Departing for Fieldwork

Tomorrow I leave for the Great Himalayan National Park at 6am. I will be driving by taxi for 12 hours along curvy roads. My stomach churns at the memory of the roads to Shimla, but the journey will be well worth the effort. Everyone I speak with tells me that the park is heaven on earth, and an incredible spectacle of alpine meadows speckled with blue and yellow wildflowers juxtaposed against glacial ridges jutting into the open sky.

Ramesh's previous field assistant, Pritham Singh, came to Dehradun to tour the area and help me carry equipment to the park, so I'll be accompanied by him on the drive. Tomorrow night I plan to stay in a Forest Department lodge in Sairopa (a small town). Tuesday, I will spend the day in Kullu, a larger city about 20 km away. There I will meet with the park director and buy supplies. During the week I will also set up a room to serve as my base camp in Kharoangcha (pronounced "Karoncha"), a small village on the border of the park. The last few days of the week will be spent practicing call counts and trail walks to prepare for data collection, which will begin around April 1.

I'm feeling both nervous and excited about this leg of my trip. I'm comfortable with the idea of camping, and honestly looking forward to the challenges and personal growth that the experience will bring. Most of my concerns are in regards to social situations - food, clothing, language...and to be blunt, even bathroom issues, since those experiences are so blatant when camping. Not only will this fieldwork be mentally and physically draining, since we will be rising early (4am) and treking through high altitude ridges, but it will be an intense exercise in cultural differences. I will be working with assistants who speak minimal English and have spent most of their lives in the forest, collecting medicinal plants and mushrooms for their livelihoods. I am less familiar with forest-dwelling, having only taken several, short-term backpacking trips in my life, and am praying that I don't offend anyone with my American-style of doing things. I'm getting used to making social mistakes and asking questions when things are unclear, and hopefully those lessons will help me adjust to the Himachali lifestyle quickly.

My fieldwork schedule will follow a general pattern of 5-12 days backpacking and camping in remote areas of the park, followed by 2-4 days rest in the village. Internet and phone access is available in Kullu, which I can travel to by bus. I will check my email and post on this blog approximately every 2 weeks, so please be patient with your communications to me. That said, fieldwork can be lonely work and I would be very grateful to be greeted by updates about your lives when I do manage to check my email.

My research will be investigating the impact of ecodevelopment and park closure to human activities on three pheasant species in the park. In 1999, the year after Ramesh finished his doctoral research on pheasant ecology, the Great Himalayan National Park closed its borders to human harvesting of natural resources (i.e. collection of firewood, fodder, mushrooms and medicinal plants, as well as livestock grazing). Previous ecodevelopment programs had been established from 1994-99 in an attempt to lessen the villagers' dependence on natural resources, which had been identified as a primary contribution to the decline of the endangered Western tragopan. Now that the park's borders are legally closed and the impact of people on the pheasants' habitats is (supposedly) less, I am returning to Ramesh's study site to re-sample pheasant abundance and sense whether the populations have recovered.

My study species:

The koklass pheasant, a common bird in the area that calls at dawn.


The Himalayan monal, state bird of Uttarakhand (location of Dehradun) and national bird of Nepal. Also the poster bird of my blog. I will survey the monal by walking along trails and recording sightings.


The star of my study, the Western tragopan. Less than 5,000 individuals exist in the wild, and GHNP is only one of 2 protected areas to contain the species. The bird calls at dawn and I will survey its presence with call counts.


To find out more about the park, its fauna and the ecodevelopment project, click here. The site also contains pictures of the area.