Bhutan

A quick glance at a map of Bhutan illustrates just how little of the country can be reached by road, a consequence of the magnificent mountain landscapes of the southern Himalaya and an enlightened conservation programme that has been in place for many years.

The lack of population pressure certainly helps the natural environment too – only three quarters of a million people live in an area just less than that covered by the Netherlands. The result is that just about everywhere you go you are surrounded by beautifully pristine natural forest or alpine slopes reaching up to Bhutan’s magnificent peaks. Around a third of the country is within designated protected areas and there are considerable areas also given special status as biological corridors. It is one of these that we’ll spend a few days exploring. A few years back an American birding group was camping here and noticing a dead Yak near their camp they set out a trap camera and checked in the morning only to find that Tiger and Leopard had both visited the carcass in the night!

It is not those big cats though that attract us to this area as more recently trap camera evidence has shown that the Pele La biological corridor which links Jigme Dorji National Park and Jigme Singye Wangchuk National Park is home to the Golden Cat. This cat has perhaps the most variable coat colour of all the felids with golden, melanistic, grey and even ‘ocelot’ forms all registering on trap cameras around the country. This area is also good for Asiatic Black Bear and Red Panda inhabits the mossy woodlands laden with Rhododendrons. We’ll see Alpine Musk Deer too – this is a great spot to see these normally hard to see deer – and we’ll search in particular here for Dhole, a species in severe decline.

This tour features a wonderful variety of Flying Squirrels – we can expect to see Himalayan Giant Flying Squirrel, Hairy-footed Flying Squirrel, Parti-coloured Flying Squirrel, Hodgson’s Giant Flying Squirrel, Grey-headed Giant Flying Squirrel and there’s a healthy population of Bhutan Flying Squirrels, a truly noble rodent!

On the eastern fringes of Bhutan, adjacent to Arunachal Pradesh, lies the remote and little-known Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, a reserve that in years to come will likely become known as one of Asia’s finest. For now though Sakteng’s 750 square kilometres are home to a couple of thousand semi-nomadic Brokpas or “men of the pastures” – a cultural group who have a very different life style, traditions and dress to the rest of Bhutan – and probably the closest thing to a pure faunal assemblage in the whole of the Himalayan region. A sublime mix of coniferous forests, alpine pastures and broadleaved woodland in the valleys is home to very good numbers of Asiatic Black Bear, Leopard, Red Panda and Dhole. We’ll camp amid this fabulous habitat and spend our time searching for these species and others. Of course, our search for Golden Cat will continue… Yellow-throated Martens are always a treat and tolerably common. At lower altitudes we’ll find plentiful Gee’s Golden Langurs, one of the world’s rarer and more beautiful primates and it is Sakteng that is home to a population of the recently described Arunachal Macaque. Serow and Goral are common here. There’s quite a list of what we might see here.