Expedition Dispatches
Satellite phone updates from the 1998 American Everest Expedition

Corfield

Ornithology on Everest
Tuesday, May 12, 1998 — Base Camp (17,500')

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Good Morning Mountain Zone, today is Monday, May 11th, 1998. This is Charles Corfield. One of the things which is very hard to photograph and capture around here is the sheer amount of bird life that comes up to base camp. On the way in, the first thing you really notice about the birds up here in Khumbu is, lower down, there is quite a lot of crows, all eking out a living. Then around Lobuche, you become aware of a rather curious game bird which the locals call Chombo. These are the size of a chicken, and I think anywhere else in Europe or America, they would have long since been shot to pieces and served up on dinner tables. However, fortunately, they are regarded as being sacred here, and so they go about their business unmolested, and indeed, they will come right up to you if you scatter biscuit crumbs out. They are quite tame.

Meanwhile back in base camp...
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(photo: Corfield)

Coming up to base camp and as base camp develops, a lot of the local birds figure out that it is good foraging territory, so we see up here a lot of birds called Chingmas, a little different from Chombo. These are a little larger than the English black bird, same color, black all over, yellow bills, and they tend to look around for kitchen scraps and everything and just make a pretty good living up here. They are also followed by the sparrows, inevitably, and the bird which looks something like a washed-out American Cardinal; it's this pinkish color, and they have started to show up the last week or so. So base camp is at 17,500 feet, so what happens higher up?

Well, I've seen at Camp I and Camp II Chombos and a lot of sparrows. As they get used to tents, they will start hopping inside looking for crumbs. What may well surprise you is even up at the South Col where wind is often just nuking, I've seen Chingmas touch down, forage and then take off on a ballistic trajectory into Tibet. I've no idea if they ever find their way back into Nepal, or if it is basically a one way ticket. Still, it is pretty remarkable when a bird is foraging in the tens of thousands of feet and will think nothing of flying up into the Western Cwm looking around and touching down at 26,000 feet and happily take off again and fly even higher.

Some people have reported seeing Chombo passing as high as even the summit of Mount Everest, so 29,000 feet. I have no idea, since I'm not a ornithologist, what the high altitude record for birds is as they migrate or go foraging, but it's pretty impressive to me that these animals are quite tolerant of the extreme altitudes where we humans are starting to think about using supplemental oxygen. So that's it on birds. This is Charles Corfield, Everest Base Camp.

— Charles Corfield, Expedition Science Manager

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