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After leaving Big Almaty Lake, the site of our Ibisbill dip, we continued uphill to the Tien Shan Astronomical Observatory where lunch was distributed and everyone wandered off in ones and twos and small groups to eat and bird where they wanted for the next hour or so.  I wandered off with Thomas Griesohn-Pflieger, editor [...]

Big Almaty Lake, about thirty kilometers south of the city of Almaty, is a glacial-fed lake situated at just over 2,500 meters in the Tien Shan Mountains.  During the summer it reflects the three peaks that surround it but when we visited in May it was still largely frozen.  The river that feeds the lake, [...]

Seeing any bird with the word “Himalayan” in its name is going to be a thrill.  Ditto for any bird named with any variation of “Rubythroat.”  So seeing a bird that combines those two words, the Himalayan Rubythroat, is pretty amazing.  Seeing that bird well, singing repeatedly from exposed perches in decent light while you [...]

After the pre-breakfast birding whetted my appetite for some seriously good birds I couldn’t wait to get up into the the snow-capped Tien Shan Mountains that we could see from the grounds of the Hotel Altyn-Kargaly in Almaty.  The Tien Shan Mountains, which run east-west and straddle southeastern Kazakhstan, northwestern China, and pretty much all [...]