Cherrapunjee Abode Of The Cloud

 

February 2004: We zig-zagged up the narrow, 55-km.-long Shillong-Cherrapunjee road en route to the abode of the clouds - the famous Cherrapunjee. A male Plumbeous Water Redstart Rhyacornis fuliginosus, flitting from stone to stone in a nearby stream, was a promise of things to come. Our journey had been an informative one so far, with Suzie, our beautiful Khasi co-passenger, telling us about Cherrapunjee, or Shora as it is locally known and its people. No doubt she mistook us for tourists, though we were in fact here to carry out a pilot survey of frogs in and around Cherrapunjee, part of a larger survey of the entire northeast.

As we approached Shora, the weather turned cloudy. Pine trees were gradually replaced by mixed evergreen forests and at hairpin bends we could look down at deep forest-choked gorges. Suddenly near Mawphlang, 19 km. from Shora, two Mountain Bamboo Partridges Bambusicola fytchii (a breeding pair? It was the right season!), ran across the road. These rare, shy birds come out to feed at dawn and dusk and are confined to the northeast hills and probably the Chittagong Hill Tracts
of Bangladesh.

Cherrapunjee is divided into Upper and Lower Shora. Upper Shora is mainly a crowded market place, whereas Lower Shora is more spacious and has government offices, the police station and the Circuit House. Lower Shora was established comparatively recently. After looking unsuccessfully for accommodation in Upper Shora, we made our way to the Circuit House at Lower Shora on foot, walking down a set of rock-cut stairs, surrounded by mist.

An artistic people

The Khasis are an artistic people, with a keen sense of decoration. Every household had beautiful flowering plants in the verandah. Walking through the town, we spotted two bamboo cages and, upon examining them were surprised to see they contained Flavescent Bulbuls Pycnototus flavescens, a species we had seen for the first time. This bulbul is only found in the northeastern hills, where it forages in bushes and trees. The Khasis call it ‘Diphong', which is probably a common name for all bulbuls. Later we did a preliminary survey around the township and found that several houses had one to two birdcages. Black Bulbul Hypsipetes leucocephalus, Ashy Bulbul Hemixos flavala and Orange-bellied Leafbird Chloropsis hardwickii (locally called ‘Jalyeit') were kept as cage birds. The last was common and used as a decoy (‘Shimpa') to catch other birds, as it mimics a variety of birdcalls. Keeping birds is a family tradition, and Khasis occasionally go bird trapping with sticks. Sometimes as many as 20 birds a day are trapped, either for sale or for the pot. Good care is taken of pet birds, however, which are kept in the verandah for ‘aesthetic pleasure'.

The old Circuit House was located atop a hill and afforded a panoramic view. After dumping our bags, we started our frog search the same evening, at the perennial streams crisscrossing the undulating plateau. With daylight fast fading, frogs had already started calling. Following a call, we caught a tree frog from some nearby shrubs. It was brilliantly coloured, upper side green and underside yellow, a new frog to us, though it was later identified as Rhacophorus bipunctatus. Finding frogs inside bushes was tough at first, but we soon got the hang of it.

After a while our specially assigned two-man police escort waned and we headed back to the Circuit House, releasing the guards. By now the entire area was enveloped in a thick fog that had risen from the valley. After a rejuvenating hot dinner, we resumed our work and carried on till 11 pm. The weather was chilly, but there was no rain. Though we did not rest for a single minute that day, the excitement of our pursuit blinded us to our fatigue. The first night, we restricted our search to human habitations, on hedges and in small puddles. We caught many Rhacophorids and also saw many foam nests built by frogs that had just mated.

Sacred groves

Despite a steady drizzle the next morning, we decided to explore an interesting looking hill we had seen the previous day. It looked like a typical shola forest in the Western Ghats. The top and sides of the hill were covered with short grasses and there was no sign of burning. The depression between two adjacent hills was choked with thick forest - slender, short, thick-canopied trees. We found out that the Khasis use hilltops as graveyards and this whole area is a sacred grove. The forest looked promising from an amphibian point of view and we resolved to return after nightfall.

From the summit of the hill we scanned the beautiful Cherrapunjee plateau, where we sat on the grass and spent a pleasant hour birdwatching. There were some restless warblers that we were unable to identify, what with their quick darting in and out of the forest margins. We did however identify the Grey-hooded Warbler Seicercus xanthoschistos and the Assam Black-throated Hill Warbler Prinia atrogularis.

The Hill Warbler (or the Hill Prinia as Grimmett prefers to call it) was markedly different from the Assam Brown Hill Warbler Prinia criniger in that it has a white supercilium. It appeared to be the subspecies khasiana in non-breeding plumage, which occurs east and south of the Brahmaputra river, and has rufous-brown upperparts. It called from the branch of a tree, a high pitched tsee-tsee and tweete-tweete, restlessly swooping down into the grass. This long-tailed bird was also, as Sálim Ali described it “twitching its tail up and down, occasionally vibrating it up and down very rapidly for a moment."

 

In the afternoon we went to the nearby Thangakarang Park, from where we could see the panoramic Khoramah falls, completely surrounded by green forest. The bottom of the Khoramah falls seemed to be the ideal place to look for frogs - amidst the damp and partially submerged rocks. Though it looked tough, we were sure that there must a way to reach the floor of the gorge. We tried two different routes but were forced to turn back. Our last option was the Nahkalikai falls.

That evening, we returned to the ‘shola forest hillock.' It was a cold, cloudy, dark night, and we had some difficulty finding our way with the limited beam of our flashlights. We climbed past the graves, entered the darker forest and followed one of the streams up towards its source. Silence enveloped us like a shroud, except for the frog calls all around us. The calls were different from those we had heard last night, and their authors were certainly very wary - they would stop calling as soon as the torchlight came anywhere close to them! After several minutes of vigorous searching, we caught our first amphibian.

It was a species we had not seen yet, a tiny creature, hardly 20 mm. in length, but emitting a deafeningly loud ttak- ttak! The frog, Philautus, probably Philautus shillongensis, was perched on a broad leaf of a shrub near the stream. Once we saw the nature of its microhabitat, it became easier to catch more of the same species. We found the population of P. shillongensis to be exceptionally dense here.

Suddenly a different call attracted us. After a long search we found another frog, probably also a species of Philautus, on a tree trunk a little distance from a stream. A sudden heavy downpour forced us to return at 10 pm. Good news awaited us - one of the frogs we had caught the previous night had laid eggs inside the polythene bag!

Forced to stay indoors due to stormy weather the next morning, we studied the morphology of the frogs we had collected, one of the ‘slippery customers' escaping in the process. Finally, out of sheer boredom, we decided to brave the elements and set off to Upper Shora by a new route. We soon realised what we had been missing by remaining indoors... we were in a dreamland! The rain had lessened considerably and soon stopped. Just on the edge of the road was a deep gorge, far off were waves of green hills, and silver clouds floated everywhere. There was a glimpse of a distant fall and a village at the bottom of the 300 m. deep gorge!

After lunch in Upper Shora, we set off for the Nahkalikai falls. We thoroughly enjoyed the tiring walk through the mist, droplets of water gathering on our hair like pearls! The hillocks around us were covered with short grass and the route was calm and quiet, except for partridge calls. Not a single person passed us by.

 

Five kilometres from Upper Shora was the viewing-point for the Nahkalikai falls. Compared to the route we had come along, the viewing area was positively over-populated - two tea stalls and a house. A few people gathered around us as we sat sipping our tea. They found our mission amusing, but to our excitement, they revealed that there was a way to reach the bottom of the falls. With the help of a tea stall owner, we managed to find a local guide to accompany us that night.

In the evening, we returned by taxi, which was difficult to get as nobody wanted to take a bunch of strangers to visit the waterfalls at night! Lukason Kaar, our guide, was a shikari and sometimes would accompany adventurous tourists, but he had never tried to climb down the deep gorge at night. He led us along a narrow route that he normally used in the day. We descended carefully; glad we had brought torches, for the night was pitch dark. It was not raining, but we fell frequently on the slippery hillside. Kaar's agility on the slippery hillside was astounding - we on the other hand, had to cling on to bushes or trees for dear life!

We crossed a small waterfall, but saw nothing until Kaar spotted a frog (jakait in Khasi) at a bigger fall. The frog clung to a rock over which the water gushed. Kaar, who was rapidly turning out to be as valuable as a goldmine, nonchalantly leaned on a rock, put the torch in his mouth and caught the frog by hand. We stood on a big rock surrounded by flowing water. We shone the torch above… darkness. Over the edge of the rock and below us…  still more darkness, as far as the light reached! Confused, we asked Kaar which way to go and to our shock he signalled for us to follow the falls down vertically! It was a spine chilling experience, but we followed his lead… very carefully.

After descending thus for several metres, we found a way to cross the falls horizontally. After a few minutes of relatively easy walking, we reached another waterfall, where we caught more frogs - all new to us. As if we were not sufficiently shamed by Kaar's superior athleticism, he put the torch in his mouth again and rapidly climbed up a four metre, steep, wet and slippery rock to catch a frog!

 

Suddenly we spotted a green snake coiled in the grass on the hillside just above our heads. We brought it down with the help of a stick and realised that it was a poisonous green pit viper Trimeresurus stegnegeri. We were more careful after that! We estimated that we were about 300 m. below the top of the plateau. We continued along the ‘trail', which at one point narrowed to less than a metre, the smooth rock wall on one side and the deep gorge on the other. On the way we collected three unknown lizards, which we later identified as Khasi Hills bent-toed gecko Cyrtodactylus khasiensis.

It was already 9 pm. and we had not yet reached the main waterfall, though the roar was much louder now. After much discussion, we decided to return as the route only got tougher from here. Besides, we had already collected a sizeable number of frogs.

Reaching the plateau, we flopped down on the road. After showing our appreciation for Kaar's help with both words and money, we set off for the Circuit House. As if it had paused just for us, the rain started belting down again, and we were thoroughly drenched by the time we reached; but we couldn't care less.

On arrival, we found a very worried caretaker, who had even reported our absence to the police station! Also awaiting us was the frog we had lost in the morning, perched on a shelf, so like a tree frog! It was midnight when we went to bed.

The next morning dawned bright and clear, and we couldn't help thinking… had it all been a dream?

by Hillaljyoti Singha and M. Firoz Ahmed, Sanctuary Asia, Vol XXIV No. 1, February 2004