Jodi in China

So, another day of bus travel and we made it back to Shangri-la. That was a month ago already now, so I am way behind in my story-telling. I have had a busy month since returning from the alpine, with a few overnight and daytrip fieldwork near Shangri-la. I hope to tell about these adventures eventually, but thought I would give an update on my life while I am in Shangri-la. On October 1, we started renting a Tibetan house in Old Town of Shangri-la. It is a big old house, a little bit dumpy because it hasn’t been kept up for a few months, but with lots of space, some furniture, and best of all, a wood stove. The house itself is kind of like a barn that has been fixed up for people to live in, so no insulation and a little drafty. Since it is getting pretty cold (high of 60 in the day, heavy frosts at night) I get a special pleasure out of the stove. When the sun starts to go down, the temperature, outside and insidel, drops rapidly. I love the evening ritual of bringing in the wood, starting, feeding and stoking the fire, and feeling the big old house slowly warm up.

I have become very interested to study songbirds here, there is a great diversity of them, and it seems that no one else has studied them. But the first step to studying them is to figure out how I would go about identifying them. So I have been devoting some time at the Shangri-la Botanical gardens, which is a safe place to walk around by myself, and has several different habitats in a relatively small area. It is a lot of fun, stalking the secretive ones and adding to my list every day. My favorites so far are the laughingthrushes. They are big, clumsy, and giggle a lot. But I have to admit it is a little tough going sometimes, and I have a really long way to go before I could consider doing any serious bird research. I am a birding novice, I haven’t found a great field guide for the region, nor have a found a local expert that could teach me about the birds specific to this area. But I have made a little headway, and I continue to search for a local expert to help me out. So far, I have identified around 40 species, and there are ~ 20 others I have seen but haven’t been able to identify. Just for you AWOL’ers, here is my list so far (I suspect your lists would be at least twice as long):