Phobjikha Valley is a flat-bottomed glacial valley at 3,000 metres in the Wangdue Phodrang district of central Bhutan, a wide bowl of marsh and dwarf bamboo ringed by pine forest, where most of the country's black-necked cranes winter, some 650 birds arriving from the Tibetan plateau in late October, and the valley buried its power lines underground so that the cranes would not fly into them. The cranes are watched from viewing points along the wetland as they work the marsh, probing the wet ground for the rhizomes of the dwarf bamboo with their long bills, black necks bright against the pale winter grass, and the cattle chewing across the marsh are not competing with the birds but keeping the bamboo short for them; Bhutanese tradition holds that the cranes circle the Gangtey monastery three times when they arrive and again when they leave in mid-February, and the valley holds a crane festival in November. The species was taken off the vulnerable list in 2020 as the world population passed 15,000, but the Bhutan flock is small and watched by the crane centre at the valley's edge.
Gangtey Goenpa stands on a spur above the valley floor, a monastery of the seventeenth century whose courtyard opens on a main hall walled with murals of Buddhas and protective deities in gold, red and deep blue on carved and painted timber, and almost none of the woodwork is original, since beetle larvae had eaten through the timber and the monastery was rebuilt from the inside out over eight years. The Gangtey nature trail drops from the monastery spur through pine forest and past a mani wall, then flattens out among farmhouses, wooden fences and grazing cattle on the valley floor, a walk of two hours that ends at the marsh with the cranes in the distance. The valley is three hours from Punakha over a pass and stays cold and quiet in winter. Phobjikha is a valley that went dark for its birds, and the cranes come back every year to it.