Doucs And Dong: Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part four (2015)

oh, really complex question. In every country there are people and organisations working to save the ecosystems, the species, the environment. But they are seriously in the minority.

For most people in those countries, the sooner the forests are converted into cities and farms the better. Then the country will be modern and civilised.

Overall, I would say no, there is zero hope for almost anywhere in Asia. At best there will be little pockets of forest or grassland with remnant populations of animals marooned inside. You can already see this in Sabah and Vietnam in particular.

For wildlife-travellers the world is at a bit of a crossroads. It is easier than ever to get to distant places to see wildlife, but it is at a tipping point where it won't be long before all that wildlife is gone. If it was earlier in history many places I go would be fairly inaccessible, a bit later in the future and those places will be destroyed. It is the saddest thing about what I do - you are literally seeing the things you came to see being destroyed before your very eyes.

 

just briefly! It was only three weeks in Vietnam, then back to New Zealand.

that sounds about right to me too. Except elephant. I think elephants are doomed because they are just too big and too dangerous to coexist almost anywhere in Asia. Eventually they will occur only as tiny populations in isolated parks in places like India and Sri Lanka.

 

Day Eleven: Mang Den

We set off early morning for today's douc hunt. First we headed along the 676 road but about halfway to the Mang Canh forest we took a right turn onto a side road. This road started off well - it was being prepared to be sealed so was nice and smooth - but after the first village it suddenly became less of a road and more of a pile of rocks dumped across the hills in a line. Mostly it was just really really bad, sometimes extending to "I think I broke my tailbone" bad. This was more like my sort of travel, going off on a crazy motorbike ride over a rollercoaster of rocks looking for an animal which I wouldn't find. Because you know the old saying, "if you don't go looking for a Grey-shanked Douc, you'll never see a Grey-shanked Douc".

Every so often we would stop to scan the forest but at regular points there were temporary encampments for mining which probably meant any larger animals had already been hunted out. Whenever the driver asked about doucs they always shook their heads and pointed further ahead. After about two hours, when the road got to a point where the bike couldn't take me any more, we went back the way we had come. Part way back we took another fork. This road was about the same level of badness but composed of earth rather than rocks and so not as violent to use. This road eventually turned into a morass of mud churned up by trucks, so I walked for a bit until we reached a paved highway. This was much easier because I could keep a look out for monkeys while we rode, instead of just trying to stay on the back of the bike!

When the forest ran out we went up yet another road, this one an inexplicably well-paved one over the hills, only about ten feet wide with the undergrowth encroaching in from either side. It was like riding through a long-abandoned botanical gardens. I have no idea what this road is used for: there were no human activities along it (no houses, farms, nothing) and it simply came off the highway at one point and returned to the same highway at a further point. Really strange. It was very steep in some parts, necessitating me to walk up some sections. There were a few nice viewpoints and I spent a bit of time scanning the surrounding hillsides. Two Black Giant Squirrels were seen but no doucs.

Just after coming back onto the highway the rain came thundering down in sheets. We took shelter with several other motorcyclists in a roadside shack for half an hour until it petered out. Not long after heading off again, however, it came down harder than ever. A quick detour took us off the highway, along a dirt track (now more of a muddy streambed) and onto another paved road where we took further shelter in a small shop, although we were already comprehensively soaked by then. After an hour the rain still hadn't let up, so we bought a couple of disposable plastic raincoats to continue back to Mang Den. Mine split open as soon as I put it on - it was not made for anyone bigger than a Vietnamese person! - but it would keep my bag dry at least. The paved road lead eventually all the way back to Mang Den, where it was not raining when we arrived. This was the only day of the entire trip where rain made itself into a problem.


Birds seen today:
Large-billed Crow Corvus macrorhynchos
Long-tailed Shrike Lanius schach
Pale-capped Pigeon Columba punicea
Blue-bearded Bee-eater Nyctyornis athertoni
99) Grey Wagtail Motacilla cinerea
Yellow-billed Nuthatch Sitta solangiae
Dark-necked Tailorbird Orthotomus atrogularis
Red-whiskered Bulbul Pycnonotus jocosus
Ashy Drongo Dicrurus leucophaeus


Mammals seen today:
Black Giant Squirrel Ratufa bicolor

 

Day Twelve: even more buses

Just a short entry for Day Twelve because it was a travel day. Nhung had booked a seat on a bus for me for 7am, but that bus arrived at 6.40am, waited outside the gates for about 30 seconds and then left, so I just flagged down the next one from the side of the road at 7.15am. I got into Kon Tum at 8.50am, and found a bus bound for Danang which was leaving at 9.30am and cost 200,000 Dong. This was another silver mini-bus; the impression I got was that all the day buses running this route are the mini-buses and all the big buses were the overnight sleeper buses.

The bus got into Danang at 4.30pm. It had rained almost the entire way. My intention had been to stay in Danang that night - there is always at least one cheap hotel next to any bus station - and head on to Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park the next day, possibly after having made a visit to the Son Tra peninsula outside Danang to look for Red-shanked Doucs. However I thought I'd find out the bus schedules for the next day before finding a hotel, and there was actually another mini-bus sitting there ready to leave at 5pm. The driver assured me he was going to Phong Nha and I would get there by 10pm. This didn't seem quite right (I knew it should be six to seven hours from Danang to Phong Nha) but what the heck. I hadn't yet had any vehicular accidents, such as are requisite for one of my Asia trips, and three bus trips in one day would surely triple my chances. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on which side your flipped coin is buttered on, even tripling my chances did not result in any road accidents. In fact there weren't any traffic incidents for the entire trip which amply demonstrates how completely non-adventurous this holiday really was.

I'm still waiting for the day when as I walk away unhurt from a crash, the car explodes into a fireball behind me, but I don't turn around because cool guys don't look at explosions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqz5dbs5zmo

As it happens, the mini-bus wasn't bound for Phong Nha at all. Instead they kicked me out in some city, I knew not where, at 11.40pm. But I didn't care. After sixteen hours on buses I just wanted to lie down in a cheap hotel and go to sleep.



Birds seen today:
Large-billed Crow Corvus macrorhynchos
Feral Pigeon Columba livia
Tree Sparrow Passer montanus
White-throated Kingfisher Halcyon smyrnensis

 

Day Thirteen: Phong Nha

Early in the morning I went out to look for an ATM and try to gain some idea of how to get to Phong Nha. I discovered several things quite quickly. Firstly the mystery city that I was in was Dong Hoi, which is about 40km from Phong Nha (which is the village, aka Son Trach, next to the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park). Secondly, it was already exceedingly hot, even so early in the morning. Thirdly, the Agribank ATM I found did not have any money in it. Fourthly, I happily found out that ATMs of the BIDV bank have an upper withdrawal amount of three million Dong instead of only two million. And finally, and most agreeably, I found out that there are regular green and yellow buses going to Phong Nha from the roadside in town (i.e. local buses, not from an actual bus station) and they cost 33,000 Dong (about NZ$2.30).

I guess it takes about two hours from Dong Hoi to Phong Nha - I wasn't really paying attention to the time - and as per usual for Vietnam there were no birds to be seen along the way. Phong Nha turned out to be a fairly pleasant village, albeit one composed almost entirely of hotels, restaurants and tour operators. It was packed to the gunnels with tourists of all kinds, but seemingly dominated by white backpackers. They were crawling everywhere, like a plague of pubic lice. The same sort of backpackers who I would see turning up to Crocodile Lake, take a five second look at the lake with an exclamation of "wow, that's beautiful", and then all just sit down with their backs to it and talk earnestly about home and what was happening on the latest episode of Game of Thrones and what their Lonely Planet said they should go look at next. The most popular collection-point for them in Phong Nha appears to be the Easy Tiger Hostel which is like a flame to these moths. The manager of this Vietnamese hostel was a big fat Irish guy named Sean, which probably tells you all you need to know. I just popped in there to get a map of the park and then got the heck out. My preference for somewhere to stay was a cheapish Chinese hotel called the Binh Minh.

The reason I had come to the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park was to do with monkeys, again. The main species I wanted to try and see was the Hatinh Langur which is one of the black and white "Francois Langur group" (a group of closely-related Indochinese leaf monkeys which are restricted to limestone karst forests). All of the six or seven species in this group spend their days in the forest feeding and retire at night to sleep on sheer cliff-faces to escape predators. In theory seeing the Hatinh Langurs should be fairly straightforward because I knew where their preferred cliffs were, so it should just be a matter of being there in the late afternoon or early morning.

The other primates which I was interested in at Phong Nha were Red-shanked Doucs which depending on which trip reports you read are either easy or difficult to see there; and Indochinese Black Langurs and White-cheeked Gibbons, neither of which I actually expected to see based on what I had been reading.

From various trip reports I knew the cliffs where the Hatinh Langurs sleep were by the western entry point of the park, at the Tro Mong entrance next to the Dark Cave (although nobody seemed to know what I was talking about when I called it the Tro Mong entrance, even though it is called that on the map). For the other species I only knew that Jon Hall from Mammalwatching had written that the Black Langurs were "often seen" near the Tam Co Temple on the road to Laos. To find out more I tracked down a local chap named Hai who runs Hai's Eco Conservation Tours. He is also the owner of the Bamboo Cafe which happened to be right across the road from my hotel. Before coming here I had been under the impression that entry to the park required a permit and guide, which my wallet didn't like the sound of, but upon arrival I discovered that this was not the case at all. Individual elements within the park have entry fees (e.g. the various caves and the Botanical Gardens) but the park itself is free with unrestricted access. However when I thought I would need a guide I had found out about Hai and figured he would be a good choice. I popped in to see him to talk about monkeys. He confirmed the place for the Hatinh Langurs was by the western entrance and told me the best times in the afternoon and morning to try and see them; he said the Red-shanked Doucs were extremely difficult to find so I wouldn't see them; and he said to not even bother looking for the White-cheeked Gibbons or Black Langurs because "nobody ever sees them, even researchers coming here to study them can't find them." I had really limited time so I decided to just hope for the Hatinh Langurs - the others could wait for some future return trip.

The access in the park consists of a basic loop road, off the bottom of which are two other roads, one leading to Khe San and the other to Laos. The village of Phong Nha sits up around the top right-ish of the loop road. The northern portion of the loop is through farmland and the bottom portion is in the forest (in the park itself). The whole loop is around 65km long I think. Rather inconveniently the place where the Hatinh Langur cliffs are is on the opposite side of the loop from the village. There's no route through the middle because it is all limestone peaks, so whichever way you take to get there is a distance of about 20 or 25km. First I had to find a motorbike driver to take me there (before I go back to Vietnam for my next trip I am really going to have to reacquaint myself with how to ride a motorbike!) and this was bizarrely difficult. I had somewhat assumed that because the village basically only exists because of all the people visiting the park, that the locals would know all about the Hatinh Langurs and other monkey species there. But no. Every time I would say that I was here to look for monkeys the immediate response was "go to the Botanical Gardens." (The monkeys there are ex-pet Rhesus Macaques which live in a "wild enclosure" to try and rehabilitate them for release). I would explain about the Hatinh Langurs and how they sleep on the cliffs, and the person would flatly refuse that this was true and then say something like "you cannot see monkeys in the nature - you can only see them at the Botanical Gardens!" I mean, seriously, I'm giving you handfuls of cash to simply take me to the other side of the park and then just wait while I look around, why are you turning this down?! It wasn't even like it was some awkward destination - it was literally right by where all the other tourists go to visit the Dark Cave! Gaaah! Eventually I did find someone who was happy to take my money, oddly enough at the Duong Homestay which was directly across the street from my hotel and right next door to the Bamboo Cafe. I should have just gone in there first!

Hai had told me that the best time to see the Hatinh Langurs was between 4.00 and 6.30pm when they would be going onto the cliffs to sleep (it gets dark at about 6.30) and between 5.00 and 6.30am when they would be leaving in the morning. I had a bit of time before then, so I tried going for a little walk outside the village to find some birds. This idea didn't stay with me long because it was as hot as the last days on Earth when the sun is burning up the planet. Before I crept back inside for some shade I did see Paddyfield Pipit and my first mynahs of the trip with a little flock of White-vented Mynahs. That's right, thirteen days in and the first mynahs.

I was round at the cliffs by the Tro Mong entrance before 4pm. I wandered all up and down that road scanning every cliff I could until dark. There were mosquitoes in abundance, but no langurs. I think the driver was probably thinking "yup, no monkeys live on the cliffs - stupid tourist!" I'm guessing the langurs in that area have multiple sleeping cliffs, not all of which are by the road, and they just go to whichever one is closest to where they were feeding that day. Otherwise I cannot explain not seeing them.

I had dinner at the Why Not Cafe where the service was poor and the food almost inedible. That's probably where they got the name from ("Shall we eat at that place tonight?" "Eh, why not..."). There are Pigmy Slow Loris at Phong Nha, but it would be an eight kilometre walk to the closest entry into the forest so I didn't go spot-lighting at all.

Here's a video for a song about Khe San. If you aren't familiar with Cold Chisel, you should be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNA4ELdkYCo



Birds seen today:
100) House Swift Apus nipalensis
Tree Sparrow Passer montanus
102) White-vented Mynah Acridotheres grandis
Spot-necked Dove Streptopelia chinensis
White-throated Kingfisher Halcyon smyrnensis
103) Paddyfield Pipit Anthus rufulus
Red-whiskered Bulbul Pycnonotus jocosus

 

Day Fourteen: Phong Nha to Bach Ma

I had decided that in the morning I would check the cliffs for Hatinh Langurs again, just in case they had somehow appeared there without me seeing them last night, and then head to the Tam Co temple to see if there might be any Black Langurs hanging around there, while also keeping a look out for Red-shanked Doucs. I had arranged with the driver to head off at 5am. Instead I was banging on his door until 5.15 before he woke up, and we didn't get to the cliffs until 5.45 which is a fair way after dawn. No luck with finding Hatinh Langurs.

The dogs around Phong Nha are strangely aggressive in the mornings. During the day they are harmless, but in the morning on the way to the cliffs two separate dogs tried attacking the bike on the road, and when heading south through the park three dogs came tearing out from the entrance to the "Eco Trail" and chased us for half a kilometre. I'm not sure if they were actually trying to get us but their teeth were snapping far too close to my feet for comfort!

I left the driver waiting at the Tam Co temple and walked along the road to Laos for an hour or so. No Black Langurs of course (I think Jon Hall's "often seen" is wildly optimistic!) although I think I heard some distant gibbons. Bird-wise the only ones I saw were two unidentified drongos, a male minivet too far away to tell which species it was, and a couple of Stripe-throated Bulbuls. Recently I was told that there's a Red-shanked Douc troop which hangs out right near the temple which would have been useful to know when I was there, and that there is another Hatinh Langur troop in this area as well, on the cliffs on the other side of the river. I had been looking at the cliffs while there but hadn't seen anything (it would have been too late in the morning for the langurs to have still been on them anyway). At least it's all information I can use for the next time!

I don't know if Phong Nha is always so dead or if it was just the time of year or because I was too focussed on trying to find monkeys and ignoring the birds, but in the afternoon I caught a bus south to the city Hue with almost literally nothing to show for the visit. It would have repaid a longer stay I think, but really I had just slotted Phong Nha in as a quick visit and was anxious to get to Bach Ma National Park. There are Red-shanked Doucs at Bach Ma but given my abysmal primate-finding record after the very good start at Cat Tien, things weren't looking too hopeful!

There are local buses from Phong Nha to Dong Hoi and then from there to Hue, and I think there is a direct local bus between Phong Nha and Hue, but I just got a tourist bus which cost 180,000 (which I'm pretty sure was considerably higher than the real price, but thems the breaks). The bus was another mini-bus. I would have preferred being crammed into a local mini-bus with regular folk than crammed into a mini-bus with other backpackers, but at least it was only a four hour trip to Hue so much faster than the local alternatives. The main saving grace was two solid hours of Metallica which brought joy to my cold metal heart. I'm not sure the other passengers were old enough to appreciate the fine musical tastes of the driver.

Passing through a town called Dong Ha I saw a few unidentified fly-by mynahs, and dozens of what looked like wagtails perched in flocks on houses or wheeling over them.

Hue turned out to be a big brash city glowing with neon, not quite what I was expecting. The bus dropped everyone at Pham Ngu Lao - I guess all the major cities in Vietnam have named their backpacker street Pham Ngu Lao. The street was swarming with tourists, and touts passed by on motorbikes every couple of minutes offering girls, marijuana and cocaine. I just went into the first hotel I saw, the Phuoc An-DMZ Hotel, my arms loaded with a pile of girls, marijuana and cocaine, and got a room there for what I was told was 120,000 Dong.

In the morning I would make my way to Bach Ma.


Here is an appropriate Metallica song, Where-ever I May Roam ("Rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond, call me what you will. But I'll take my time anywhere. I'm free to speak my mind anywhere. And I'll never mind anywhere. Anywhere I roam. Where I lay my head is home")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwPg8gJq_Kw


Birds seen today:
104) Greater Yellownape Woodpecker Picus flavinucha
Stripe-throated Bulbul Pycnonotus finlaysoni
Tree Sparrow Passer montanus

 

here are a couple of photos to show what Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park looks like. The second photo is of the village of Phong Nha (aka Son Trach).

 

there are some rabid macaques coming up in Malaysia, but there was nobody to save from them except myself.

Otherwise, um, no. There is one cool encounter approaching (at Bach Ma, in a few more posts) but basically everything good on the trip was in the first few days at Cat Tien. In fact apart for one very brief simian sighting at Bach Ma which had to go unidentified, I didn't see a single primate in Vietnam after leaving Cat Tien. I had really bad luck for most of the trip but that's just the way animal-watching goes sometimes.

 

Day Fifteen: Bach Ma

Last night when I arrived in Hue I went into the Phuoc An-DMZ Hotel because it was the first hotel I saw when I got off the bus. The guy on the desk told me a single room cost 120. In Vietnam the currency has many many zeros, so in conversation people drop off the last thousand for the sake of simplicity - so 120,000 Dong (about NZ$8.50) is just said as 120. This was a good deal so I took it. In the morning I found out when going to pay that by "120" he had somehow actually meant "US$12" - which is about 265,000 Dong, over twice what I had been told! I could have made a big deal about it, but I was at the end of the trip so saving a few dollars wasn't all that important, plus the girl on reception was really nice, so I let it slide.

My destination for today was Bach Ma National Park, which is easily reachable from both Hue (40km away) and Danang (65km away). The park covers almost 40,000 hectares of forest but the only accessible part for visitors is the road up to the summit of Bach Ma itself. The French built a hill resort on top of the mountain in the early 1930s but a lot of this was destroyed in the 1950s during the Anti-French Resistance War, and the remaining buildings were left to fall apart (now there are just some stone walls here and there buried in the forest). There are some old photos on display in the summit tower showing the first tourists being carried up to the summit in sedan chairs, and hunters posing proudly with tigers and sun bears. The current park was established in 1991 and now there are a number of villas and a couple of restaurants up near the summit, as well as down at the entrance HQ.

Still in Hue in the morning, I asked the girl at reception about buses to Bach Ma. She rang the bus station and then told me the local bus was full already, then she rang a bunch of other numbers and found one of the tour operators who could take me there. It may have been an tour operator they had a deal with, I don't know. Anyway, the usual one-day tour price was 700,000 per person (about NZ$50) according to the other people in the mini-bus doing the tour, but because I was only going to the entrance HQ I paid 200,000 (about NZ$14).

The road to the summit of Bach Ma is 19km long. The first 3km are outside the park, from the highway through the village of Cau Hai to the HQ, and then from the HQ to the top is 16km. I was planning on spending two nights at one of the summit accommodations, then one at the HQ accommodation (originally I was going to be at the park for five nights, but I went to Phong Nha first instead). There's not much around the lower levels where the HQ is, but there's a trail called the Pheasant Trail at the 8.5km mark, where Crested Argus live and where Vladimir Dinets had seen a Large-antlered Muntjac so I wanted to have a look. I already knew all the accommodations were expensive, and I had heard that the food there was also expensive, so I took the precaution of buying two days worth of instant noodles in Hue. As it turned out the food there isn't particularly over-priced but I still saved a lot of money. Just as a warning though - two days of eating nothing but instant noodles does not have good effects on one's digestive sytem!!

At the HQ I arranged my stay and they also handily marked on the park map the best places to try and see Red-shanked Doucs (in the early morning or late afternoon, when there are no cars on the roads). I would be staying at the Phong Lan Villa at the 18.5km mark, which at 550,000 Dong per night (about NZ$38) was the cheapest place up there! The hotel at the HQ would be 250,000 but in the end I stayed all three nights at the summit instead. There are no motorbikes allowed in the park, except those ridden by the park staff, so if you are a backpacker the only ways to get up the top are in one of the park's overpriced mini-buses, hiring a taxi, or walking. Rather conveniently, as I was standing at the reception desk organising things a couple of Germans with a taxi turned up. They were on one of the Easy Rider tours, where tourists are taken on a motorbike tour of Vietnam - but for the Bach Ma bit they have to use a taxi. So they asked if I wanted to join their taxi to bring the cost down. With three of us we were paying 300,000 each which gives you an idea of how expensive it is!

The Phong Lan Villa is perfectly serviceable and would probably be the best place to stay if at Bach Ma because it is only half a kilometre below the summit. (Although it is definitely worth noting that if you have a tent you can also camp, which obviously largely avoids the costs). Next to the villa is the Phong Lan Chicken Restaurant, and there is 24-hour electricity (I had read the park only used generators with limited hours).

As soon as I had checked in, I headed out after birds. It was about 11.30pm by this time, so it was more to get the feel of the place than because I thought I'd see a lot at midday. Generally speaking, hill and montane forests are much easier for birding than lowland forest - it is cooler and the birds tend to be a lot more active all day long and to be more visible. Even so I still struggled here and the daily bird-lists were only short. I am really anxious to come back during a better time of year and see what I find then! From Phong Lan there's half a kilometre to the end of the road, then there's another half-kilometre (which feels like a full kilometre!) of paved walking-trail through forest to the summit, and then there's the Nature Exploration Trail which comes out back on the road at about the 17.5km mark. I spent most of my time at Bach Ma along these trails.

There were very few mosquitoes around, but quite a lot of leeches (I wore my leech socks all the time). There were lots of harvestmen on the trails too. As well as the usual pitch-black ones common all over southeast Asia there was a much larger species with a leg-span bigger than my hand. Their bodies were pale grey and the legs silvery-white but they were almost invisible against the leaf-litter until they ran, and then the light caught their legs and it looked like a shimmering across the ground. If one was moving in a patch of sunlight you could see the legs glowing from quite a distance. I had to be careful not to stand on them because they often ran across the path at my approach - or even just stopped dead right in front of my foot - and although the movement of their glittering legs made it look like they were speedy wee things they really weren't.

Walking from the villa to the end of the road on my first day I came across a good bird-wave but it was buried right back in the undergrowth so I could only see bits and pieces of bird as they darted this way and that. The only firm species I could pick out though the foliage were Striated Yuhinas (which I think made up the bulk of the wave) and a White-throated Fantail. Interestingly enough, at Mang Den the dominant bird in the waves were Mountain Fulvettas but here I only saw them a couple of times and they didn't seem common at all.

On the paved trail up to the summit I popped up a little side-trail to see if anything was there, and just over a ridge a tree-top crashed as a big primate jumped. I saw it jump again - an indeterminate shape about the size of a douc - and then it was gone. Almost had it. I didn't see any other primates at all while at Bach Ma.

On the Nature Exploration Trail a continually-calling bird took my attention for quite a while. I'm not sure what it actually was - I suck at bird calls - but it was part of a vague barely-moving but mostly-hidden bird-wave, out of which I finally managed to spy out Black-throated Laughing Thrushes and Ratchet-tailed Treepies (not to be confused with the Racket-tailed Treepies from Cat Tien). I only saw the treepies on the first day but I heard them every day at this same spot, which for anyone going there was right around the butterfly sign-board where there's a little side-trail to the ruins of a small building.

The Nature Exploration Trail is 1.2km long and easy to walk. Apart for the steep steps at the start and finish it is mostly pretty even. There are regular sign-boards about butterflies, leeches, seed dispersal, tree ferns, etc. It runs along the sides of hills through forest, so you have good vantage points of the downhill slopes. Still, I didn't see anything between the treepies and laughing thrushes until the very end when I saw a Golden-throated Barbet. I had been going to walk back along the road but decided to retrace the trail instead, which was a good idea. Back where I saw the treepies I found a Red-headed Trogon, and further on I got a glimpse of some sort of ground bird as it disappeared into the plants on the uphill edge of the trail. I put my binoculars on the spot, expecting to see a partridge or something similar, and into view hopped a Blue-rumped Pitta! It was a young bird, still with streaky head but with some blue showing up on the nape and rump. It looked about, hopped a bit further behind more plants, into view again, out of view, then hopped across the path and paused at the other side to check me out before hopping down into the undergrowth and vanishing. I like pittas because while I can hardly ever find them, when I do manage to see them they often give me good (albeit usually fairly brief) views, and that combination makes them pretty special. The Blue-rumped Pitta made the tenth pitta species I have seen in the wild.

Something that may have been even better than a pitta goes into the "almost" basket. About halfway along the trail when on the return walk (before I saw the pitta), some mid-sized mammal burst from its resting place in the plants right beside the path and catapulted away through the undergrowth and over a ridge. All I saw was a blackish blur, but going by the size and movement I'm about 70% sure it must have been an Annamite Muntjac. I kept my eyes open for the rest of my stay but I never saw another one.

Rain came through at about 4.30pm, just as I got back to the villa for my noodles, but it only lasted about half an hour. I spent the next hour wandering along the road looking out for doucs but saw only Red-whiskered Bulbuls and Striated Yuhinas, as well as a nice Red-cheeked Ground Squirrel.

As dusk neared I went back to the summit walking road. The sky had black clouds again and a fog had rolled in, so thick that another Red-cheeked Ground Squirrel on the road was barely even visible through the binoculars. After dark the fog proved so impenetrable in the forest that I couldn't see more than a few feet, the torch-beam simply reflecting back off the water droplets as a wall of light. I gave up after a bit and went back to the road but there wasn't anything there either. In the end I just went back to my room and went to sleep.



Birds seen today:
Tree Sparrow Passer montanus
105) White-throated Fantail Rhipidura albicollis
106) Striated Yuhina Yuhina castaniceps
107) Black-throated Laughing Thrush Garrulax chinensis
108) Ratchet-tailed Treepie Temnurus temnurus
Golden-throated Barbet Megalaima franklinii
Red-headed Trogon Harpactes erythrocephalus
109) Blue-rumped Pitta Pitta soror
Red-whiskered Bulbul Pycnonotus jocosus

Mammals seen today:
17) Red-cheeked Ground Squirrel Dremomys rufigenis



The photo below is a Striated Yuhina.

 

Looking down from the summit towards the coast, with some of the oft-present black clouds....




Below is a Ratchet-tailed Treepie (this one I photographed in Thailand, but they are really cool birds so I thought you might like to see one):

 

one. Red-shanked Douc. I know it wasn't a gibbon because it had a tail, and it was too big to be a macaque. But it was only a brief glimpse of a jumping shape, so it cannot be counted.

 

Day Sixteen: Bach Ma

I had been planning on going out spot-lighting before dawn if the weather was clear but I didn't wake up until 5am, so that was out. On the way up to the summit trails I saw two Red-cheeked Ground Squirrels on the road - they seem pretty common up here, but were usually seen only early or late when there were no tourists around. The Nature Exploration Trail was pretty quiet. I came back up the road to the villa for my breakfast noodles. There were no doucs seen, but there were Pallas' Squirrels and one of the Striped Squirrels (I'm not sure which species, either Maritime or Cambodian) and amongst the birds were White-browed Shrike-babblers, Plain Flowerpeckers, Barred Cuckoo-doves and Lesser Necklaced Laughing Thrushes.

After noodles I returned to the Nature Exploration Trail for the next three or four hours to look for Silver Pheasants. No joy on the pheasants but a Black Giant Squirrel made the fourth sciurid of the day, and unusually for a Vietnamese mammal it actually hung around long enough for me to watch it! There was also a great bird-wave with what seemed to be dozens of Golden-throated Barbets and White-browed Shrike-babblers, along with Orange-bellied Leafbirds, Grey-cheeked Warblers, Mountain Fulvettas, Black-throated Sunbirds, Great Ioras, and an unseen drumming woodpecker.

It rained from about 3.30pm to 4.15, and then I went out along the road - still no doucs, and for birds nothing but Barred Cuckoo-doves and Striated Yuhinas for the rest of the day! I walked the Nature Exploration Trail at night - it was clear with no wind or fog, but the only living things I saw were leeches, moths, fireflies and a stick insect.


Birds seen today:
White-throated Fantail Rhipidura albicollis
Golden Babbler Stachridopsis chrysaea
Red-headed Trogon Harpactes erythrocephalus
110) White-browed Shrike-babbler Pteruthius flaviscapis
Dark-necked Tailorbird Orthotomus atrogularis
Golden-throated Barbet Megalaima franklinii
111) Plain Flowerpecker Dicaeum concolor
Great Iora Aegithina lafresnayei
Mountain Fulvetta Alcippe peracensis
112) Barred Cuckoo-dove Macropygia unchall
113) Lesser Necklaced Laughing Thrush Garrulax monileger
Black-throated Laughing Thrush Garrulax chinensis
Silver-eared Mesia Leiothrix argentauris
Red-whiskered Bulbul Pycnonotus jocosus
Striated Yuhina Yuhina castaniceps
114) Orange-bellied Leafbird Chloropsis hardwickii
115) Grey-cheeked Warbler Seicercus poliogenys
Black-throated Sunbird Aethopyga saturata

Mammals seen today:
Red-cheeked Ground Squirrel Dremomys rufigenis
Pallas' (Red-bellied) Squirrel Callosciurus erythraeus
Striped Squirrel Tamiops sp.
Black Giant Squirrel Ratufa bicolor

 

doesn't everybody?

 

Day Seventeen: Bach Ma

Today was my third day at Bach Ma. As I said earlier, I had been going to stay just two nights at the summit and then one at the bottom, but I hadn't found anything at night yet and I was still hopeful for doucs during the day, so I decided to stay up top for the remaining day and night. Sometimes a change in plan brings nothing to the party, but other times it works a treat. This time it worked - but I had to wait for night to find that out.

There was no rain today, just a bit of thunder and a smattering of drizzle around 4pm, but the day itself was rubbish in terms of finding animals. The morning was spent walking up and down the upper stretches of the road looking unsuccessfully for monkeys. I saw a few birds - nothing I hadn't already seen lots of in the previous two days - and a Black Giant Squirrel and a Pallas' Squirrel, but no doucs.

The rest of the day was dead, with almost no birds. It was quite a bit hotter than the other days though, so that may have had something to do with it. Really the only birds worth mentioning were a Blue Whistling Thrush (the only one I saw in Vietnam) and a male Orange-bellied Leafbird. I had seen lots of female leafbirds yesterday and today, but no males, and I was starting to doubt my identification of them. How could I not be seeing any males at all?! Interestingly, the female of the local race doesn't have an orange belly like the nominate race does, just a bit of yellow which wasn't obvious except at certain angles, and the male's underside is bright yellow and not orange at all.

When I was leaving my room at dusk, one of the staff wondered where I was going carrying binoculars and a torch. He was flabbergasted that I was going out into the forest alone at night. I must be very brave, he thought. I get this all the time in Asia. People generally think I'm either extremely brave or plain crazy (or maybe both) to risk such an outing. Often people even think going into the forest alone during the day time is the height of bravery! Really I like being out alone in the forest at night. It's relaxing. Sure, sometimes your imagination starts playing up and then you can't shake the creepy feeling that a zombie pirate is following you, but most of the time that proves to not be the case.

To keep my spirits up on this night I made up a little song. "Gonna find me a ferret-badger, hope I don't get killed by a bear." They weren't the most developed of lyrics, but I feel it's best not to dwell on being killed by a bear. There were actually several heavily dug-over sections along the Nature Exploration Trail which must have been from either wild pigs or a bear. Perhaps tonight I'd find out.

It was a great night for spotlighting. No wind, no fog, no rain, under the canopy so no moonlight. There were lots of owls calling, and maybe some frogmouths, but none were close enough to be able to see them. About halfway along the trail I suddenly heard the sound of leaf litter crunching. Something was coming. It sounded big. What was it? Where was it? Was it a bear? Oh man, I was going to fail at the second line of my song before I even got a chance to fail at the first line! Then from around the bend up ahead, a ferret-badger came bolting along the path towards me like a rocket, with another ferret-badger hot on its heels! They took a sharp right, off the path and down the slope, and vanished.

There are two species of ferret-badger in central Vietnam, rather unhelpfully called the Large-toothed Ferret-badger and the Small-toothed Ferret-badger. They are also known respectively, and even more unhelpfully, as the Burmese Ferret-badger and the Chinese Ferret-badger. (There is a third species in north Vietnam as well, described from the Cuc Phuong National Park in 2011, but that one looks very different to the other two species). The Burmese and Chinese Ferret-badgers look very very similar to one another. The main differences - unless you can persuade one to open its mouth for you - are that the Burmese one has a white dorsal stripe running right along its spine whereas in the Chinese one the stripe doesn't usually go past the shoulders, and the Burmese one has a lot of white on the tail whereas the Chinese one's tail is just tipped in white. Basically what that means is that if you get a ten second look at two ferret-badgers running towards you at top speed in the dark you really don't have much chance of telling which species they are. Very cool to see them, but they could only go down as "ferret-badger sp."

I carried on up the trail. A rat darted across the path a bit further on - "rat sp." - but there was nothing else seen. Last night I had walked back up along the road after completing the trail, but tonight I just went back the way I had come, hoping the ferret-badgers might be back out somewhere and I would be able to get a proper look at them (but they were not).

Back at the top of the road by the ranger post I picked up some eyeshine which turned out to be a discarded cigarette packet. A minute later I got some more eyeshine, and this time it was real. It looked like another ferret-badger sitting on the road, but it was so small! Then it turned its head so there wasn't the glare reflecting back from its tapetum, and I could see that it was a ferret-badger, although obviously just a young one as it seemed to be only about half adult-size. As it turned to the side and pottered off the road into the grass I was trying to see the dorsal stripe but I couldn't see anything but grey! There were a couple of flashes of eyeshine from amongst the grass and then nothing. Had it gone? I snuck carefully up to the spot - and then spent the next twenty minutes watching the ferret-badger foraging amongst the grass tangles under the torch-light from just a few feet away! At one point it walked right up to my feet, looked up at the light, and then scampered away again. Just the cutest little animal, I could literally have bent down and patted it on the head.

The reason I hadn't been able to see a dorsal stripe before coming closer was because the stripe was so reduced as to be little more than a spot on the nape, and the tail had only the briefest white tip; so I was confident in calling it a Chinese Ferret-badger. I would like to think the other two I saw earlier were Burmese Ferret-badgers because it would have been cool to see two species in one night, but I won't stoop to that. I don't usually take my camera out when spotlighting (I don't like using flash on nocturnal animals) but if I had... well, actually if I had I probably still wouldn't have got any good photos because I would have had the zoom lens on it and the ferret-badger would probably have been too close to focus properly!

Best wildlife encounter of the Vietnam trip, hands-down!


Birds seen today:
Barred Cuckoo-dove Macropygia unchall
Striated Yuhina Yuhina castaniceps
Grey-cheeked Warbler Seicercus poliogenys
Silver-eared Mesia Leiothrix argentauris
Golden-throated Barbet Megalaima franklinii
Black-throated Laughing Thrush Garrulax chinensis
Orange-bellied Leafbird Chloropsis hardwickii
116) Puff-throated Bulbul Alophoixus pallidus
117) Blue Whistling Thrush Myophonus caeruleus

Mammals seen today:
Black Giant Squirrel Ratufa bicolor
Pallas' (Red-bellied) Squirrel Callosciurus erythraeus
Red-cheeked Ground Squirrel Dremomys rufigenis
18) Chinese (Small-toothed) Ferret-badger Melogale moschata