People and wildlife of Eastern Himalaya_My journey to some remote village_Batasia

[Samrat Sarkar]

I could hear the calls of a lot of birds from the nearby trees of the forests. I consulted with Mohan and made a plan to go for a trekking through Guras towards Singalila. I finished my supper early at night and slipped under a thick blanket in the bed and realized how cold the weather was.

As I woke up in the morning the morning sun was peeping through the pine forest and was drenching everything with red hues. The sky was crystal-clear. There is a small water reservoir made of concrete just in front of Mohan`s house. Water coming down from the uphills are channelized to the reservoir through a pipe to the reservoir continuously and the excess water is overflowing to go downwards. I was sitting there and sipping tea when I saw an extraordinary view of something. A flock of about twenty five to thirty Red Crossbills has come down to the reservoir to drink water and they were having a lot of fun being close to the water. I was wondering that to take some snaps of these Red Crossbills my friends visit the forests of Buxaduar and have to wait hours and sometimes days whereas so many of these birds now have arrived here to drink water and are now as close as 5 meters to me! Mohan informed me that they have been frequenting the reservoir since the last one year.

Red Crossbill