Tokalo : Day Eight

Day Eight is one of those days within the survey when nothing too crazy happened ~ or perhaps we were getting tuned ~

I get up and make not very successful attempts to spot the birds creating this wonderful music.  But we aren’t in the open. The canopy is dense and the lazy sun makes it more difficult. These 2 reasons I understand also do not allow me to get a location on the GPS. Tea is nice and I await food which is late today.

Some of us are up early ~ 

We hear a hoolock gibbon song a little before 9 am. When I point out the possible location 2 companions smile and say it is from the other side of the stream.  We go a little higher but are unable to see it. Do the voices in these forests echo?

The posts that we are to work on today are missing and we can only wait and augment our skill sets pertaining to patience. I do nothing for sometime and then write a little while Ja and Jo go off with binoculars. They return with a dead grey-headed canary flycatcher. The posts arrive and we sort them out in bunches of 5 and I also ask for Forest Department people to lift them rather than the fellow trotting a gun. This piece of machinery is incidentally precedes NT in the department. NT joined in 1988. The gun housed, as we discovered at Lomasu, a permanent resident – an insect which we were too stunned to bother about.

Some scamper later ~ 

One of our goals is also to submit recommendations to the Forest Department on setting up of the Wildlife Sanctuary headquarters and related factors. In our discussions I agree that compared to Bymari and Tokalo, Lomasu is a much better bet to set up the headquarters. It is nearest to boundary and benefits from water supply. The river could enable easy movement for the Forest Department staff and thus allow for monitoring movement of others. Communications by walk of 2 way radio should be enabled. Awareness as a process should be initiated towards Wildlife Act issues, presence of amazing species in Maraland and need to protect them. All this should be better planned than the current survey.

We start walking late and reach the next site early! It has been a slow going and I wonder when we will complete the task at this rate. I also recall what R A Lorrain and more pronouncedly Fanny Parkes had written of explorations in the interiors. I go ahead of the camp to put up post 16 and 17 with Ja and am amused by NT’s interest and enthusiasm levels in preparing his sleeping place; distance from fireplace and adequate leveling. By now, I understand, I am living and enjoying this adventure. The forests have allowed me to leave the worrying and judging parts of me behind.

As the dal got ready ~ 

I have been taking pictures of scats and pug-marks; will share them with those knowing more than me once I am back at Saiha. With the commotion that we are creating I wonder on the mammals we will be able to spot. Today, however, I click a picture of possibly the largest butterfly I have come across till date.

As I was back from the post 17 alone towards the camp number 3 which is also our post 15. While walking alone has always been an activity close to heart - here has been a catharsis! In some ways it is like the treks I used to take up in the Himalayas – what today seems long ago!  And I love this.

And the trees looked down on us ~ 

Burmese beer and whiskey find their way to the camp-site; of course we don’t have any vegetables and make do with dal and rice. This is ridiculous – to put it mildly. I wonder how these very fellows talk of liquor being harmful when they put on their church or youth club caps.

The camp site today is all of us sleeping in an uninterrupted file with fires on each site to us warm and wild banana leaves sleeping below us as also hanging above. Bird sounds are lesser by notches and I hear a cat in the dark of the night. Not knowing the languages also allows me space of my own. But today when few of them put on the fire to chat during the cold darkness I wished I could join in for a short time and see the survey through their lens.

As I get into the mosquito net the legs ache where stones have hurt them. There were 3 of us inside a mosquito net at camp 1 and 2 while here I am alone. I begin to write but a couple of mistakes and I know my priorities for the moment. I am off to sleep.