[This is my last post about our Mongolian trip. After this, back to Lovell, Maine.]
Despite what I have shown you so far, there are places in Mongolia with trees. An hour or so north of Ulaanbaatar, there is a real forest, the southern edge of the taiga that stretches north to Siberia. Called Terelj, the parts closest to the capital have become a major tourist destination, and we only reached a tiny wild corner of it just as the hotels were giving way to forest. It was fall, so the colors were lovely:
and we saw a handsome bird called a Northern Nutcracker, Nucifraga caryocatactes:
eating larch cones:
and hiding from us:
These birds are specialized nut-eaters; their tongue has a “lingual nail,” a long keratin growth that helps to lever up and shell seeds.
The only other woodlands we had seen were an odd little fragment near Chamdani in the Altai. Remember the Altai:
and then imagine how startling it was to encounter this: a wetland threaded with rivulets, dotted with small birches, and grazed into grassy moguls.
Small songbirds loved this place:
But my enduring memories of Mongolia will still be those wide open spaces. I end my series of Mongolian posts with this poem by the famous modern Mongolian poet Dashdorj Natsagdorj, who says it better than I can; it is quite long, so rather than pasting it , here is a link:
https://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1117&context=sfh
PS The poet had a very interesting life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashdorjiin_Natsagdorj
PPS The Nature Conservancy has a huge project helping Mongolia preserve its wild grasslands : read here:
https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/mongolias-conservation-horizon/
Eyes on the Wild 