Thai Birds

You'll be very disappointed with this if you are expecting an insight into Thailand's seedy underbelly. All I will say on the subject is you'll not have to look very hard for it in any of the major tourist centres! No I am talking about the avian world, the winged creatures, real birds. Thailand is considered to be one of the best places in the world for watching birds and from October to April sees many migratory birds, including rareties, who like their human counterparts, like to stop off and take in the rays and have a bit of a party on their passage.

I am not a a birder by trade but my closest mate, Tony, is and when we meet up, usually in Scotland, we often go "doon the water", as they say, to Troon and check out the birds on the Firth of the Clyde; we have also done the same on the east coast in the Gullane/Aberlady area to the south of Edinburgh. Any golfers reading this blog will recognise, or rather, should recognise those names! Tony arrives here with telescopes at the end of this month and we are going to give it large so to speak.

At this point I need to acknowledge a professional birder called Nick Upton who runs the Thai Birding website. This site is a classic example of how effective the internet can be and it is thanks to this site that I have discovered the wealth of birds that can be spotted within about an hours drive from home. In fact to be honest I don't really need to leave home to spot brids: my house faces a line of trees and pylons behind which is a golf driving range; first thing in the morning hundreds of egret can be seen in the range grounds. On the trees there are brown shrike, kingfisher, sooty headed bulbuls, mynas, drongos, eaurasian house sparrows, red collared doves....

Even before you get to the recommended locations the range of birds that can be seen from your car is phenomenal......asian openbills, black kites, brahminy kites, Indian rollers, herons of all kinds, 4 varieties of kingfisher, pied fantails, green bee-eaters, coucals, black winged stint and on the list goes.

There are various salt pans near Petchaburi which are popular with migratory birds. This is shorebird territory and you can get out onto the flats of the gulf of Thailand and there are thousands of birds there but most are a distance away and can't really be seen close up. A telescope is needed and I have been restricted to some extent with glasses. So hurry up Tony! Close by is the Kaeng Krachan National park which extends to the Myanmar border and this is full of hornbills and other exotic birds. I'll take Tony there.

Near the salt pans is The Kings Project which is a sewage recycling unit with mangroves. This however provides the ultimate drive by birding experience. Luna and I sat there one Sunday afternoon in the car our mouths agog as we took in the wonders of a pied harrier, perched in the mangrove basking in the late afternoon sun. This fellow, well lassie actually, was resplendent, she looked as if she had stepped out of a Savile Row tailors. Everything about her was perfect, bright orange eyes with black irises and lurid green legs blending into the vertical striped belly. We knew we were looking at something quite magnificent and we were only 30 yards away! Unfortunately the camera batteries were flat so we were not able to photograph it but copious study of the guidebooks and a review of published bird lists for this area leave me in little doubt that it was a pied harrier.

So we have the binoculars out on a very regular basis and two of Luna's friends join us on our little trips. These really get us to some parts we would not otherwise reach so grateful thanks to Nick Upton. Boy do we have fun!

My two favourite golf courses, Dragon Hills and Royal Ratchaburi abound with birds....bee eaters, hoopoes, coucals, kingfisher, hawks, kites.... I played Royal yesterday and heard a woodpecker but could not spot it.

I have also learned that the greater Bangkok area has bird life like no other major conurbation courtesy of Philip Round's Birds of the Bangkok Area( White Lotus Press,2008, ISBN 978-974-480-109-8). This surely is one of the great birding books, an astonishing labour of love, brimming with carefully researched information and interesting comment and opinion.

You might be surprised to learn that Lumphini Park right in the centre of Bangkok periodically has some quite rare birds stopping by.

So for sure you can have a lot of fun with the birds in Thailand!