BIRDING MONGOLIA

Hard walk

text by Jonathan Stacey & ABu

This rock held the Wallcreeper.

Gorkhi-Terelj NP, 4 Feb 2016 © Jonathan Stacey

On 4 Feb 2016, shortly after noon, I teamed up with Jonathan Stacey for birding in Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, just an hour’s drive from UB. We checked in at a ger camp and then walked around. Jonathan had found an active nest of Bearded Vulture (aka Lammergeier) nearby in February 2014 and we slowly walked up the slope to see whether breeding had already commenced. There were only a few Eurasian Nuthatches and some Willow Tits plus the usual corvids around, including resident Ravens. Before we reached the point from where we could check the nest, a small bird flew out of the cliff just a few meters above our heads and flitted its way over the rock and out of sight: Wallcreeper! Unfortunately and despite our efforts, we could not relocate the bird to take some pictures. Funnily enough, we had been discussing the possibility of encountering Wallcreeper in Terelj or in UB, literally 1 minute before we saw it suddenly appear. Pure serendipity! Strike!

The female Bearded Vulture was indeed incubating tightly, with just her head visible peering over the rim of the eyrie. Her mate soon made an appearance, soaring along the high cliffs before coming into roost before sunset at a favorite site, indicated by lots of white-wash. We then went back to our accommodation, lit the fire and had a dinner which was accompanied by a couple of beers and talk of birds and travel well into the night.

The red dot indicates where we had had parked the car.

Gorkhi-Terelj NP, 5 Feb 2016 © Jonathan Stacey

The next morning saw us driving into one of the side valleys and after we had parked the car we started our ascent. To reach to top of the mountain of interest we could have chosen an approach from the north, but we did not try this because we expected it to be too difficult, mainly because of deep snow on the northern slopes. So we hiked up the southern slope which was not completely free of snow either. The lower forest of larch and aspen was frequented by scattered parties of Nutcrackers calling to each other and moving across the slope. It was unusual to see them out of their more typical preferred Siberian Pine habitat. Our route took us through huge slabs of snow-covered granite, where once Jonathan had to find an alternative path and slide—very inelegantly—for several meters to find better footing. After this we had to cross a huge scree-slope. This turned out to be very exhausting as we had to deal with loose, sometimes very unstable rocks, and oftentimes for three steps up we slid one step down. During our long ascent through the morning we saw the male Bearded Vulture again, a small group of Eurasian Black Vultures closely inspected us, there were those nuthatches and Willow Tits again and we saw a distant group of Alpine Accentors as well as a pair of Long-tailed Rosefinches.

Birdless but mature forest,

dominated by Siberian Pine and Siberian Larch.

Gorkhi-Terelj NP, 5 Feb 2016 © Jonathan Stacey

In the forest on the mountain summit plateau, although looking quite promising, we did not see much: only Willow Tits, Eurasian Nuthatches and an Eurasian Treecreeper, the latter heard only! Walking was as difficult as expected with the snow sometimes reaching up to our knees. Wolf tracks were evident. After an hour or so we headed back, giving us plenty of time to make the long arduous descent to the car. At the forest edge we finally got closer to a group of c25 Alpine Accentors. Suddenly they all were spooked—by what we knew not—and so we had no more reason to stay 600 m above our car. As we had to be even more careful on our descent we climbed down painstakingly and slowly to reach our vehicle just at sunset. Totally exhausted after a spectacular, but a rather quiet birding day—we drove back into the smog of the capital.