I have not been posting much on this website since this past summer. My Olympus camera broke down again. I need to find a camera that can take some rough handling as I like to cycle and hike with it to take wildlife photos.

Today I went for a hike with our guide Boris and my wife Nadia. We hiked in the Ugam-Chatkal National Park in an area called Sukok. A USAID project has developed it into a nature reserve and it is a nice protected area underneath Aukashka Mountain (3,100 meters). I will be focusing on spring wildflowers until I get a camera with a good zoom lens again.

The snow was melting during our hike and the first spring wildflowers of the season were peaking out through the snow. There were numerous Gymnospermium albertii along the trails. It is a common plant in rocky outcroppings of the former Soviet Central Asia, especially in the Chimgan National Park. The species is named after the son of a German botanist, Eduard August von Regel, who identified and name thousands of plants while leading the Imperial Botanical Garden of St. Petersburg from 1875-1892. It is a member of the Barberry family and there are 12 tuberous species in the Gymnospermium genus.

I also spotted a couple Crocus alatavicus, a member of the Lily family. This is also another bulb plant like the Barberry above. There are about 200 species of Crocus including the famous saffron. The genus has been known to humans for a long time the name Crocus, comes from the Aramic/Hebrew language. This Crocus blooms in the early spring and all parts of the plant wither away during the hot, dry summers, remaining underground.

Later in the afternoon, we stopped at the Institute of the Sun, a former USSR solar energy research center outside of Parkent, Uzbekistan. We climbed up the massive, 12-story solar mirror. While walking up the winding stairs, I saw this dead Alpine Swift (Tachymarptis melba). They are amazing birds that can live up to six months without landing, catching insects on the fly. They are migratory as the map below shows, Uzbekistan is on the edge of their range. This specimen must have just arrived as the snow is just starting to melt in the mountains. I am guessing it collided with the solar panel structure because of the wound on the head.