Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part 3: 2013-2014

My next destination after Ruoergai and Songpan was a place called Labahe, sort of south-west of Chengdu, and once again up in the mountains. When Richard Webb went to Ruoergai after Tibetan foxes he also went to Labahe after red pandas (see the last couple of entries if you've already forgotten about Richard Webb). From his trip report he made it sound like Labahe was positively overflowing with red pandas and so that and Ruoergai became the top two spots on my trip list. There's a very narrow window for good red panda viewing, basically from late October to mid-November, when the trees are losing their leaves and the pandas are actively foraging in the canopy on berries so they are easy to see. And that's pretty much why I started the trip at such a terrible time of year for birds in South Korea and Russia, because I had to fit them in before the optimum time for red pandas in China! I actually didn't think I was going to get to Labahe because not long before I was due to leave the Chinese government went and closed both of the two top red panda sites, Labahe and Wawu Shan. I had a back-up site called Longcanggou, but I didn't really know how to get there and I only had a vague idea of where it even was – I was going to figure all that out on the spot – but fortunately Labahe re-opened while I was travelling (in September I think), so I got to visit after all.

When I was a young lad I had the book version of David Attenborough's The Living Planet. Actually I had (still have) two book versions, the large-size one and the mid-size one. The first chapter talks about the Himalayas and in the mid-size version there is a full-page photo of a red panda sitting in a tree. When I think of red pandas, that picture is the one that comes into my head. When I was growing up I never in my wildest dreams thought I would ever be going to look for red pandas in the wild!!

From Songpan I caught the 7.30am bus to Chengdu (127 Yuan, 8 hours). It terminated at the Chadianzi Station, and I transferred via subway and taxi to the Xinnanmen Station where I caught the 5pm bus to Ya'an (50 Yuan, 2 hours). I had no clue where to stay in Ya'an but there was a local hotelier waiting for customers at the bus station there and her hotel was just round the corner, so I got a room there for 100 Yuan. The next town to get to was Tianquan. Most independent travellers seemed to take a taxi from Tianquan to Labahe, but I had found two (older) reports which said there was a bus. One said it was at 10am and you need to get the 7.50am or earlier bus from Ya'an to Tianquan to make the connection; the other said the bus was at 1pm. I didn't know if there even still was a Labahe bus given that the park had only just reopened, but I got the earliest bus from Ya'an to Tianquan anyway, which as it happened was the 7.50am one (12 Yuan, one hour). When I got to Tianquan I found that the Labahe bus was at 12.30 (and also cost 12 Yuan), so I had a three and a half hour wait. Also the bus isn't actually a Labahe bus, it is a bus to Angzhouhe which is a nearby area. You get dropped at the reserve's entrance gate, which is 22km before the reception area, and then I guess the staff there arrange a car for you. I didn't have to do this because we happened to pass one of the Labahe staff in his vehicle on the main road en route so the bus driver off-loaded me onto him (which meant we drove straight through the entry gate up to reception without stopping, so I never paid the entry fee, which I think is about 60 Yuan). I got a room in the chalets by reception for 200 Yuan per night; not cheap but not Tangjiahe prices at least!!

It was about 3pm-ish when I arrived. As per usual with the nature reserves set up for tourism in China, nobody speaks any English, so my first job was trying to sort out how the place worked (meal times and things like that). The area where the red pandas are found is up a jeep track which runs from the reception area. The jeeps take visitors up and down, and there are a few trails and boardwalks up there. It isn't an extremely long track, about 8km to the start of “the panda zone” so to speak, and then maybe another 10km right to the end if the park map is to be believed, but it is all uphill and very steep so it doesn't make sense to try and walk it (at least not upwards!). The jeeps are priced per group, at 50 Yuan per person, which means that if you're alone you need to sit around waiting for others unless you want to pay the whole 400 Yuan yourself (about NZ$80). Fortunately there was a group going right that very moment and they said I could join in, and also kindly waited for me to get my cameras and everything organised. We stopped at about the 8km mark at a circular trail made up mostly of stone steps up a forest-covered hill and back down. This was right at the “panda zone” (there was even a red panda on the sign by the trail) so I kept my eyes peeled but no luck this first afternoon. There didn't even seem to be any birds around. I saw a couple of laughing thrushes which were probably hwameis, but the fog was so thick I couldn't really tell. Still, the ride gave me a good idea of what the road was like, what the forest was like, and just a good overall idea of things for the next few days.

Before I go any further I should probably describe the forest so you all have an idea of what it is like there. It is all mountainous of course, and a mix of conifers and deciduous trees. At the moment all the deciduous trees are in their red and yellow autumn colours. It is what I imagine the temperate forests of Europe or North America to look like at this time of year. The forest floor is covered almost everywhere in a waist-high carpet of bamboo (which makes it very hard to see a lot of the birds!) but elsewhere there are just sheets of moss, or big tumbly thickets of wild roses and sometimes a rhododendron or two. The roses are in fruit, and there is a particular type of tall deciduous tree which has lost most of its leaves but is covered in little red berries. It is this tree in which the red pandas feed and why this time of year is the best for seeing them (i.e. in winter they probably won't be in those trees and in summer they will be hidden in leaves).

That first evening I had dinner at the restaurant of the expensive hotel a kilometre up the road from reception. The group I had shared the car with was there (it was one of theirs birthday) and they convinced me to join them for a free meal. The real reason for eating at the restaurant there however, is that the dining room overlooks a salt-lick where sambar deer gather after dark. They even have a special viewing area just for deer-watchers! There were about ten sambar that night. I've seen sambar in the wild before, but never as well as this. They were maybe ten metres from the window, under lights, and through the binoculars it was as if it was day-time viewing. It was pretty special watching them that close. I suspect other kinds of animals also come to the lick later in the night after the lights are out, with only the sambar brave enough in the early evening. Later I walked further up the road for a few kilometres spot-lighting but found nothing. Returning to the chalets though I spotted a Himalayan tawny owl which was nice because I don't see a lot of owls.

Breakfast is included with the price of the room, so the next morning I performed my patented “stealing boiled eggs from the buffet so I don't need to pay for lunch” routine, and then sat around for over an hour waiting for enough other people to finish breakfast and get round to coming to reception for a jeep ride up the road. The area where Richard Webb saw his first panda was just past the start of the circular trail from yesterday, where there is a couple of toilets on the left of the track and a fenced area on the right. He says this is 6 or 7 km up the track, one of the park maps says it is 8km, and the dodgy map on the jeep ticket suggests it is about 10 or 12km (which it totally isn't!). You would know it when you saw it anyway. The fenced area is for red deer – I don't know why they are here but they are, all with ear-tags and the stags with their antlers sawn off. The toilets are now used for storing dried grasses for feeding the deer. Richard Webb saw his first red panda in a tree on the left of the track just passed the toilets. I looked carefully in all the trees but no pandas. I then took what I thought was a side-trail (but which the next day I learned was actually the main track to the long boardwalk) but there wasn't much happening there, so I returned to the jeep track and continued along what I thought was the main track, which curled up right round the deer pens and then coiled its way up the mountain. I know I shouldn't have been expecting finding red pandas to be easy but Webb's trip report was so full of pandas that I couldn't help it. And when you're expecting to find an animal easily and you don't do so quickly then you start feeling like you're wasting your time.

Then, I saw a red panda! And despite my low mood up till then, I had only been looking for two hours and no matter what anyone says two hours to find an animal like a red panda is no time at all! He (or she; I'll just say it was a male) was sitting curled up in the open on a tree branch, looking remarkably like one of the big lumps of reddish moss which grow on all the trees here, but when I stopped to look at him through my binoculars he lifted his head and stared right back at me. Because he was up in the tree against the sky the photos were all pretty rubbish because he always ended up silhouetted. There was a narrow path cut through the bamboo right past the tree along which a water pipe was running, so I went along that and tried unsuccessfully to find a better vantage point where the panda wasn't against the sky. Never mind, I was just happy to see one!! The tree was one of those full of little red berries which had attracted not only the panda but also a variety of birds, the first ones I saw being a flock of chestnut thrushes which are black and red. Then a Darjeeling woodpecker turned up, which is black and red and white and fulvous. It was like this tree was reserved just for animals of those colours. A bird wave passed by under the tree through the bamboo as well, containing amongst others black-faced laughing thrushes and brown parrotbills (I'm just mentioning them because they were lifers). The panda seemed totally unfazed by me staring at him, just watching me right back for a while and then eventually deliberately turning his head away and going back to sleep! I figured he was going to be in the tree for a while, so I left him to his sleep and continued up the road to see if I could find any others. I kept going slowly up the road for a couple more hours but there wasn't much to be seen. I did see a Swinhoe's striped squirrel (the first of several) and, remarkably, managed to get some good photos of it! If you've ever seen a striped squirrel – or, indeed, any of the smaller squirrel species – you'll know how tricky that is to do when they are awake! Back at the panda tree the panda had awoken and started moving round a bit, feeding on the berries. I still couldn't get any very good photos but I stayed there for quite a while watching him. When I got back down to the deer pens, I was surprised to find a second panda, once again just sitting in the naked branches of a tree completely un-hidden. Because this one was right where Richard Webb had seen his first panda I would guess this was quite possibly the very same individual, perhaps even in the very same tree. This one was feeding on berries too, but wasn't quite as relaxed as my first one. After maybe five minutes she (I'll call it a she because I called the first one a he) adopted a very interesting pose, where she stretched her body out vertically behind a thick branch, head-downwards, and froze. I think this must be a defensive “hiding” posture, because from the point of view of the predator (me), the black belly fur creates a disruptive effect behind the branch. If I didn't know the panda was there I would probably have walked right on by and not even seen her. She stayed like that until I left. (I didn't stay too long because I didn't want to keep disturbing her, so I don't know how long she would have stayed in that position otherwise). After dinner I went spotlighting for a bit along the main road past the expensive hotel, and saw a bunch of sambar and a Reeves' muntjac. The muntjac also displayed an interesting reaction to the torchlight which I hadn't seen before. When the torch was on her she turned her head away and just stared in the opposite direction, as if knowing that her glowing eyes were giving her away. When I moved the light off her she immediately swivelled her head back to look at me. Light on her, look away, light off her, look back, and so on.

I was the only person at breakfast the next morning. This meant there was no buffet, just my own individual breakfast, and I had to pay to get some extra food to take away for my lunch. It also meant there was nobody else to share a jeep with to get up the top of the road. The woman at the reception said it would cost me 300 Yuan for the car by myself, an amount I didn't really want to pay. I went away and got my gear and then hung around the reception for a bit in case someone did turn up. As far as I could work out (i.e. with her speaking no English and me speaking no Chinese) there was nobody else staying at the park right then. Eventually I said I would just go in the jeep myself. She got on the phone and then said “50 Yuan”. I thought that was nice, they had taken pity on poor old me and were just charging me the part-rate and not the full-rate. I took the ticket and waited, and waited some more, and then I kept on waiting. Also I waited a bit. No car came. Then a girl turned up who did speak a little English who explained things to me: there was no car, I would have to walk after all. This was slightly confusing to me given that the woman had already sold me the ticket for the car. But no, there was no car and the woman would refund my 50 Yuan, which she did. A jeep arrived right then. What about that one? No, that one isn't going up the mountain. Well what about that one, or that one? I mean, there are three jeeps all just sitting there doing nothing. Nope, none of those are going up the mountain, I would have to walk. You can walk to here, I was told, with the 6km mark being pointed out. But I'm going to the 18km mark I say. This caused some consternation because this was a long way to walk up the mountain. Well.....there is that mini-bus right there which is taking a group of people up, in which you can ride! Sometimes I really don't understand China!

The group going up in the mini-bus were about ten nature photographers who, as it happened, were staying at the chalets. They were going to the boardwalk at the end of the road which was also where I was planning on going so it worked out well. The boardwalk runs for several kilometres up and round a mountain and then steeply downhill before ending up at the road again, although several kilometres down the road from where you start out of course. The boardwalk isn't in the best of shape anymore, but at least it is still mostly in one piece. It is a very nice walk too. The first part is through forest, the second through an open expanse of the waist-high bamboo. There are obviously a lot of takin around here because their trails were regular through the bamboo fields, and there were often deposits of dung on the boardwalk where-ever their trails crossed it. I didn't see any though. In fact I didn't see much of anything. I really made a poor show of birding the whole time I was at Labahe. I don't know why, because looking for pandas and looking for birds was basically the same activity (walking along the roads looking in the trees). I really was trying because there are some beautiful birds there which I did want to see, especially in the babbler department, but I just couldn't seem to find any. But funnily enough I didn't really care because Red Panda!! Speaking of red pandas, I saw one from the boardwalk, up a valley in the top of a tree feeding on berries. There were only two of the photographer group at the spot so I pointed it out to them and they were extremely happy! It didn't stay around long so nobody else got to see it. Back at the road the group all left in their bus back to the chalets for lunch, but I walked back up the road until I reached the start of the “panda zone” again. The one from yesterday afternoon by the deer pens wasn't there, so I continued on to where I had seen my original one. Just before I got to the spot I happened to look up a rough bulldozer track to my right, and there was a panda sitting curled up in an isolated tree. The funny thing with the pandas is that while they are fairly obvious sitting in the open branches you could still easily miss them if they are curled up because they look like balls of moss or knots in the branches – but they have the habit of lifting their head when you pass and staring straight at you, and then their bright white faces immediately give away their position. This panda was in a far better position for photography than the last three I had seen because I could get up on a bank opposite the tree and then there was a mountain in the background behind the panda instead of sky, so it wasn't silhouetted. It stayed curled in a ball looking at the camera. I couldn't tell if it was calm or stressing out – their cuddly faces don't give much away! – so just to be safe I didn't stay too long. Three or four minutes further up the road was the tree where I had seen the first panda the day before, and sure enough he was still there. I watched him for a bit, then carried on even further but there were no more pandas to be found so I returned the way I had come. I passed Panda Number One, and when I came to the one in the other tree I saw he had become active and started feeding. I got back up on the bank again and got some really good photos. However this time it was obvious that after a little while, maybe ten minutes or so, he was starting to get stressed by my presence (he started doing the stretch-out-and-hide-behind-the-branch trick) so I began to make my departure. But first, not sure why, I thought I'd have a quick scan of the hillside further up the bulldozer track – and there was another panda in a tree! The fourth for the day, with three of them literally within a few minutes walk of one another. Just outstanding. I'll tell ya, I am loving Sichuan!!!

Back at the reception/chalet area I ran into the photography group and showed them my last panda photos (the good ones!). They were stunned that I had seen four in one day. In fact they thought they were misinterpreting what I was saying. One of the women started berating the leader that the reason I had seen the pandas was because I had stayed up there, having taken my lunch up with me, and not wasted time going back to the chalets for lunch which was probably true enough. Being a charitable sort, and because it would get me a ride back up the mountain the next day, I said I would go with them in the morning and show them where to look. (I should probably point out that all the group only spoke Chinese, so when I write about conversations what happens in reality is that every couple of sentences takes about ten minutes of complex back-and-forth involving mutually-unintelligible languages, hand signals, drawing pictures, etc, before we understand each other!).

After dinner I went out spotlighting up the main road past the expensive hotel. No owls or muntjacs this night, instead a leopard cat! I've seen leopard cats in the wild in Malaysia but I don't remember them being that small so I think it must have been a young one. It certainly didn't seem bothered by me shining a torch at it. It just sat on the bank above the road, in that hunched-up way that contented cats have with their feet tucked underneath, and only when I got too close, within maybe ten metres, did it slink away. On the way back a couple of hours later it was sitting up in one of the trees and just stared back at me, cool as a cucumber. That is what I like about spotlighting – you never know what you're going to get. Some nights you get nothing, other nights something really cool. (For those not familiar with what a leopard cat is, it is a small wild cat with spots like a leopard; it is not an actual leopard or I would not be so calm about waving a torch in its face!). I went several kilometres up the road but otherwise only saw sambar. Really apart for sambar, everything I saw when spotlighting was just in the one kilometre stretch between the reception chalets and the expensive hotel.

The next day was my last at Labahe. The sky was blue as blue can be, not a cloud in sight, and the sun was surprisingly hot. Before going up the mountain for pandas, the photography group wanted to see the local Tibetan macaques get fed. One of the park staff blew on a whistle until the monkeys came swarming out of the forest onto the road, and then he threw a bucket-full of corn in handfuls out over the ground. The young Tibetan macaques are really cute, all round and fluffy like teddy bears with teeth (sort of like the Vulcan sehlat I guess), but the adults, especially the big males, are aggressive-looking things. Feeding macaques around tourist spots really is just asking for trouble and I'm surprised they do it here. Once that was finished we went up the mountain and I quickly found the group two red pandas (I can now legitimately say I have guided people to find red pandas!), one of which was probably one of the ones from the day before and the other probably not. After the group left I continued on up the road and found a third panda which was very skittish indeed, probably because it was in a low tree; it bolted down onto the ground as soon as it saw me and vanished through the bamboo. Back down the road the very first panda I had seen on day one was back in his tree – third day in a row, and again making four pandas in one day. Over the course of my three full days at Labahe I had made ten separate panda sightings, comprised of at least seven (possibly eight) individual pandas. Not too shabby! Almost makes up for completely failing to find even one Lady Amherst's pheasant whilst there!!!

And just to end this little panda tale, I will return to macaques and tourists by providing a transcript of a sign by the roadside at Labahe which did nothing to sooth my macaque worries:

Notice for visiting the ecological monkey area
Respected tourists:
In order to assure you can experience the fun of viewing the wild animals, please consciously abide by ecological monkey area notes as following, thank you for your cooperation!
1.Those who in gorgeous color such as red, yellow, green are not allowed to get close to the monkey, or else you will be attacked by them.
2.Don't scream, run, touch or make tricks the monkeys when you get close to them. Please specially remind the old and the young how to view them in safe.
3.In order to keep the monkey healthy, please do not feed them with the food you bring with; you can feed them with the feed which the scenic spot specially offered.
4.Because the monkeys are greedy, you shouldn't feed them with all your food on hands but little by little, please feed them by the guide of keepers.
5.If you are grasped or bitten by them, please don't be panic, you should wash the wound with soap water, then go to the hospital to inject Rabies Vaccine immediately.

 

the Korean ones are still holding up surprisingly well! Not going to be forking out any money for new ones until I need to. Some of the lining is coming away on the inside but otherwise they're still good. And they're a bit beaten up now so they don't look so flashy!!

 

Very nice indeed I would suggest that the difference between this individual and the ones you have seen previously in Malaysia will be due to the fact they will have been two different subspecies (the Malaysian being P. b. bengalensis and this individual being P. b. chinensis) and the leopard cat shows a *lot* of subspecific variation - so much so that I personally class the Amur subspecies as a distinct species, being as it does share a lot of morphological and behavioural qualities with the fishing cat rather than other leopard cats.

 

possibly for the ibisbill; they may be round the Wolong area. Although given my track record so far with pheasants I'm having doubts about whether I should even bother going to Wolong and Balang Shan, the sole reason for those spots being pheasant hunting!

With what you said about how golden pheasants sound when they call I think I did hear Lady Amherst's once or twice at Labahe (I was assuming they would sound similar) but it may have been something else entirely. I'm pretty rubbish at bird calls. Richard Webb wrote that he saw "up to twelve a day" at Labahe but I think that was a typo for "up to zero a day" because that is exactly how many I saw! I did find a feather on the road from a female but that's as close as I got. I don't know what was going on with my lack of bird-finding-ability there, but I only saw a handful of new species (white-throated dipper was one of the best).

For distinguishing goldens and Lady Amherst's by call in the wild, I don't think they are found in the same places given how closely related they are and how readily they interbreed. In trip reports it is always golden at one site (say, Wolong or Tangjiahe) and Lady Amherst's at another (say, Labahe or Emei Shan). I think the goldens must be distributed a little north of the Lady A's distribution.

 

yes, I knew you would be more impressed with a common old leopard cat than red pandas!

I haven't looked up the subspecies here, but the main reason I was surprised at its smallness was because it is at a higher altitude than the Malaysian ones (Labahe is up above 2000 metres, whereas in Malaysia I have seen them in the tropical lowlands) so I would have assumed it to be larger here.

I think the Amur leopard cat should be a full species too. It really doesn't look much like regular leopard cats at all!

 

they did seem very passionate about nature (very considerate over the red pandas for example, not wanting to get too close and stress them out). China gets a bad rap for wildlife abuse but there are actually lots of very nature-oriented people here and lots of protection for certain animals and places. Still lots of bad stuff going on, but it's not all doom and gloom.

 

Here is a photo I managed to root out online of Chinese Leopard Cat (Prionailurus bengalensis chinensis), just for the sake of comparison.



And here are the photos I have taken of Indochinese Leopard Cat (P.b.bengalensis) and Amur Leopard Cat (P.b.euptilura) at Galloway Wildlife Park, and of Fishing Cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) at Exmoor.







These, I suspect, show there is a distinct difference between the Chinese and Indochinese subspecies, and an even wider difference between both of these subspecies and the Amur Leopard Cat. Moreover, I believe it shows the Amur Leopard Cat is more closely affiliated with the Fishing Cat.

 

I have a feeling I heard somewhere that there is a full genetic re-analysis of the Felidae as a whole underway, so time will tell.

I believe you have misunderstood somewhat - I was not claiming that Chlidonias had seen an Amur leopard cat. My assertion was that he had likely seen a Chinese Leopard Cat, which is found throughout much of China, with the border between the range of these and the Southeast Asian leopard cat being generally accepted as Yunnan.

 

the Chinese photo won't load on my laptop, probably something to do with it being Chinese (the leopard cat and the internet, not the laptop). But I don't need to see a photo because I have seen the real thing!

I don't normally take flash photos of nocturnal vertebrates so when I go out spot-lighting I just take my little point-and-shoot camera for spiders and insects. However with the leopard cat he was just so unconcerned that I did take two photos with that little camera and he just sat there. They weren't great photos obviously, but word soon got round the reserve and for the next two days everyone kept coming up to me asking to see the photos. Everyone was very interested which was really good (at some parks the staff seem to have little interest in the wildlife). The photos also made the nature photographer group doubly jealous!!


Just some extra information from my last few hours at Labahe yesterday morning. I discovered that there is a direct bus from Chengdu to Tianquan and vice versa, so you don't need to change buses in Ya'an, but the Chengdu station for that bus is Shiyangchang which is a very inconveniently-located station in the southern outskirts of the city, so I wouldn't be doing that again (the bus ride from Tianquan to Chengdu took three hours: just getting from the Shiyangchang station to the Mr. Panda hostel took another 1.5 hours!!). I also discovered that the manager at Labahe speaks quite good English! Also she's very attractive and has a fondness for wearing very short skirts. Anyway, she saw a giant panda in October, right by the road next to the expensive hotel!

I will be in Chengdu for the next couple of days catching up on work, hopefully getting to the zoo finally (!), and then I should be off to Wolong.