Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part 3: 2013-2014

As mentioned previously I haven't been doing much in Thailand. The total for the last almost-a-month has been a short trip to Khao Yai, two visits to the Chatuchak Weekend Market, a visit to the Dusit Zoo, a morning birding at Rot Fai park, and a failed attempt to get to another local park. I am almost embarrassed. It is like I am letting down the whole birding-mammaling-adventuring side. I am heading off to Assam in a few days time, so I made an attempt today to actually get out and find some birds. The spot I was aiming for was the Muang Boran fish ponds which are just south of main Bangkok (I think they are actually still in Bangkok – it's hard to tell where the city ends).

I had two sets of directions to get to the fish ponds. The first was from Nick Upton's awesome website, but his directions start from the side of the road. See here Birdwatching in Thailand; Muang Boran Fish Ponds, Samut Prakarn. for more particulars, but basically it says the site is near Muang Boran (the Ancient City) and you take a motorbike taxi from beside the footbridge, which is all well and good but it doesn't say which footbridge – there are only about a dozen of them! So I found the following blog by another birder (Redgannet: Muang Boran Fish Ponds, Bangkok, Feb2013) which makes it more specific – from the entrance bridge to the Ancient City (now called Ancient Siam by the way) you continue on along the motorway for about 500 metres to where there is a pedestrian overpass (not the one directly after the Ancient City bridge but the next one) and the bridge next to that is the one you want – and it is an actual vehicle bridge I discovered when I got there, not just a footbridge. I like blogs and websites that are very specific because it makes it so much easier, and that's why I tend to put so much possibly-irrelevant information in my posts, just in case someone is googling to find out something specific and finds my writings useful. And of course with the way I like to travel I make loads of mistakes (on purpose.....) so that I can help others not make those mistakes!

So, anyway, I took RedGannet's advice and rather than taking a taxi all the way from central Bangkok I rode the skytrain to the southernmost station of Bearing and got a taxi from there. Muang Boran is only about 14km or so from the Bearing station so it also cuts down on your taxi fare. It will be getting even easier and cheaper too, because there is currently an extension being built to the skytrain system, running from Bearing almost all the way to Muang Boran! I would guess at it being completed by next year, perhaps even late this year. The driver took me straight to Muang Boran no problem (I had written the name down in Thai in my notebook) and I got him to drop me off at the overpass further up the road where I got a motorbike taxi. I had memorised the directions, and also written it down from both websites, but I still managed to get turned around. Nick's site has a little map – over the bridge, turn left directly after the apartments (my extra note: the apartments are green and the road you take to the left has an archway over it), then follow that road round to a little village and the next motorbike taxi stand – but neither set of instructions is particularly clear about where to go once you hit the village if you can't speak to the driver. We stopped by some women and I mimed looking for birds using my binoculars and showing them my bird book – after all, the only foreigners ever to come through this village are birders so they should know where I'm going. They sure did know, but it wasn't this place I wanted, it was somewhere “over that way” (pointing) and they told my driver where to take me. Off we went again, back to the main road, and I'm thinking despite the directions fitting it must actually be the next bridge I was supposed to take – but instead we ended up at Bang Poo which is another birding site just up the road. I hadn't been intending to go here because it is primarily a wader site and I don't have a scope, and it was high tide so apart for hundreds of brown-headed gulls and whiskered terns (and some plain-backed sparrows on the verge) there wasn't a lot visible. If I had bothered to pay attention to the details of Nick's Bang Poo page I would have seen that at high tide the waders are in some pools just by the entrance road but I hadn't and instead got the driver to take me all the way back to where we started, and back to the village. This time we got lucky and found a taxi driver there who did know exactly the way when I showed him the binoculars and bird book. I can't give any specific directions myself unfortunately, and there's lots of little streets in the village.

The fish ponds are a mix of open ponds (shallow and deep), reedbeds, and dry fields. Some of them look like rice fields rather than fish ponds. There's a main dirt track and then various foot-tracks on the bunds around the ponds, so lots of places to watch birds from. Also there are lots of dogs. Lots of dogs! There are little huts dotted about the place and all of them have between one and five or more dogs, all of which are very barky indeed. None of them seemed to be bitey to go along with the barking, but whenever I've got a pack of five dogs coming onto the path, all looking very nasty, I prefer not to tempt them! Nick Upton says on his site that 70 or 80 bird species can be got in a day here. I got just under 50 but amongst them were both the species I really wanted to see here so that was all good (bronze-winged jacana and white pigmy goose, with bonus watercocks). Of course there were a lot that went unidentified because I didn't get to see them well enough or because they were warblers! I'm pretty sure I saw a couple of ruddy-breasted crakes flushing up from the reeds but they weren't well enough seen, and there were lots of little crakes flushing from beside one bund which I think must have been Baillon's crakes but again I couldn't be certain. Most of the species I have already seen this year but I got a lot of new species for my Thailand list.

The first pond, to your right when on the main dirt track, is pretty large and has loads of vegetation. There were many barn swallows and whiskered terns hawking for insects here, but I only saw one definite white-winged black tern all morning. Lots of intermediate and great egrets as well as purple herons and unidentifiable pond herons, little grebes, common moorhens, Indian and little cormorants, lesser whistling ducks, and pheasant-tailed jacanas. I was really happy to see pheasant-tailed jacanas for the first time at Lake Inle in Burma and here they were even more common, but even better were the bronze-winged jacanas which I now think are even nicer. Both species were very abundant. Also in this first pond was the other species I particularly wanted to see, the white pigmy goose, which is a dainty little goosey-looking duck. I got a glimpse of what must have been a watercock, another bird I wanted to see, but I had to wait a bit longer to get a proper view later in the morning.

On the other side of the track is a narrow water-filled ditch and beyond that more ponds. In those were cattle egrets, a couple of black-winged stilts, and I got a short view of a flying cinnamon bittern (which actually is the colour of cinnamon). There were lots of bitterns around this morning: I saw several cinnamon bitterns and even more yellow bitterns. In the trees and reeds here and elsewhere were common ioras, golden weavers, black-headed munias, pied fantails, koels, zebra doves, pied starlings, zitting cisticolas, striated grass warblers, Oriental reed warblers, and loads of plain and yellow-bellied prinias. In ponds further along were flocks of black-winged stilts and cattle egrets. I saw one marsh sandpiper but there were a lot of other waders too far away to tell what they were through the binoculars. Grey-headed lapwings and white-browed crakes seemed really common too.

So, a good morning for me. I like the ones where I see lots of birds and nothing goes too wrong!! Maybe I should go birding more often.....

 

that's all good then. I was actually getting a bit worried because you are on Zoochat all the time but then just seemingly disappeared without notice.

 

I actually didn't even take my camera (I wanted to keep things light), but yes with your zoom you should be able to get very good photos, even of the more sneaky things like white-browed crakes. The jacanas, herons, many of the passerines (weavers, reed warblers, etc) should all be fairly obliging. Obviously it just depends on where the birds are on the day, whether they are at the backs of the ponds or closer. Some of the areas are open, but in parts there are reed-belts and little fences and things which you could use for cover to sneak up on birds. It's a big area and very hot, so take lots of water.

If you look at Nick Upton's website here Thailand Bird Watching Locations Map there is information and directions to bird sites all over Thailand.

 

*ignore mode activated*

 

And now I'm in India. Kolkata to be precise. There was a little drama when I was trying to check in at the airport in Bangkok and for a while I thought I wasn't going to make it. New Zealanders and a few other nationalities can get a one month visa on arrival for India which does away with the need to get one in advance like most people have to. When I was checking in at the Air Asia counter the man there starts flicking through my passport and then says “do you have an Indian visa?”. I say no because New Zealanders get a visa on arrival, and he says no I need a visa in my passport. I said again that we get a visa on arrival and he looks up on his computer where it says New Zealanders “require a visa” for India, and tells me I need one in my passport. I broke a bit of a sweat then, thinking “have they gone and changed the visa rules just recently and I didn't pick up on it?”. He goes away to check with someone, then comes back and says I need a visa and a return ticket. I say I have a return ticket, with Thai Airways, and show him the e-ticket which I fortunately had already printed out. He goes away again with all my bits of paper, and then comes back and says I need a hotel reservation for Kolkata, which I didn't have because I was planning on just heading to Sudder Street and seeing what I could find (Sudder Street is the backpacker place which has the cheapest rooms, and which is fairly close to the Alipore Zoo). Sorry, can't let you on the flight without hotel reservations he says. I can go book somewhere, print out the reservation, and then check in – but I need to be back before the check-in counter closes. What about the visa, I ask, have you sorted out what the deal is with that? Oh yes, you get a visa on arrival but you need to have the hotel booked. He directed me to an internet cafe in a hotel opposite the airport and I just booked the least expensive place on Hostelworld. There was only a choice of three, none of which were on Sudder Street and none of which were particularly cheap, and the one I booked did not have good reviews! And that is how I ended up in the Travel Inn Kolkata, aptly situated in a street named Lower Range!

The flight got into Kolkata at just after midnight because the airlines which offer cheap flights like to punish people for taking cheap flights. I wasn't sure how the visa on arrival was going to go at the Indian end but it was easy as pie, the only minor issue being that I knew the fee was US$60 and so I had specifically got some Baht changed into US$60 for that purpose but it turned out that the office at the airport wouldn't accept US dollars so I had to pay in rupees anyway. Also I didn't have a passport photo with me for the application; the officer made head-shaking tut-tut-tut noises and then photocopied my passport and used the picture from that. There was a pile of other applications on the desk which had already been processed and apart for one they all had photocopied pictures as well. I just slept in the airport for the first night to save money, and then at 6am took a taxi to the Travel Inn which, although it looks like an abominable slum from the outside is actually perfectly serviceable inside. The taxis in Kolkata are yellow cabs, which just say “India” (in a first for me, the back seat of the taxi was swirling with mosquitoes!). The city as a whole, from what I have seen, is “Indian”. It is like a southeast Asian city but there's something different, I can't quite place it but it looks and feels different somehow. It is certainly a lot more, er, “run down” than any other Asian city I've been in!

Soon I go to the Alipore Zoo.

 

I have now been to my first Indian zoo and first Indian aquarium, the Alipore Zoo and the aquarium on the other side of the road from the zoo. It turned out, once I had looked at google maps, that where I am staying is actually a bit closer to the zoo than Sudder Street is. It took me about forty minutes to walk there, during which time I discovered that India doesn't believe in labelling streets so you can find your way around. However I saw a five-striped palm squirrel along the way, a species I have seen in Western Australia but never on its home ground. At the zoo I found huge numbers of Indian flying foxes at roost as well as quite a lot of birds. Most I had seen already this trip (and this year), but the jungle babblers and Indian pond herons were both lifers.

Zoo discussion here: http://www.zoochat.com/254/alipore-zoo-visit-15-feb-2014-a-355860/#post749096

 

I was looking at your thread right after you posted it and was wondering how to do by best-per-country. I could just list all I've been to in order I suppose, but Bukkitinggi would be well below Medan.

Peter Dickinson doesn't post any more, but he has seen waaay more Asian zoos than me. In fact I daresay devilfish has seen way more also, because he crammed a lot into his trip! Most of my trips are taken up with looking for wild animals so I haven't *really* been to lot of Asian zoos.

 

The Botanical Gardens in Kolkata were on the bird-watching cards this morning. First I had to get a taxi. The first driver wanted 500 rupees to take me there (twice what the taxi fare from the airport was!) and when I said to use the meter he refused. So I tried a different taxi who also refused to turn on the meter and said it would be 250 rupees. You know that if you're being quoted a price and the request to use the meter is refused then you are being ripped off, so being the contrary person that I am, I didn't take any taxi from there at all. Instead I put off the Gardens for the moment and walked to Sudder Street which took about an hour. I quite like the Travel Inn where I have been staying the last two days – the room is clean and the staff are friendly and helpful – but it is situated in an extremely inconvenient location with no public transport anywhere nearby and no food outlets. Sudder Street is just near the subways and has loads of little restaurants so when I return to Kolkata I am going to stay there. I got some breakfast, then found a guesthouse which didn't have as nice a room as the Travel Inn but it was less than half the price, so that's where I will stay later. From Sudder Street I then got a taxi to the Botanical Gardens which cost 140 rupees.

The Gardens have a 100 rupee entry fee plus 20 rupees for cameras. They are very nice gardens, but they would have been even nicer if it hadn't been raining solidly all morning (so no photos were taken apart for some quick shots of the giant banyan tree). Also there is a lot of work going on in the grounds with diggers and almost every road was just a thick wadge of mud, the kind of mud which sticks to your shoes and then more mud sticks to that mud, and then more mud sticks to that mud, and you end up with shoes weighing three times what you started out in. Despite the rain I had fun with the birds and saw 33 species in total. I was also looking out for squirrels (both five-striped and three-striped palm squirrels are found in the Gardens) but I saw zero squirrels. Instead I saw a small Asian mongoose (that's a Small Asian Mongoose to avoid name-confusion!) which, like the five-striped palm squirrel yesterday, I have seen previously in an introduced location (Fiji) but this was the first time in its native range.

The Gardens are full of birds. I'd like to get back there when it isn't raining because I reckon I would see a lot more than I did. Many are ones you can see everywhere (common mynahs, jungle mynahs, red-vented bulbuls, that sort of thing) but I was surprised to find lots of bronze-winged jacanas on just about every bit of water here, along with the expected white-breasted waterhens, common moorhens, cattle egrets, pond herons, and common and white-throated kngfishers. There was even a common sandpiper by one ditch. Up in the trees were green bee-eaters, black-hooded orioles, verditer flycatchers and lesser goldenback woodpeckers. On the way to the giant banyan tree I saw some Indian ringneck parakeets. These have been introduced to several parts of the world (including the UK) but I haven't seen any of those ones so the first ones I got to see in the wild were right here in India. Later I saw some moustached parakeets which are related but much more colourful. The giant banyan tree was amazing! It is in the Guiness Book of Records it is so big (it covers an area of 3.9 acres and has a circumferance of over 450 metres). Banyans are a type of fig which send roots down from their branches to the ground, where they take hold and grow into new trunks and gradually spread outwards. The one here looks like a forest of trees because you are literally surrounded by trunks (it has 3618 prop-roots!), but they are all one tree. The original centre trunk no longer exists though, having been removed in 1925 after it was infected with fungus following some storm damage. I could hear koels up in the canopy of the giant banyan. I thought I saw one but when I got the binoculars on it, it turned out to be a rufous treepie (which is actually better than a koel). Then I saw some more birds in another part of the tree, and a couple of these were koels. The others were yellow-footed green pigeons. These are real bullies! There were quite a lot of coppersmith barbets up there too and whenever one landed a pigeon would come crashing towards it to scare it off, and then sit there looking very pleased with itself; then another coppersmith would land nearby and the pigeon would go after that one too. Coppersmiths are just wee birds too. It's like a sheep chasing off rabbits for no reason. As an aside, the reason coppersmiths are so called is because their call is this really monotonous “poop poop poop” which goes on all day long and sounds exactly like someone beating a little hammer on a copper pot.

First thing tomorrow morning I fly up to Guwahati in Assam, and go straight to Kaziranga National Park.