with long strands of lichens streaming from the gnarled branches. At tree line, the forest vegetation began changing into oak shrubs, rhododendrons, and stunted junipers. We continued climbing, and about at nightfall, exhausted and gasping for air (well, mostly it was only me who was gasping for air), we reached the alpine meadows and the herder hut which would be our home for the next 4 days.

Wandering around the Adong village while waiting for our guide's preparations, we found this big beautiful walnut tree, equipped with a ladder to climb up and harvest the nuts (or pose for a picture).

At Adong Village, our guide and his mom.

Starting the hike up through the villages.
Looking down on some terrace agriculture fields.
Beautiful mountain river.