Phobjikha and the black-necked cranes

Phobjikha is unlike anywhere else in Bhutan. Cross the Pele La and the forest simply stops, opening into a wide U-shaped valley scoured flat by a glacier and now filled with marsh, potato fields and scattered farmhouses.

The birds

Black-necked cranes migrate from the Tibetan plateau in late October and stay until February or early March. There are only a few thousand in the world. Several hundred of them winter here, and their arrival is treated locally as an event rather than a curiosity.

The birds are said to circle Gangtey Goenpa three times on arrival and again on departure. Whether or not you take that literally, the monastery sits on a spur above the valley floor and the circling is real enough to have been noticed for centuries.

The valley waited until 2020 for reliable electricity. The delay was deliberate. Power lines were laid underground so as not to endanger the cranes.

What that decision says

Undergrounding cable in a remote Himalayan valley is expensive and difficult. Bhutan did it anyway, for a bird. It is the clearest single example of what conservation policy means here in practice rather than in principle.

Visiting

The Gangtey Nature Trail is an easy two-hour walk downhill from the monastery through villages and fields. The Black-Necked Crane Information Centre has scopes and is genuinely useful. Nights are cold. This is one of the higher places you will sleep in Bhutan.

When to come

For the cranes, November to February. Outside that window the valley is still worth a night for the landscape, which is unlike the rest of the country, and for the Black-Necked Crane Festival held each November.