LaughingDove Visits Thailand

As the title of the thread would suggest, I will soon be visiting Thailand. My flight to Thailand leaves tomorrow (Saturday 1st of April) and I am flying to Bangkok on a cheap but very inconveniently timed flight via Beijing and I leave Thailand on the evening of the 14th. In total I will have 12 full days in Thailand.

Some of the planning, etc. of this trip was done on another ZooChat thread here: Which Thai Zoos are Worth Visiting? which you can have a look at if you are interested.

The general outline of the trip will be first night in Bangkok (because we land in the late evening) then the first four nights of the trip proper at Kaeng Krachan National Park, then three nights in Bangkok, followed by two nights near Khao Kheow Open Zoo, then the final two nights in Khao Yai National Park. We will be hiring a car to make the travel easier.

Most of the trip will be birding and wildlife watching, however there should be two zoo visits as well, namely Dusit and Khao Kheow and possibly the Bangkok SeaLife Aquarium.

As I mentioned in the planning thread linked above, I won’t be able to write extremely long and detailed posts as I have done with some of my past travel threads (a few notable examples of which can be found here: Trip to Australia – June and July 2016, LaughingDove's Little Tanzanian Adventure, A Trip to Kenya – February 2016, LaughingDove’s Trip Through Europe – Summer 2015) but I hope slightly shorter posts (I’m hoping to largely write everything throughout the trip itself because I won’t have much time afterwards – we’ll see how that goes ) as well as some pictures in the gallery will be of interest.

 

Travel and Arrival:

I arrived in Thailand earlier this evening (landed about five hours ago now) and it is currently the evening after the journey so I’ll post a short update. The flight to Bangkok was via Beijing with Air China which is not an obvious route to go, especially since there is a nine hour stop in Beijing on the way, however I got the flights for a very good price on a promotion since the Warsaw to Beijing route is quite new (and was very new when I bought the tickets). Most of the stop in Beijing was during the night, so there wasn’t the possibility of leaving the airport however from the airport looking out the windows I saw a Eurasian Magpie which is a different subspecies to what I have seen before, so that is interesting.

I am just staying here in Bangkok right nowfor a single night near the airport before heading to Kaeng Krachan tomorrow, hopefully via Pak Thale and I plan to get up for sunrise tomorrow to look for some common birds around the accommodation and get my first Thai birds. Around the accommodation at night though, I have seen a large number of Common House Geckos as well as some presumably unidentifiable bats and also an unidentified frog, though I am hoping to identify the latter from pictures. Does anyone know any good resources for identifying amphibians in Thailand? I was unable to get an amphibian field guide of any kind. Maybe someone on ZooChat would be able to identify the frog when I upload pictures when I get back to Warsaw.

Anyway, the first day of birding starts tomorrow so I’ll be off to bed (trying to get over jet lag).

 

I find the subspecies of Eurasian magpie near me to be noticeably larger in size than the ones in Britain.

 

I'll check both of those out when I get to somewhere with usable internet (it took over 5 minutes of loading the page to get to this point ).

 

First Day of Birding – Travel to Kaeng Krachan via Pak Thale

I started the day by getting up just after sunrise to have a look at what birds could be seen on the grounds of the accommodation. Although the ideal situation would be to leave very early in the morning to get some early morning birding outside of Bangkok and miss the rush hour, this of course would not be possible with my non-birding family who for some reason totally unknown to me wanted a lie in after a 24 hour journey. Anyway I got up early setting an alarm for just after sunrise which of course made me very popular. There were some cool birds around the grounds of the accommodation such as a loudly calling Coppersmith Barbet. I will post a list of birds in the Big Year thread (and link to it here when its posted) containing a full list of species seen subdivided into where I saw them so in all cases have a look at that for details of species seen.

Anyway, after everyone was up and after breakfast we left around 10:30 and headed out of Bangkok towards Kaeng Krachan National Park where we would be staying for the night but going via Pak Thale/Laem Pak Bia. There were a fair number of birds seen on the way, and the Sat Nav took us on a ‘scenic route’ over a bridge that still had metal cable sticking out of it. We soon reached the salt ponds which is the main wader spot and we stopped at a random pond along the way which had a large number of birds on it, and I added quite a few species there (again, see the list). We then went to the main wader watching site at Pak Thale which is famous for having Spoon-billed Sandpipers. However those are only really possible with a scope and I don’t have one, but I still saw a large number of species including Sand Plovers which are very prettily coloured and loads of Painted Storks flying overhead. We then stopped for lunch at a roadside place where there were a couple more little birds like a Pied Fantail.

After lunch it was getting quite late so I would have to choose one of the two other places in the area that I wanted to see (all of my prior information came from thaibirding.com) because we still had to drive to Kaeng Krachan to hopefully get there before sunset, these were a sand spit where you can hire a boat to see Malaysian Plovers or a large conservation project started by the former king. I decided the latter would be cooler, so I’d miss the plovers but I should see some other stuff the conservation area. It turned out that it was actually a very cool place. It’s free to get in there, and there is a bus that drives you around that is also free. It is an experimental natural water recycling area with some reed beds and big natural water treatment ponds and also a huge area of natural mangroves. I saw a lot of birds there including a number of interesting things in the mangroves ranging from birds to fiddler crabs to mudskippers and there is an extremely well-maintained and extensive boardwalk through the mangroves that the free bus drops you right in front of. Although it’s not a huge area, it’s very interesting to visit and I saw the spit from the end of the boardwalk at the see and I don’t think I missed too much.

By the time we had finished this, it was actually much later than we should have left, and by the time we got near the National Park it was dusk and it was dark when we arrived at our accommodation at Baan Maka Chalets near the national park. The funny thing on the journey there was that the turn off to get to the chalets was blocked by some military men who said we couldn’t go down that road and we had to go straight ahead, which was a military training ground. Of course the guards didn’t like us going into the training ground but eventually we managed to sort things out (helped tremendously because my mum speaks Thai) and we drove through a military training ground past the barracks and back onto the main road and it turned out that the road was being repainted. Eventually we got to the chalets in the dark and everything was fine. After dinner, I went for a little bit of spotlighting and I saw two species of frog and heard loads of stuff but I didn’t see any owls or nightjars as I was hoping (or mammals) probably largely because I had not seen the place in daylight so didn’t really know where I could go at night. I did find a third species of frog in my bathroom though so that was cool. I’m going to have a lot of frogs to try and identify.

Tomorrow I will be doing some birding at Baan Maka (which supposedly has lots of birds itself) and visiting Kaeng Krachan National Park. (Note: although this was written on the evening of the day itself, it was not posted then because there is no internet (or even mobile service) in the room at Baan Maka and some very slow internet in the restaurant, but I’m not going back to the restaurant just to post this.)


Note: the thread is currently about 24 hours behind, and any spelling mistakes or typos are because I haven’t bothered to read through this at all .

 

First Day in Kaeng Krachan:

After arriving in the dark last night, I was keen to get up to see the grounds of Kaeng Krachan, so I was up just before sunrise to look around. The grounds of Baan Maka are very nice with a pond covered in lotus flowers and of course lots of birds as well as two species of squirrels. I think most of the species I saw around the grounds are pretty common, but they were all exciting for me (again, see the big year list which is yet to be posted). I birded around the grounds of Baan Maka for about an hour and a half until I could get my family up to have breakfast to go to the national park because today I would be going around the national park in our hire car with my family. There were quite a few nice birds seen on the way up, and seeing the first Junglefowl was very cool (though these turned out to be common).

It was a bit late by the time we got into the National Park and we got to the lower campsite around 10 so it was already a bit hot, but there were some nice birds there that I enjoyed seeing like barbets and woodpeckers and there were huge numbers of butterflies, as well as a particularly exciting bird which was a great hornbill flying overhead. The rainforest and the landscape was nice too. After looking around this camp we headed up the first part of the track that goes up to the second campsite. This is not paved anymore, and it is supposed to be up and down at specific times, but we were told by someone at the reception office that we could make it to the first stream that you have to ford (and also no one was paying attention to the up and down times). The birding along the road was extremely difficult because of the density of the rainforest, and it was quite hot and humid. Actually, so hot and humid that some of the ink transferred from one page of my bird book to the other side. I did nonetheless manage to spot some nice birds though so that was fun. I did see a group of Dusky Langurs which was a very nice thing to see, but other than that the only mammal seen that day was a single macaque and I was expecting to see more. So we just generally birded around the lowland part of the national park for a while before leaving in the evening, and I saw quite a number of birds.

We got back to Ban Maka just after dark and after dinner, I went out for some proper spotlighting along the dirt road that leads to Baan Maka off the actual road to look for nightjars and owls. I went quite a way along this road and after a while the torch got quite hot which was very unpleasant and I think that’s the most I have ever sweated. But I did hear lots of owls I think both scops and brown hawk owls and I saw a number of Large-tailed Nigtjars so that was good.

Tomorrow I am due to have a day in Kaeng Krachan National Park with a bird guide and a 4x4 so I hope to see some high altitude specialities and some of the harder to spot birds with my mum who will go birding with me while my brother and father go to the beach at Hua Hin.


Note: this is again posted a day late and again I haven’t read through it so apologies for any errors. Assume the latter in all subsequent posts while I’m in Thailand.

 

Second Day in Kaeng Krachan:


My second day in Kaeng Krachan involved a very early start with a guide and we were leaving Baan Maka (after having had breakfast) at 5:30, so I set an alarm for 4:45 which is quite early even for birding standards and especially early for my brother who is sharing the room. Our guide appeared just before 5:30 as we were finishing breakfast in a big 4x4 pickup truck to take us into the national park. Throughout the day, the guide proved to be very good at spotting birds and identifying birds especially by their calls. His English was very poor, but we managed well by gesturing pointing at guide books and with translations from my mum, and getting a guide proved to be a very good decision especially since we would have hired a 4x4 to get to the top camp anyway because the road is terrible.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself here (you can tell I haven’t thought about what I’m writing, can’t you? ), we got the guide and headed into the national park and one of the very first things we saw was a golden jackal running along the road ahead of us for a bit before disappearing into the trees at the side. We didn’t stop on the drive up and drove straight up to the top camp, though when we saw some birds at the side we just stopped the car randomly in the middle of the road to have a look, because that’s what you do on tiny winding narrow dirt roads on the edge of a cliff apparently. Particularly awesome was hearing the traditionally farmyard sound of roosters calling at sunrise in the middle of the rainforest miles from anything from the red junglefowl.

It took quite a while to get up to the top of the road, but it was still early when we go to the higher camp (which is around 1000 metres in altitude and that is quite high considering the see is not very far away really). Before starting to look around for birds, I went to the toilet and was startled when coming out of the toilet to see a Yellow-throated Marten sitting there a few metres away! We then looked around the area with the guide seeing loads of cool birds like barbets, etc. and also heard the amazing dawn chorus of gibbons while looking across the mountains. After birding the camp, we drove back down a bit and stopped all along the way to look for birds which the guide was great at pointing with things ranging from trogons to Banded Kingfishers to hanging parrots and there were a couple of heard-only things too like Green Magpie and Brown Hornbill. There was an awesome gliding squirrel too. We soon came up to a group of bird photographers (who happen to also be staying at Baan Maka) camped around a Long-tailed Broadbill nest. Bird photographers are odd, anyone who has seen a group of them in the wild will know what I mean. They had a guide with them who was using a laser pointer to show exactly where they should point there cameras and when they couldn’t see, he just moved the tripod and positioned the camera for them, leaving them only to push the shutter. The broadbill was awesome though.

We then had lunch back at the upper camp and after lunch our guide took us down an obscure little forest track to a bird hide (more of a tent) where we could see an area where some mealworms had been spread around. There were lots of little flycatchers and things, but the most exciting thing, and also the only thing to really get the guide himself super-excited, was a Rusty-naped Pitta that put on a show. After maybe 45 minutes in the hide (which was during the middle of the day so too hot for much anyway) we headed out again to very slowly make our way back down the hill stopping at lots of places along the way for birds. We stopped at the same Long-tailed Broadbill site that was surrounded by bird photographers earlier and funnily enough now that the laser pointer and people cutting down plants to get a view of the nest were gone, the pair of broadbills that were building a nest were much more active and I got a greater view. I later discovered that the bird photographers had gone off to bother some owls later in the day. We also spotted one of the White-handed Gibbons that had been making all of the noise around here and of course loads of birds. We continued to bird along this road and also a bit around the lower camp, and then stopped for loads of birds on the last bit of road to the exit, most of which I have no idea how the guide spotted from a moving car. Again we just left the car in the middle of the road to look at the birds. Most exciting was a nest site of a Collared Falconet which the guide knew of just off the road. There was one bird sitting on an exposed branch and one bird sitting in its tiny little nest hole which was really cute.

We had about a 13 hour birding day that day (and the same again for tomorrow) and I saw loads though I missed a couple of things that I really wanted to see like giant squirrels, banded leaf-monkeys, Racket-tailed Treepie (though I think I only care about this because birders visiting Kaeng Krachan are supposed to) and tickell’s brown hornbill but I have another full day tomorrow (the last day in Kaeng Krachan) to see them.

I didn’t go spotlighting tonight because I was exhausted (and the long dirt road with only the chance of owls and nightjars isn’t great anyway – I’d probably go spotlighting if I was in a national park) but I saw a huge Tokay Gecko in the restaurant so that’s cool. Now that I’ve written this I’ll be going to bed very shortly because it’s another 4:45 AM start tomorrow! (but I will be posting this a day later because there is no internet in the room)

Note: the reason I haven’t posted my big year list yet is because I have to check taxonomy for quite a few birds and I can’t do that until I have faster internet.

 

The bit about the junglefowl is really cool! I've seen some in Vietnam at Cat Tien, but it was pretty close to a farmstead so I wasn't at all confident counting them.
Were the gibbons your first wild ones?

 

Yep, the junglefowl was amazing and really quite surreal. It was still pretty amazing today to randomly hear a chicken sound in the middle of the rainforest.

Yep, first wild gibbons.

 

Third Day in Kaeng Krachan


I started early again at the same time because for my last day in Kaeng Krachan I had a second day with the same guide and vehicle. This time, rather than head straight to the highest altitude place, we started the morning birding at the lower altitude and we birded along the road stopping all along the way and looking at the various birds that could be seen from near the road. A particular highlight from this part was a Black Giant Squirrel. We then continued past the first campsite starting up the road to the second campsite, but we stopped still within the lower altitude area (mostly between the first and third stream and a bit beyond the third stream for anyone who knows the National Park) to find various birds walking along trails through the forest. The birding was extremely difficult and not very productive, apparently it had rained at night and that makes the birds inactive at the lower levels and also seemingly makes tons of bitey insects appear. The thought did occur to me though that there don’t seem to be many stingy or thorny plants than other places, but way more vicious insects. There were some particularly nice birds seen though including a Great Hornbill on its nest hole, Black-naped Monarch, and Orange-breasted Trogon as well as a gibbon. Apparently someone had found a new site for the elusive White-faced Scops Owl yesterday which the bird photographers immediately scared off and the owl wasn’t back there anymore. There used to be a reliable site for these, but my guide said they hadn’t been there for about a year so sadly I didn’t see any.

After the birding in the lowland sections, we had lunch in the lower campsite and as soon as the road to the top campsite was open (actually half an hour before it was technically open) we headed up to the top camp to see what could be seen there. A Silver-breasted Broadbill was seen on the drive up so that was awesome and then the most awesome thing was seen. A leopard. An actual leopard was sitting on the side of the road and it slowly wandered up and off while we watched it. I got some ‘record shots’ of the leopard through the windscreen of the vehicle before it disappeared off and it was amazing. The guide was incredibly excited too, and he hadn’t shown the slightest interest in mammals before hand but it turned out that he had *never* seen a leopard before with his own eyes. This is someone who I think was about 40 who must go to the national park so much and he had never seen a leopard before. I knew it was special and rare, but I didn’t know it was this rare. Although I have seen leopards in Africa before, the rainforest settting was very cool and it was much darker in colouration and possible a bit bigger than African leopards. Even in Africa where leopards are relatively easy to see, this was by far my best view of one. Funnily enough 10 seconds after the leopard vanished and while we were still reeling from the shock and excitement, a tiny little two wheel drive car (I don’t know how the car could possibly have made it that far) appeared around the corner travelling the wrong way which our guide was cross about and it turned out that everyone on the road above has tried to stop them and they said they would just go down a bit to turn around. They said they couldn’t find the campsite. One road goes up to the campsite and there are no other roads anywhere in the national park.

Anyway, as soon as we got up to where the other guides were (two guides with their bird photography groups) our guide immediately started showing off about the leopard looking at the pictures I and he took, etc. Obviously it was very rare because there seemed to be a fair bit of excitement. While there I also dropped in to see what the bird photographers were camped around today and it turned out to be a Common Green-magpie feeding its chick on a nest which I had a quick look at before going on. We then looked around the top camp where I added a few odd bits and pieces to the list like Streaked Spider-hunter and finally got a proper view of White-browed Scimitar-babblers that I had seen a lot of in the forest and then we birded quite a long way down the road out of the camp. I was looking for Racket-tailed Treepie and Banded Leaf-monkey mainly, I didn’t see either of those, but I saw lots of other birds including a bird wave with various things so it was a good end to the day. It was quite late by this point considering the long journey back down, so we drove straight down and out of the national park. I had a great time in Kaeng Krachan over the three days and I really liked the national park a lot. The wildlife watching is extremely difficult, even with a guide who knew all the calls and a number of nesting sites, the birds were still hard to find but there are lots of very cool birds and the potential for loads of mammal surprises too. The scenery and landscape is of course really nice too.

I’m probably not going to go spotlighting again tonight, there’s not that much to see on the dirt road and I’m exhausted from trying as much as possible to see birds. I hope to do plenty of spotlighting in Khao Yai at the end of the holiday when I am actually staying in the national park, and I will be up for sunrise again tomorrow to hopefully tick a few more birds on the grounds of Baan Maka before driving to Bangkok (hopefully with some birding on the way). I should get a big year list up tomorrow night since I’ll be back in civilisation with cell phone connection and wifi and I can check taxonomy and everything (though I have two birds and a bunch of frogs awaiting identification). I wish I had another two weeks in Kaeng Krachan. What a great place.

(This is actually on the right day now)

 

I have no problem with the bird photographers who just sit there quietly watching a nest or something from an appropriate distance, but when they sit in tents in the middle of the road, chop down branches to expose the nest and use laser pointers and other things that disturb the birds, it's really annoying and it must be bad for the birds.

 

And the funny thing is that as I was waking from the restaurant where I posted the above post back to the room, a group of birders had their torches pointed up at a palm tree. I went over to have a look at what it was, and they had found a Collared Scops-owl! If I had gone out spotlighting I would have gone a different way and probably not seen any owls anyway .

 

Back to Bangkok via Petchaburi Rice Fields


I started my last morning at Baan Maka/ in the Kaeng Krachan area with another morning of birding before the rest of my family was up. I added a few nice bits and pieces to the list and there were absolutely loads of Variable Squirrels around. A particular highlight was a group of about 10 Oriental Pied Hornbills that flew in to eat on some fruiting trees and I got much better view at close range than I had from within the National Park.

After breakfast we left Baan Maka to drive back to Bangkok for the next part of our holiday, but I had managed to persuade my family to stop at a birding site for a relatively short visit because it is directly off the main road that we would be taking anyway. This is the site called the Petchaburi Rice Fields as described on thaibirding.com but it is basically just some rice paddies and very small villages. Of course it was not the ideal birding time of day when we got there and extremely hot and sunny out in the open between rice paddies, but there were still a lot of nice birds around. The rice paddies were absolutely covered in various herons and egrets, especially pond herons and Cattle Egrets and there were loads of swallows flying low over the fields. There were also hundreds of weaver birds nesting in the trees around the paddies of all three native species and various other small birds were about too. I missed a couple of species that I was hoping to see in the area, but considering how hot it was, there were loads of birds around. We then continued on to Bangkok with lunch from a roadside place on the way, also passing a number of macaques seen from the car sitting on buildings.

In the evening in Bangkok, I met up with my Aunt who lives in Bangkok, and she will be with us for much of the remaining trip. Tomorrow is my first Thai zoo day – a visit to Dusit Zoo.

 

I've now posted my species list for the trip so far:
2017 Big Year

 

I'm getting behind on posting in this thread and I don't have time so those will come later, but the day after tomorrow (Tuesday) I will have a full day at Khao Kheow Open Zoo but without any transport once in the zoo. How problematic will this be when it comes to trying to see everything? I've read that it's difficult to go around the whole zoo on foot.

Also Chlidonias' thread about Dusit was very helpful on that zoo visit, does anyone have any advice for doing Khao Kheow or any things that I absolutely have to see?

 

Do you think it's worth trying to persuade my dad to drive me around the zoo?