Great stuff as always, Wim!
Cheers,
Graham Buchan
On 19/03/2011, at 9:58 PM, Vader Willem Jan Marinus wrote:
>
>
> THREE WEEKS IN THAILAND 3. SHOREBIRDS
>
>
>
> After our return to Bangkok the next day would be the day of the shorebirds.
> We drove SSW out of Bangkok, close to the Gulf of Siam, through an area that
> now primarily seemed to be in use as salt-fields. Lots of people worked on
> the field, their most colourful clothes giving a bit of colour to the
> otherwise mostly black and white scenery; the people carried heavy loads of
> salt, seemingly just from A to B, often from a myriad of smaller piles to a
> much larger one. It was a hot day, and it must have been exceedingly hot and
> heavy work. Black-winged Stilts were very common here; their long legs allow
> them to exploit lagoons with more water than the other shorebirds.
>
>
>
> initially, at our first stop, I was somewhat disappointed, as most of the
> shorebirds here were far away, and we had to look at them throught the
> telescope. A new swiflet, German's Swiftlet, overhead, compensated: birders
> are never downhearted for long! But later when we walked along the narrow
> dams, and in to the area ourselves, we got much much better views, in the
> afternoon also in wonderful light. And this is a paradise for shorebirds!
>
>
>
> Large numbers of dainty Marsh Sandpipers, and the somewhat confusing Greater
> and Lesser Sandplovers dot the lagoons, Curlew Sandpipers stand to their
> bellies in the water, while Red-necked Stints dribble around and Kentish
> Plovers run around, often along the dikes. We had the great pleasure here of
> the assistance of local guru Mr Tee, who knows these lagoons like the back of
> his hand, and he knew also a place where we could find and admire one of the
> grand prizes of any Thailand trip, the enigmatic and rapidly decreasing
> Spoon-billed Sandpiper. Somehow I had expected these birds not to be quite so
> small as they turned out to be; but we could see them well, and admire their
> strange spoonbill at length. In my youth I have participated in Holland in
> annual camps studying 'Shorebirds and Bottom fauna' (where I was the
> bottomfauna specialist while my bird observations always were received with a
> cetain scepticism by my ornithologist colleagues), and I tried therefore hard
> to see, whether these birds used their very specialized-looking bill in any
> special way---but I could discover nothing of the kind: the birds seem to
> obtain most of their food by surface picking and very shallow drilling.
>
>
>
> Nor were these the only shorebirds here. I have never seen so many
> Broad-billed Sandpipers in one place, Great Knots were present in some
> numbers, somewhere a large flock of Eurasian Curlews flew in, and a little
> later a smaller flock of Terek Sandpipers whistled past. Common Greenshanks
> were indeed quite coomon., but Common Redshanks few and far between, even
> outnumbered by the still winter-pale Spotted Redshanks, as usual foraging in
> quite deep water. Here and there a Grey Plover, looking dispirited as always,
> a small group of the long-billed Barred Godwits, a lone Dunlin, already with
> its summer black-belly patch, and a few Ruffs, those still in full winter
> plumage. We also found one or two Turnstones and even a single Sanderling,
> far from its beloved sandy beaches
>
> Of special interest for me were the Long-toed Stints, which I only ever had
> seen on their breeding marshes in Siberia; they turned out to be quite easy
> to identify, darker and 'more upright' than the Red-necked Stints. And a
> completely new bird for me was Nordmann's Greenshank, a very light-coloured
> bird, and clearly different from the larger and sturdier Common Greenshank.
>
>
>
> Whiskered Terns and Brown-hooded Gulls were the common larids here, but there
> were also a few Little and Common Terns, and mr Tee found us even an
> immaculate Slender-billed Gull. White-throated and Collared Kingfishers
> hunted from the wires, and of course the salt ponds also hold the usual
> herons, egrets and pond-herons; here we saw our first Javan Pond Heron in
> almost summer plumage, and a Black-crowned Night Heron in one of the few
> mangrove stands left; these also held the sweet-voiced little songbird that
> one can call either the poetic Golden-bellied Gerygone or the definitely more
> prozaic Flyeater. A very dark Peregrine flew lazily overhead.
>
>
>
> We proceeded to an excellent seafood restaurant, where a dream came true for
> me, as they had a large tank with horseshoe crabs. I have since found that
> this is Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda, the Mangrove Horseshoe Crab, one of the
> only 4 species of extant horseshoe crabs, a group that are true 'living
> fossils', the rests of a once mighty and dominant animal group in the seas.
>
>
>
> We had still another adventure to come this day, a boat trip to the by now
> famous sandspit of Laem Pak Bin. We started through the mangroves, not
> finding any rails, but in an area full of fiddler crabs, large mangrove crabs
> and mud skippers. As soon as we came out of the mangrove, we found many
> egrets on a mudbank, one of them an unmistakable representative of the quite
> uncommon Chinese Egret, again one of the birds everybody had hoped to see
> here. A lone Whimbrel also added to the impressive day list of shorebirds. We
> motored on to the sandspit, where a large group of loafing terns contained
> both Crested, Lesser Crested and Caspian Terns. Crested Terns followed our
> boat and hunted the small fish (probably Halfbeaks Hemirhamphus, that
> skittered over the surface in the shallower areas). On the sandbank itself,
> where I as always was heavily distracted by all the shells, Sepia-shields and
> other marine animals (Once a marine biologist , always a marine biologist),
> all attention otherwise was on the famous plovers of this sandspit, the
> uncommon Malaysian Plover and the only recently rediscovered White-faced
> Plover Charadrius dealbatus. These were duly found, and we could admire them
> in peace. Sanderlings ran along the waterline, and a few Eastern Reef Herons
> completed our heron list.
>
>
>
> A very rich and long day, ending at the most luxurious hotel of the entire
> trip, in Hue Bin (Even so, we all got a present in our rooms, with the
> cmanagement's excuses for not having us in an even more luxurious place!)
>
>
>
> The last bit will be about the Kaen Krachang park, our last experience.
>
>
>
> Wim
> Vader, Tromsø Museum
>
>
> 9037 Tromsø, Norway
>
>
> <>
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