We just returned from a quick camping trip to Kumaon. The weather was
persistently cloudy, and visibility so low that my camera stayed in its
bag, the birds stayed hidden in the forest, and my attention strayed to
the other creatures lurking around us.
Annelids
We camped on the crest of a ridge that separates two valleys, carrying
supplies up the hillside. In this season—so soon after the monsoon—the
thick, moist undergrowth was home to many friendly leeches. Friendly,
hungry leeches. Ammu saw a thin, thread-like one somersaulting up the
rock she was sitting on, and didn't know what it was; but I knew, and
started checking my socks obsessively.
I became quite attached to three or four leeches over the next couple of
days. Two of them drank their fill and disappeared without my ever being
aware of them, but I caught one that had dropped off to digest its meal
in my sleeping bag, and disturbed one that was drinking messily through
my thin cotton sock. The second one was larger, perhaps 4–5cm long and
shaped like a flower-vase with a long, thin, mobile neck and a bulging,
rounded bottom. It must not have fed enough—when I nudged it with my
sock, it immediately stood up straight, waving to and fro, trying to
reattach to whatever mammal it probably assumed had touched it.
I sprinkled salt on both, feeling vaguely guilty when they exploded in a
spectacular gush of (my) blood.
Plants
Leeches were not the only new friends we made in the undergrowth. I also
found a plant with pretty green catkins… covered with fine, translucent,
almost invisible thorns. When I brushed a slender branch out of my way,
I discovered the thorns, and that any contact with skin was sufficient
to cause an intense burning that took a long time to fade. Scratching,
I learned, was a very bad idea. The profusion of these plants along a
trail I wanted to follow soon convinced me to turn back, even though
my hands were the only skin that I was exposing to them.
On a previous visit to approximately the same area, I discovered another
interesting plant which has thorns sticking straight up from the surface
of the larger leaves in addition to the thorns on its stem and branches.
It had small spherical fruits—the ripe ones a bright lemon yellow, and
others mottled light and dark green in an attractive pattern somewhat
like a watermelon. I renewed my acquaintance with this plant too—but
not, thankfully, by sitting on it as I had done last year.
I also saw—from a respectful distance this time—a nice Thistle-shaped
plant covered everywhere with sharp and surprisingly stiff (I
couldn't resist checking) thorns, even its perfectly round seed-head.
I can't reliably identify these plants. The first must be related to the
Stinging Nettles Urtica sp., even though its leaves (palmate with
a serrated edge) didn't quite match textbook descriptions. But Stinging
Nettles are well-known in Kumaon, where they are called the Scorpion
herb (shrub?), and their boiled leaves are eaten as a vegetable.
Arthropods
Fittingly, however, arthropods comprised the most numerous and varied of
the creatures at and around camp. There were mosquitoes, of course, but
not so many as to be a real problem. There were small black-and-yellow
striped midges and big metallic-green flies (which distinguished
themselves mostly by not sucking my blood).
After the camping trip, we went to a KMVN tourist rest house to shower
and relax before heading home. It was off-season time, and nobody had
stayed in the cottages for a while. We could tell, because they were
crawling with spiders.
Uttarakhand hotels seem to vie with each other in providing the largest
possible spider for the price of a room. Shikhar Hotel in Almora has six
storeys (descending down the hillside from road level, so you have to go
up to the reception from your room, not down) with increasing prices,
and I could swear that the more expensive rooms have bigger spiders as
well as better TVs.
This cottage won the contest hands down. There were spiders everywhere.
Large and small, alive and dead, at floor level, on the walls, on the
ceiling, scuttling crazily around or sitting still, out in the open or
behind the mirror, inside the cupboard, in the curtains… everywhere.
They were all the same kind, but I don't know which species that is. The
largest were perhaps 13cm across, with prominent pedipalps, very spindly
black legs and body, and indistinct stripes on the abdomen.
Our adventures with the Arthropoda did not end there, however. When we
reached home, we found a 13cm centipede in the bathroom sink(!).