A Few Days Away

With the New Year celebrations finally over and with the start of a new school term in sight we had a very pleasant few days in Ban Pu Noi, aka Dolphin Bay, about 20 kms south of Pranburi. We stayed at Blue Beach Resort and I am glad we are not in the tourism business. I think our hosts had been reasonably busy in March/April but we were the only guests there for the three days we stayed and that must be depressing. The owners are genuinely decent people and if they can weather the storm they may do well with this place. We were comfortable, slept well, ate well and had a great time.

I have a pile of new species to report: Malaysian plover on the beach at Ban Pu Noi, very amusing and droll as they scurry about; on the rocks on the main island opposite the beach we spotted a pacific reef egret, unmistakeable due to its very obvious egret shape, but confusing as it is dark grey.

On Tuesday we went into Tesco's in Pranburi to stock up on insect repellent and things we had forgotten and made a detour to the Pranburi Forest Park and I would recommend this for birds. Not the park proper but if you follow the signs from Pranburi (as opposed to Hua Hin) for the forest park you will come to a dirt road, as you get near to the sea, on the left which has a wooden sign in Thai. We drove down that road and from it we saw quite a few species some of which I have not been able to recognise but we did see two new species: green peacock with wonderful trains, really awesome and in some respects the even more impressive and unmistakeabke tail of the asian paradise-flycatcher. You can hear the peacocks' calls and they sound almost like cats. In addition we spotted some coucals and green-billed malkohas. Today we stopped on our way back and there was a black shouldered kite hovering and we saw a very elegant white-throated kingfisher sunning himself. The peacocks could be heard but not seen today!

Yesterday we had a trip to Sam Roi Yod National Park and the highlight was seeing a pair of pied kingfishers perched on posts in the freshwater marsh. I come form a country which has one species of kingfisher, there are 42 species recorded in Asia as a whole, and 16 in Thailand. For good measure later in the day in the main park we saw a common kingfisher, the same species that can be found in the UK, and I can assure you from observing it the last word you would use to describe it is "common"! Once more my tools did the work for me.

I was actually quite disappointed by the marsh initially as some locals had taken over two of the three salas that are connected by a walkway leading out into the marsh and they had radios blaring and noisy children and dogs! Through the binoculars I thought perhaps there was a tern on the post but once I got the scope on it the kingfisher emerged in contrasting black and white. Luna panned a bit and came up with a second pied kingfisher on the next post.

A bit later we became aware of a new species bee-eater, the chestnut-headed bee-eater, who lacks the tail prongs but in most other respects could be taken as the blue tailed bee-eater.

Today on our way back we stopped off in the Laem Pak Bia area near Petchaburi. There were some isolated shorebirds in and around the deserted building, but I am not going to guess other than to say there was either a godwit or a dowitcher but it went before I could get the big fellow onto it and there was a very light headed greenshank sort of bird that had me thinking it was a Nordmann's Greenshank but I couldn't in all conscience state that it was as a certainty! (The more I have researched the less likely this is!) As I have said before there is a lot of work to do on shorebirds!

I am completely certain that there were great cormorants in the saltpans to the northwest of the deserted buildings; one huge fellow who was actually standing as if he were a goose, and in fact when I scoped the area I was expecting to see ruddy shelduck! He had the size and the fairer markings under his chin to leave me certain he was a great cormorant.

Into the Kings Project further north we added another species of kingfisher to our collection for this trip, this time the collared kingfisher. Once more a darker feathered bird had me thinking as I could not place this time a heron look alike; the book told me it was a little heron, another new species. Luna then spotted a great egret with its distinctive red legs and bushy back plumes, another new species. We then had a bit of a feast spotting greater painted-snipe, both male and female, yet another new species and ruddy breasted crake a further new species.

What a fantastic trip. The only downer is I have lost my notebook! Saturday we are driving south to Krabi and I am really looking forward to a bumper crop of new species and interesting sightings.