MeroDelivery Blog

Nepal is small on the map and enormous in birds: more than 880 species have been recorded between the Tarai and the high Himalaya. Of all of them, exactly one is found nowhere else. Not in India, not in Tibet, not in any zoo. The Spiny Babbler lives in Nepal, full stop.

It is not a showy bird. Thrush-sized, streaked brown, with a long tail it likes to hold up like a question mark. Look closely at its throat and breast and you will see where the name comes from: the feather shafts there are stiff and bare, and stand out like tiny spines. Most of the year it keeps to thick, thorny scrub on the mid-hills, where you hear it far more often than you see it.

Then spring comes. From March to June the males climb to the very top of a bush and sing, loud and clear, across the whole hillside. If you have walked the ridges around the Kathmandu Valley, in Shivapuri or above Godawari, or through the hills of the far west, you may have heard one without knowing that no one outside Nepal ever could.

Science nearly lost it. Brian Hodgson, the British resident in Kathmandu, described the bird in 1836 and gave it the name it still carries: nipalensis, of Nepal. After that, for more than a century, no one confirmed seeing one again. It took until 1948, when the American ornithologist Dillon Ripley went looking through the western hills and found it, alive and singing, exactly where it had always been. He later wrote a whole book about the search.

The babbler never needed to go anywhere. Much of what we ship is like that too: grown, ground, pickled or woven in those same hills, and hard to find outside them. Bringing it to your door in the States is the whole reason MeroDelivery exists.