Big Tortoises

Find Penguins not a great success this time owing the the remoteness of our destinations (Northern Assam, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur) and lack of signal. Given that each day began well before dawn and ended in the dark there was little time or inclination to write daily reports in my fairly exhausted state.
This was a hard core birding trip with the main goals usually very hard to see and range-restricted species such as Gould’s Shortwing and the recently discovered Bugun Liocichla. Suffice to say that we seem to have had much greater success than the one or two other bird groups in the area because of the phenomenal bird finding skills of our guide, Shashank. Our trip list was around 470 species of which maybe 400 were new to me.
A few good mammals too including a couple of rare mountain goat species, one Tiger relaxing on a sandbar and a few Hoolock experiences in tall forest areas. These are noisy gibbons. Rather few photos taken by me but I hope for some shares from other members of the group.
Apart from wildlife, the almost vertical hillside forests of the Mishmi Hills, the rocky Himalayan terrain near the Chinese border, and the vast Brahmaputra River (9km wide where we crossed it) were landscape highlights.
Wonderful self sufficient and self contained mountain tribal people were most impressive and with beautiful features. Bamboo a fantastic versatile building material used throughout - together with much corrugated iron.
What a tame and safe place the UK is! I’m not expecting cattle, dogs, goats, piles of building materials, landslides, rockfalls or wandering people and bicycles to block our passage on the motorway between Edinburgh and home, or cars and cyclists coming at us on the wrong carriageway! We have rules here but they seem to be totally absent in India - yet there was never and accident of any sort, though hundreds of what we would consider to be near misses!
Many thanks to Andy Clements for his digiscoped images.Read more