Richard Prior
Halfway up an Alp
I know what you mean Deb, as if they were designed by a committee !
22 May
After the short distances driven the previous day, today held a different prospect, a journey of 137kms from Vayk to the village of Tsapatagh on the eastern shore of Lake Sevan. Still, all the roads showed as red on our map and had the reassuring ‘M’ prefix, so what was there to worry about?:eek!: Just after leaving Vayk a Hoopoe crossed our bows and we realised that we’d gone a whole day without seeing one! We soon turned north up the M10, the only north-south major road through Armenia that doesn’t involve going through the Yerevan conurbation. As the road started to climb towards the Selim Pass (2410metres high) we spotted our first Blue Tit of the trip, but more exciting was a superb male Levant Sparrowhawk perched on the roadside wires, no doubt looking out for unwary lizards below. It was to prove to be our only totally rain-free day of the two weeks but conditions at the Col were not brilliant for birding, very windy and not surprisingly for the date no apparent migrants around apart from two weary Rosy Starlings that paused in some bushes for about 30 seconds before continuing southwards.
The Caravanserai just short of the pass is a must-see for anyone with even the slightest interest in history, to wander inside with a torch with nobody else around was a privilege and we felt transported back centuries to the days of the Silk Road and imagined all the merchants, their goods and animals all hunkered down safe inside as they passed the night, before continuing their epic journeys. The Crag Martins were happy to use ‘the facilities’ and were nesting just inside the only entrance with its inscription in Persian using Arabic letters. Armen, the local souvenir salesman chatted to us in French (as well as selling us honey, jam etc ‘made by Madame’) and seeing our interest in the martins proudly showed us a photo he’d taken on his mobile phone a few weeks before of a Bearded Vulture that had passed him within a few metres! Selim was my last chance of Radde’s Accentor as some birders have seen them there but my luck was out. The birds were typical of the Armenian uplands, Common Whitethroat, Skylark, Meadow Pipit, Water Pipit, Whinchat, Northern Wheatear, Cuckoo and the only raptor we saw was a Long-legged Buzzard. After a brisk (but fruitless) walk away from the summit in search of some wet areas I’d read about in trip reports we started the gradual descent towards Lake Sevan (which is at over 1900m remember so not a huge drop in altitude). A few kms later there was a (seasonal?) lake to our left, upon and around which could be seen at least a dozen pairs of Ruddy Shelduck, after seeing them in England, France and Switzerland these felt like the first ‘non-plastic’ ones I’d ever seen! A handful of White-winged Terns were dip feeding, Redshank and Coot were clearly breeding around the lake as were Stonechatsp and very smart Black-eared Wheatears (we saw both black-throated and white-throated males on our travels).
We paused for a picnic on the Lake Sevan shore and there saw Gadwall, Mallard, Pygmy Cormorant, Armenian and Black-headed Gulls, Common Terns, Great crested Grebes and Coot going about their business. In the reeds were Reed Warblers and our only Reed Bunting of the trip, Grey Heron and Little Egret in a tributary river bed. 101kms after leaving Vayk we turned off the M11 near Vardenis and headed up the M14 just 36kms from our hotel for the night. The first 6kms took us 30 minutes, the road, once properly surfaced had ‘seen better days’, I have never experienced anything like it for potholes and the whole of this first part was negotiated in first, and very occasionally second gear. Locals, clearly in the know, were speeding along in the fields on the other side of a dry river bed, but their ‘unofficial’ route then joined ours and the road became just bad instead of terrible for the next 30kms (ie. 2nd gear and occasionally third on this stretch:t
. Two and a half hours later we arrived at the hotel at Tsapatagh, very shaken up and me with aching arms from all the swerving and slaloming. We were mostly passing through open agricultural land, so the birds were typical of this habitat and all species we‘d seen already, the Woodlark were the first since Spitak however.
