As it turns out, it is now impossible to fully do the zoo on foot, you could manage some bits with long stretches of unpleasant walking along roads, but there is a drive through deer enclosure with signs telling people not to get out of cars which of course excludes walkers. The best way to do the zoo is of course with your own transport (which is what I did in the end) but the only other options (apart from skipping large sections) are to hire a golf cart for 350 baht per hour or take the tour vehicle-bus-thing around which doesn't stop anywhere and you see what you can from the moving vehicle. I'll write more about the zoo when I get up to that point on this thread, but they do have some very cool species like Douc, Serow, Flat-headed Cat, Blue-rumped Parrot and Lesser Bird-of-paradise.
I thought you'd like that one. You'll have to wait a little while until I get around to Khao Kheow pictures though. They had jungle cats too which you would have liked, and I also managed to see a captive Greater Adjutant yesterday while peering through a fence at a private bird breeding centre.
I saw a large black/brown duck, almost goose-sized at Bang Pra Non-hunting area this morning. I can't see what it could possibly be in the field guide, any suggestions? I do have pictures which I can upload after the trip.
Dusit Zoo and Sea Life Bangkok Ocean World: My first day in Bangkok was a zoo day, but because by this point I was exhausted from 15 hour non-stop birding days at Kaeng Krachan, so I had a short lie in. This morning was one of only two of the trip when I was still asleep at 7. I did still get up reasonably early though, and before going to the zoo I saw an interesting mammal from the window of my room which was a different subspecies of variable squirrel to what I had seen in Kaeng Krachan. In Kaeng Krachan they were cream with black tips to their tails, but the one in Bangkok is what I think of in my head as a variable squirrel which is with a cream underbelly and brown/grey above. The traffic on the drive to Dusit Zoo was absolutely terrible and it took several hours to get to the zoo so we didn’t get there until midday. I went around the zoo with my aunt who lives in Bangkok while the rest of my family went to meet up with some friends in Bangkok. But back to the zoo itself. Overall, I really liked the zoo, most of the exhibits were poor when compared to European zoos, but not terrible and I’ve seen many worse enclosures in Europe. The zoo was a bit chaotic with street stalls dotted around and a 7/11 shop within the zoo, but that’s the Thai way. I found the zoo quite attractive overall though particularly how it’s spread around a lake that has a big colony of wild Openbill and Painted Storks and I also spotted a couple of wild Spot-billed Pelicans. There were also tons of wild Water Monitors, Variable and Pallas’ Squirrels, and a small colony of wild fruit bats. Particularly when considering that the zoo is in central Bangkok it was very pleasant. The zoo’s collection was quite extensive too with many common ABC species as well as a variety of species that I found particularly interesting like Phayre’s Langur, Mainland Serow, Fea’s Muntjac, Red-shanked Douc, a variety of interesting civets, Black Giant Squirrel, Indian Giant Flying Squirrel, Milky Stork, South-east Asian Sarus Crane, a very large and extensive reptile collection, and possibly more that I’m forgetting. I think the Eld’s deer were the Thai subspecies as well(?). A couple of things that I didn’t like about the zoo were a ‘Kenyan Acrobatics’ show which I didn’t actually look at, but it was a show with some presumably Kenyan people doing acrobatics. Uncomfortably close to a human zoo there. The zoo’s aquarium was also under a building with the ceiling only about 5-foot-high and extremely hot under the building and humid, and as mentioned a number of enclosures were quite small, but other than that I don’t have too many criticisms. Although we only arrived at the zoo around midday, we still had a very leisurely relaxed visit leaving just before closing time at 6 PM and then we took a tuktuk to the quite nearby Siam Paragon Mall where I would be able to visit the Sea Life Bangkok Oceanworld Aquarium. As the name would suggest, this is a Sea Life Centre so does have a number of the typical sea life enclosures and exhibits, but as you would expect with a sea life it’s all very well polished and nicely done though a bit lacking in character which is quite the opposite of Dusit. The entrance fee to the aquarium is also quite expensive, and the price is more in line with what you would pay at a large European aquarium rather than Thai prices Locals pay a cheaper price though. Most of the species held are fairly common aquarium species, but it was nice to enjoy the cool air conditioned aquarium after a long hot day at the zoo and there were a few highlight species such as the Chao Phraya River Stingray which was huge and a very large collection of sea horses with something like 6-8 species. Luckily the aquarium is open until 9 PM giving plenty of time to visit after the zoo. The mall that the aquarium is in, Siam Paragon Mall, was very fancy and I was distinctly out of place with big hiking boots, binoculars, cameras and a backpack whereas I looked like I was lacking in equipment in Kaeng Krachan.
Was there any white on it? I'm thinking possibly White-winged (Wood) Duck. The only other thing that comes to mind is either domestic Muscovey or a hybrid between Muscovey and conventional Mallarde-derived domestic duck. These hybrids are variable in colour, fly well, and seem to be able to survive in the wild (although it's a single generation thing as they are sterile).
there were at least fifteen, so a comparably-sized group. I'm guessing these were probably your first blue-rumped parrots? When I saw them at Dusit they were the first ones I'd ever seen.
I think you two must be right that the duck was a domestic, there don't seem to be any other possibilities.
Yep, my first ones. The yellow outline to the feathers stood out quite a lot making them very pretty little birds.
I'm back in Warsaw now and the trip is over, however I'm only about half way through the trip in writing posts for this thread so expect the remaining posts over the next couple of days. I have posted all species seen in the Big Year thread and I am hoping to post a full list in this thread at some point. Once I have written the remaining posts for here, I will start uploading some pictures, though I have already uploaded three pictures of amphibians that I am trying to identify here: Thailand - Wildlife - Photo Galleries | ZooChat
Birding in Bangkok - Muang Boran, Bang Poo, and Sri Nakhon Khuean Khan Park: For my second day in Bangkok, I wanted to visit some of the birding sites in the area so I managed to persuade my dad to drive me in the early morning to a place called the Muang Boran fishponds which is an area of semi-farmed land comprised of rotationally drained ponds near the cultural attraction of Muang Boran (Ancient City in Thai). Getting here is difficult, but I found out about this place on thaibirding.com using the directions from there. If you read that you will see that it’s quite complicated but we did manage to get there after going wrong a couple of times and made it there from the other side of Bangkok before 10 AM which isn’t too bad. However when we got to the very last thing described on the instructions “Turn left here and you are into the fishponds; congratulations!” there was a padlocked gate blocking the path right there and the locals around there said it was not possible to go in. At this point I should explain that the entire area of the fishponds is completely surrounded by informal settlements so although I believe the area is state owned, it is difficult to get access into the fishponds themselves because of all the people living around it and this way in was blocked and there was no way we were getting in here. So we decided to drive around to try and find another way in. The road goes fairly close to the fishponds all around but there is informal housing completely surrounding it between the ponds and the road. We managed to find a few areas with viewing into the area where I saw some quite nice birds like a pranticole and various other things, but the only path that we found that seemed promising giving access into the area was blocked by dogs at the end. After about two hours of doing this, I had managed to get a reasonable view at one of the ponds, but no access in despite driving completely around it so I thought I’d have to settle for that and at this point my mum and brother joined us with a taxi from Bangkok (although the fish ponds are obscure, the Ancient City next to it is easy to get to with a taxi) and once we had picked them up to try one last look around for access to the ponds, she asked at a random person’s house that backed on to the fish ponds if we could go through what was effectively their house to look at the birds, and they said yes. The young children probably thought it was odd that foreigners were walking past where they were playing in their house to go and look at birds, but I think everyone in that area thought it was rather odd. So I was finally in the fish ponds. Of course by this point it was really hot and there is very little shade around so I was in the full sun, but I still saw loads of stuff. There were huge numbers of crakes and rails, mostly White-browed Crakes but there was other stuff around as well as two species of jacanas and loads of herons/bitterns. There were also loads of small nondescript passerines around, often referred to by birders as little brown jobbies or LBJs including a variety of Acrocephalus warblers as well as Prinias and today was the only day on the trip where I really go sun burnt standing around trying to separate the near-identical warblers and identify all the LBJs. So although it was a shorter and hotter visit than I would have liked, I still saw quite a lot at Muang Boran and I would probably have seen even more with a longer morning visit. After this, we all went for lunch at a place called Bang Poo which is a general recreation area so has places to eat but with the added bonus of being a birding site with some mudflats and mangroves. I ate as quickly as I reasonably could to go out and do a bit of birding in the area on my own. There is a pier going out into the sea through some mangroves and mudflats as well as a few boardwalks going off to the sides (most of which were closed when I was there for some reason) and there were lots of Thais going up and down the pier but most just walked straight down to the end where there was a big building thing and many bought food from stalls along the way to feed to the gulls. There must have literally been thousands of Brown-headed Gulls around here being fed and although I didn’t spot any other species of gulls, there were large numbers of terns around most notably Chlidonias terns. More exciting though were the waders on the mudflats just by the pier, the tide was quite high pushing the waders right up to the edge of the mangroves and about half an hour after I got there the tide was fully in and all the waders flew off, but there were a few species around and many were not very shy despite the noise from people and I saw a number of interesting plovers as well as a small flock of Grey-tailed Tattlers that were a bit far off but flew overhead when the tide came in. The latter is supposed to be very exciting for birders, but in reality both species of sand plover, Pacific Golden Plover, and Kentish Plover all around the same place was more interesting. There were some nice birds around the mangroves too most notably an extremely showy Golden-bellied Gerygone but I didn’t spend a huge amount of time here because my family had finished lunch and there was one last birding site that I was hoping to visit on the other side of Bangkok that afternoon - Sri Nakhon Khuean Khan Park (or whatever variation of the English spelling you prefer). The drive here wasn’t too bad in terms of traffic by Bangkok standards and the Sat Nav that we were following to get there provided some excitement when it suddenly announced the message ‘in 700 metres, board the ferry’. Apparently it had decided that the quickest route to the park was with a car ferry across the Chao Phraya rather than the bridge. The ferry was fun though, and no more expensive than the cost of a toll to use any of the fast roads in Bangkok. Once I got to the park, I only had about an hour and a half to explore it before it closes at 5 PM, and there are three main birds to see here – Pink-necked Green-pigeon, Vinous-breasted Starling and Stork-billed Kingfisher. The former was easy to see all over the park including a small group in a tree right by the entrance, the starling took a bit more work but I managed to find a small group eventually (apparently they are easy to see first thing in the morning when they come out onto the open lawns) but sadly I didn’t manage to see any Stork-billed Kingfishers (though I did see some collareds). The park is very nice, and if I had more time I think a half day starting early in the morning would be great here. There is a bird tower looking over the canopy with some signage about wild birds advertising some nice species including a variety of woodpeckers but I didn't see any of them. Another particularly nice bird seen was a Chestnut-winged Cuckoo and the ponds in the park had loads of what looked like archerfish. Although it is called 'park and botanical gardens' only a small area is manicured lawns and most of it is wild with at least half of the park properly forested. We then headed back to the accommodation – taking a bridge rather than a ferry this time – and that was a day of birding around Bangkok. Doing all three sites in a day was a bit too much with travel time (and I didn’t account for wasting over two hours trying to get into Muang Boran in the morning) but not bad for birding around such a big city.
Bang Pra Non-hunting Area: The next day we were leaving Bangkok, however none of the rest of my family would get up early and there was nothing I could do in the early morning so I was forced to have another lie in – the second of two for the whole trip. Although I would have chosen to have been up at sunrise birding somewhere, I did sorely need a rest at this point. Once we were up and had breakfast, we headed to the next place that we were staying which was a two night stay in the Bang Pra/Khao Kheow Zoo area. Despite a somewhat later start, we made it to the accommodation before midday with time to spare and I would probably have been able to visit the aquarium in the nearby town of Bang Saen but it was a Monday and the aquarium is closed on Mondays so I didn’t have the opportunity to visit this aquarium – hopefully I didn’t miss anything too amazing. After checking in and having a late lunch, we went to visit the nearby Bang Pra lake which is a very large lake that has the Bang Pra Non-hunting Area around it where I wanted to go birding. Again, I got a lot of my information from the thaibirding.com website, however when it comes to facilities the description on that page is no longer accurate because the entrance area has been largely developed as a birding site with a small official entry fee to get in and a proper car park and what appeared to be a camping ground with toilet blocks at the entrance. That day I had about 4 to 5 hours of evening birding around Bang Pra and I saw quite a lot because there is a large diversity of habitats there. The place is a very large water-catchment lake which is fringed by grasslands, some of which are flooded, and the grasslands are further fringed by forest but rather than dense rainforest-type vegetation it quite open in the understory with a dense canopy. In many ways the area reminded me of Lake Nakuru (excluding the cliffs around the edge at Nakuru) in Kenya with a similar kind of forest but with trees that are closer together. When I started birding that day, it was still quite hot with the sun still high around 2PM so I started by birding in the shade of the forest. The most notable birds were Hoopoes – loads of them – and I saw more out in the grassland areas as well. There were various other birds in the woodland as well like barbets and there were signs about some of the birds with the hoopoes mentioned as well as Spotted Owlets which I didn’t manage to spot. Quite an interesting thing that I noticed here is that the trail leading out was signed as the ‘Birding Trail’, not bird watching or bird trail but using the word birding which is often only used by birders themselves who usually don’t like being called birdwatchers for whatever reason. I don’t think they get many people visiting here though, I wonder if anyone has ever stayed at the campsite and I imagine the only people visiting are the occasional birder and I didn’t see anyone apart from locals while I was there. Once the sun had lowered a bit and I had birded the forest area, I headed along the birding trail out into the grassland and open lake area. There were a few (domestic) water buffalo grazing around as well as some locals fishing but there were absolutely loads of birds as well ranging from water birds to open country grassland birds to reed/marsh birds and a few forest birds could be seen flying in and out of the forest. There were to many cool birds to name them all, my big year post from this day can be seen here 2017 Big Year and in addition to the new species seen there were lots of species I had seen already on the trip including ridiculous numbers of Asian Openbill Storks, hundreds, maybe thousands, as well as a couple of noticeably much larger and more impressive Lesser Adjutant Storks (apparently the adjutants originally escaped from Khao Kheow Zoo but are now a wild self-sustaining population and they could be found naturally wild in the area as well). Also especially exciting were the birds of prey and great views of Racket-tailed Treepies. As well as all the wild birding, I also got a view into the back of a private government-run waterbird breeding centre. There is no public access to this place (I tried), but the centre backs on to the non-hunting area and a number of aviaries can be seen from the birding trail. The species I could see in here were Painted Stork, Lesser Adjutant Stork, Black-necked Stork (presumably the Asian subspecies which I had not seen before) and most excitingly and conveniently in the most easily visible aviary from the path was Greater Adjutant. After the birding as it neared sunset, I left Bang Pra where as I was walking through the forest area on the way out I saw a Berdmore’s Ground Squirrel (there were also loads of Variable Squirrels in the trees) and some White-crested Laughingthrushes. After dinner, we went back to the accommodation where I had a look around at night with a torch because the owner said there were owls but I couldn’t find any and there were dogs barking nearby so I stopped and went to bed.
Khao Kheow Open Zoo: For my one full day in this area, I had my second zoo day of the trip to Khao Kheow Open Zoo. Before going to the zoo, I was unsure about how big the zoo actually is and how much a car is actually needed or whether it is still easy enough to do it on foot. They advertise themselves as the largest zoo in the world by area, and it seemed that the place is designed to be done by car, but I decided to try and do the zoo on foot anyway. The people at the entrance seemed a bit surprised that I wanted to go in on foot and I was told that the road around the zoo is 8 kilometres which is quite a lot in the humid, hot Thai weather but manageable. The alternatives to walking if you don’t have your own car are either taking the sightseeing bus-thing around the zoo which goes around slowly but doesn’t stop so you see what you can while you’re moving or you can hire a golf cart for 350 baht per hour (£8) which is quite a lot for a whole day particularly when considering Thai prices. So I did some of the zoo on foot and it clearly was not designed for someone to walk around since there were no pavements along the road between exhibits and you just had to walk along the road, all the signs were placed to be seen by cars, there were parking spots next to every exhibit, etc. It was manageable on foot for a while though, until I reached the first drive-through enclosure with signs telling people not to get out of their vehicles so pretty much making walking any further completely impossible since there were also no pathways to bypass it. Instead I had to ask my dad to drive me around the zoo so I did manage to see everything, however I couldn’t do it as slowly and linger at the exhibits for as long as I would have liked if I was by myself. Aside from the obvious annoyance about not being able to walk around the zoo, I did like it a lot. It is very well set up for cars and from a car it is well-polished because you don’t see or notice certain things on foot and a section of over 1km with no exhibits is not annoying when you’re driving. With very few exceptions, all of the enclosures and facilities looked very new and very aesthetically pleasing. I would say just about most were also very large and well done for the animals, though quite a large number looked pretty for the visitors but were too small or could have been done better for the animals such as the enclosures in the ‘Wildlife Wonderland’ exhibit and the cat complex which were quite small (especially considering the effectively unlimited available space that the zoo has) and I think a few enclosures had the illusion of being bigger than they actually were because of the natural looking environment surrounding it with the aim obviously being to make the enclosure look like it was part of the natural forest. I thought many enclosures were very good though, for example the Common Hippo enclosure and the big bird aviary. As far as the collection, if you compare the size of the collection to the area it will seem very small, but if you put all the enclosures next to each other and removed the huge amounts of unused space it’s not such a huge zoo and the collection is much more impressive. Khao Kheow has a large number of ABCs and all of the animals that the general public expects to see in a zoo, but in many cases they have large collections of different taxa most notably extensive bird and cat collections and the primate collection is not bad either with e.g. four species of gibbon. There are also quite a large number of unusual species at the zoo like Mainland Serow, Flat-headed Cat, Jungle Cat, Lesser Bird-of-paradise, Blue-rumped Parrot, Brown Hornbill, Greater Green Leafbird, Red-shanked Douc, etc. If I have time I might post a species list for Khao Kheow since I don’t believe there is one on the forum. One funny thing that I heard at the zoo that I thought was worth mentioning is that as a tour bus drove past the binturong cages I heard the driver refer to the animals held in these cages as ‘binturong as in Mr Bean’ (presumably giving the pronunciation because that’s how he pronounced it) which I just found quite funny.
