CURRENT ISSUE

SUBSCRIBE

CONTACT US

ADVERTISING

SEARCH

BACK ISSUES

CONTRIBUTORS'
GUIDELINES

THIS WEEK IN
CALIFORNIA WILD

Letter form the Field

Breathlessly Seeking Butterflies
A lepidopterist in Nepal

"People like yourself are good luck for Nepal," said Horry, finishing my pot of tea, rich with milk and sugar as it is always served here. Hunger and hope for a job kept bringing this young man to my hotel room every day since we first met at the Jumla airstrip. He was respectful and humble on the surface, but I could only guess what hid underneath. "I know every trail in the area. I am the very best guide for Jumla and Dolpa Districts," he went on, "and I’ll take you wherever you want to go for 200 rupees (3.5 U.S. dollars) a day."

Horry lived in a structure the size of a closet, with a clay floor, no windows, and a fire in the center. The only treasure he possessed was a book of references from people whom he had guided on trekking expeditions. He had not had any work for two years, as the few groups that come through Jumla normally bring their own guides and porters from Katmandu. Being of a low caste, he could not find a job with most high-caste employers in town.

I went to Nepal not for mountain peaks nor for ornate temples; not for the gurus nor for the relaxed drug laws. To me, Nepal is a land of butterflies. More than 600 species representing faunas of both Oriental and Palearctic regions are found in habitats ranging from lowland jungle to highland tundra, and all are packed into a 200-kilometer-wide strip of land. I was especially interested in the distribution and behavior of members of the Parnassius genus found here at high altitude.

In Jumla, I was to meet my trekking partner, an American conservation biologist and a passionate birder. Upon arriving, however, I learned that he was a week overdue after a 40-day hike in southwestern Nepal—long enough to think of a person in the past tense in the rest of the world. “In Nepal such a delay is nothing to worry about,” explained a local policeman, when I checked at the station. “Altitude and stomach sicknesses, or bad weather, often detain trekkers in highlands for much longer.” So, I settled in at the “Mountain Hotel,” two tiny rooms in a private home, bursting with four generations of a family.

My trekking partner finally arrived with three porters, who had come with him from Katmandu. For a small commission, Horry found us a fourth. His name was Mohon. A high-caste Hindu but very poor, he evinced both dignity and humility. We loaded up with food for two weeks. Spring is a hungry season in Nepal’s mountain communities, and our chances to purchase supplies would be slim. On May 20 we started toward Patrassi Himal, a mountain ridge to the east, 18,000 feet high at the lowest pass that, we were told, had been crossed by just one trekker—20 years earlier.

After two days’ of walking, the villages and villagers had a much more traditional appearance—wooden plows, homemade clothes, and no electricity. Every second person asked us for medicine; in most cases it was for treatment of worms or headaches, but we saw symptoms of tuberculosis, typhus, and various skin infections.

The villagers claimed that their ancestors used to cross the range to hunt, but that none of them ever had. Only at the last village before Himal, where my trekking partner tended some medical problems and we bought rice and flour, did the villagers grow more friendly. A young man approached us to say that he had been to the pass and that he was ready to take us there.

For the next three days, the trail followed a narrow river valley through an untouched forest of poplar, cherry, and birch trees and across wooden bridges, or rickety logs. At the end of each day’s walk, there were large caves where the porters slept, cooked a thick paste of corn flour and water, and baked flat cornbreads, raw inside and burned on the surface. The enormity of the portions they ate matched the loads they carried; up to 100 pounds of supplies were packed into bamboo baskets, held against their backs with shoulder and head straps. The skin on their hands and feet, grown tough from a life of hard work, was thick enough to take a boiling pot off the fire and to walk barefoot through the snow.

Above the tree line daytime thunderstorms and hail were followed every night by abundant snowfall. But the first few hours of sunlight melted the snow, exposing flowers in bloom and attendant swallowtail Parnassius butterflies. Though they overwinter as eggs, these seemingly fragile insects endure nightly freezing, but the glycerol in the lymph enables them to withstand sub-zero temperatures. Each morning, the sun revives them, and for a few hours they feed, mate, and lay eggs.

Everywhere I went, I collected live female butterflies, eggs, and caterpillars, and reared them en route. I found several Nepalese butterfly species whose life histories were previously unknown. Those from warmer lowland regions spent the frigid nights insulated in my sleeping bag.

As we approached the pass, the snow got deeper until it was waist-high each morning, and mushy by afternoon. We had to pound down the snow, and, by the time we reached the pass, it was late in the day and our wet clothes had begun to freeze. Next morning, we dressed in solidly frozen shoes and pants. During the descent, Mohon became partially snow-blind and was devastated by pain. My eyesight was little better so we came down together probing the snow and searching out slippery rocks: the blind leading the blind.

We passed many natural shrines, some built on large rocks topped with skulls of blue sheep and decorated with strips of cloth (once bearing prayer inscriptions that had long since faded). These signs marked the recent presence of man and, along with finding the pass to be lower than indicated on our map, made us doubt our position. After we consulted the GPS, the truth confirmed our worst fears. The guide had taken us over one of the nameless mountain ranges adjacent to Patrassi Himal! We were far off course.

We spent the next day crossing to the main Jumla-Dolpa trail. The trail oscillated between 7,000 and 12,000 feet, passing through villages populated by either Tibetans or high-caste Hindus. Very few foreigners come through these remote parts of Nepal. Children, stunned by our appearance, surrounded us while we stopped to buy rice and flower. Most of them wore torn clothes and were barefoot, showing incredible cold tolerance. Five- and six-year-old girls almost always had a younger sibling tied to their backs.

Overall, we encountered very few people on the trail except for some Tibetans who were bringing their yak herds from northern Dolpa. Yaks, I was told, are very shy of strangers. With this in mind, I approached a large, peacefully grazing bull in an attempt to take its photo. The beast immediately lowered its 20-inch-long horns and charged. Its top speed proved a tad below mine. After 50 yards the bull’s lust gave out, just before my legs did.

When we reached the Suli Gaad River, Mohon suddenly felt an acute stomach pain. The next day he was feeling much worse. We tried to carry him to Dunai, the local administrative center, but he died en route early the next morning. Should we have succeeded in reaching Dunai, however, it would have done little good, as the hospital had no staff. Mohon appeared to have suffered an intestinal rupture. The police investigation was brief, and for a time my trekking partner and I were regarded with some suspicion. After Mohon’s family chose not to travel from Jumla to claim the body, the other porters performed a funeral ceremony, and, lacking firewood for a cremation, we buried him in Dunai along with his meager possessions.

With somber spirits, the expedition pressed on along the Suli Gaad River to its headwaters at Phoksumdo, a large mountain lake. Surrounded at 12,000 feet by steep slopes covered with blooming thorny Caragana shrubs, and several Tibetan villages and monasteries, the deep blue lake is one of the most beautiful natural sites in Nepal. We stopped in the tiny village of Parela, which resembled a colony of giant communal insects. Houses and sheep stalls stood adjacent to each other, self-contained in one giant apartment-like structure terraced on a mountain slope. The total population of the village has probably remained unchanged for decades, as there is neither room for additional houses, nor fertile land to support more people.

In Phoksumdo, I bargained for a worn, wool hat and some rock-hard churpee (yak cheese), which tastes like sour cream and which one sucks like candy, careful to spit out the yak hairs. These purchases gave me a chance to see typical houses on the inside. The ground floor is used for cattle, whose rising body warmth was probably useful to the inhabitants living above during the winter months. A ladder carved from a log connects each floor, and leads to the main living area of the house. In the middle of the room a bright but smoky fire illuminates a family’s few possessions. Brass and steel pots and plates sit neatly on shelves along the walls, while bags of rice hang from the ceiling beams. Bamboo mats serve for beds. There is nothing excessive in the lives of these people.

From Phoksumdo we headed east in pursuit of a satyrine butterfly, Paralaza nepalica, that had been discovered here for the first time a decade ago. Above the village of Ringmo, we passed through its habitat of bunchgrass and waist-high Caragana bushes covered with yellow blooms. On the steep rocky slopes, while skeptically observed by grazing yaks, I chased these elusive butterflies and was fortunate to capture several.

The route went over two passes above 16,000 feet. At the first pass, we bumped into a herd of blue sheep. These gorgeous animals blended perfectly into the gray-brown surroundings and were relatively tame. We were 50 yards away before they seemed to notice us and slowly walked over the ridge, proudly carrying their enormous horns. The village of Do, rich in small and large shrines and in prayers engraved in the rocks, was poor on food. A few potatoes and some flour was all that we were able to buy. Even in late June, it was cold here above 12,000 feet, and rather depressing. I wondered what it was like in the winter for those without warm clothes or electricity, and with meager supplies.

The red and gray, steep slopes of northern Dolpa are infertile and practically uninhabited. Only Caragana shrubs grow here like colonies of mold on a crust of bread. In the seemingly lifeless habitat of the last pass, my trekking partner searched for birds, while I caught a very rare Parnassius butterfly, known from as far as Central Asia, but a new record for Nepal. The phantom shades produced by the dark wings of these smallest representatives of their genus allow them to sneak by. Running after butterflies in low-oxygen air makes the heart attempt to jump out of its cage, and only allowed me a single swing of the collecting net before I was gasping. Nearby, pierids, Colias ladakensis, recorded previously from the region of Mustang as “extremely rare,” seemed to be perfectly at home in its harsh habitats. Hundreds of these clouded yellow butterflies shot up and down the slope, their color matching the Caragana flowers that provide them with nectar.

We continued southeast through the Dhorpathan Hunting Reserve, its grasses smelling of sheep and goat urine. Enormous herds had been brought here from lower elevations to graze. The few men we met were searching the ground for the fungus gibonbhuti (summer grass, winter insect, in the local language). Cordyceps sinensis, the fungus, infests a moth’s caterpillar in the fall, and when the larva digs into the ground to pupate, the fungus kills it and sprouts anew with spore-bearing, fruiting bodies. These are gathered for medicinal purposes. A strong biostimulant taken for energy, dried gibonbhuti can fetch $600 per kilogram in Katmandu.

Two other unusual “crops” harvested here are nettles and marijuana. Both grow as weeds around the villages and are used to make ropes and clothes. Marijuana is also used to make oil and repel snakes and insects, when planted along fields.

The young nettle leaves, on the other hand, are eaten (our porters never missed a chance to add them to their soup).

Despite the poor fare, the misdirections, the cold, and, most of all, the loss of our porter, I look back on the expedition with warmth and nostalgia. And despite the changes that technology and tourism have brought, Nepal stands out as the most inspirational, spiritually and ethnically distinct of all the many countries I have visited. It is one of the few places where remnants of authentic, unchanged lifestyles still exist, preserved by their inaccessibility. This may not be for long, though. Outside influences are rapidly reaching the most remote areas of Nepal, and the new generation of this once-magic kingdom will probably choose to adopt the illusive values of modern societies over the familiarity of local traditions.

Andrei Sourakov is a research fellow at the California Academy of Sciences and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Fall 1999

Vol. 52:4