Kalaw (not birds galore)

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The buses from Mandalay to Kalaw leave between 7 and 8pm. There don't appear to be any daytime buses, which is a bit silly. The ride takes eight hours which means you arrive in Kalaw at 3am, which is even sillier. Once again the bus had its air-conditioning on as cold as it would possibly go. This time there were blankets though: it is like the operators are acknowledging that setting the air-con to “permafrost” is beyond human endurance but they have the ideal solution to it. Just as ridiculous is that the bus left Mandalay in the evening but at 11.30pm, right after everybody had finally managed to get to sleep, they stopped at a roadside restaurant for “dinner” and nobody was allowed to stay on the bus. So for half an hour everyone just stood around outside the bus trying to stay warm, because of course everyone had already eaten dinner before going to the bus station in the first place!

Once in Kalaw I found a place called Pineland Inn just near to where the bus stopped. I got a room for US$12 for the first three nights (including the night/morning I arrived) and then for the fourth night there was an “economy room” available for US$7. I had booked ahead for Mandalay but I didn't bother for Kalaw because I had read a newspaper article while in Mandalay which said that there were record high tourist numbers this season for Mandalay and Bagan, but extremely low numbers for Kalaw and Lake Inle. Kalaw is just a small village and as far as I can make out the sole reason regular tourists go there is because it is the accepted practice when doing the tourist route of Burma to go “trekking” from Kalaw to Lake Inle (and for those not into walking long distances, they go simply because it is “the route”). Lake Inle is only about two hours by bus from Kalaw so it isn't a great distance (88km by road to be precise). There are two ways to do the “trek” – two days and one night, or three days and two nights. Either way, each day is only four or five hours walking and you sleep in local monasteries; and you're not even carrying anything, so it's pretty tame. However I'm not into trekking (or “casual strolling” as I would term that walk) unless there's a bird or a marbled cat at the end of it. The reason birders go to Kalaw is that there is a reservoir outside town surrounded by forest, which is one of the most easily-accessible hill forests left in Burma.

Because of the way night buses operate, even though you arrive early in town you need to sleep so I didn't get started in the morning until quite late. The Yay Ayekan Forest Reserve (around the reservoir) is 6km out of town apparently but the taxi prices in Burma are usually stupidly expensive so I didn't think it worth it to go up there for only half the day. Instead I left it with the owner of my guesthouse to find out the price of a motorbike for me for the next morning, then went for a long walk out of the village to try and find some birds. Kalaw was much hotter during the day than I was expecting and almost all the birds I saw were common species I had seen numerous times already in Burma and elsewhere. New for the trip were only a nice flock of black-collared starlings and some sooty-headed bulbuls.

The next morning I left the guesthouse at 6.30am to get up to the forest by 7am. The price for the motorbike wasn't anywhere near as great as I feared, being only 4000 kyat one way (about NZ$5) and 6000 if he was to come back later to pick me up. My plan though was to get the ride up there to save time and let me know the route, and then walk back. About half the route over the hills outside town was a very rough narrow walking track of hardened clay cut through with rain-worn channels and holes, which didn't make for a pleasant ride, and the second half was mostly a road paved with broken rocks which also was not pleasant to travel on. The last part of the road was through broadleaf forest for maybe a kilometre or two, and then we reached the reservoir which turned out to be more like three connected lakes formed from damming a stream in several places. There is supposed to be a walking track running right around the reservoir through the forest but I'm not sure I found it. This first visit I got maybe halfway round, going very slowly and making some detours, and it didn't seem like I was anywhere near the end so I retraced my path because I still had the walk back to town to do before dark. The second visit I went round the reservoir in the opposite direction to see if I would connect with the path I had been on the day before (because I wasn't entirely convinced it was actually going in the right direction) and somehow ended up on a very wide dirt road completely not where I was supposed to be. I followed it for a bit anyway to see where it led (only past farmland) then made a cross-country hack through the forest over the hill to get back to the reservoir.

Some people come to Kalaw and leave with a big long bird list. I am not one of those people. While it was pretty hot during the day, it gets very cold at night and in the morning when I arrived the forest was shrouded in mist and the trees were all dripping as if it was raining. There was a common kingfisher catching his breakfast at the edge of the reservoir. After that there was a lot of nothing, barely even any birds calling. I often find that birds in mountain and hill forest are slow to wake up in the morning, perhaps because of the cold, so I'm thinking that things will get underway soon enough and it will be like Bukit Fraser or Mt. Kerinci with birds everywhere. No. There was a mountain bulbul in one spot, then when I came out into an open bit there was a tree across the way with a couple of ashy drongos, a bronzed drongo, and some minivets which I thought were probably scarlets but they were too far off to tell. I found a side-path going up a hill so took that for a while to see what was up there and found a singing dark-backed sibia, a flock of black-crested bulbuls, a white-throated fantail with a flock of little twittering things I couldn't identify at all, and on the way back to the main path a couple of grey-headed canary-flycatchers in with a bunch of warblers (I don't even bother trying to identify most of the warblers any more – they all look the same to me!). I stopped for second breakfast and was visited by a male black-throated sunbird and in some nearby trees I spotted some white-browed scimitar-babblers and a male hill blue flycatcher. There was an Oriental honey buzzard in the sky which was new for me (by virtue of me being useless at identifying birds of prey so I only count them if I get really good looks or can confirm from photos). A bit later in the day things did pick up when I found a great bird wave in one spot in which I managed to see white-browed shrike-babblers, black-naped monarchs, bar-winged flycatcher-shrikes, scarlet minivets, common tailorbirds, grey-hooded fulvettas, lesser racquet-tailed drongos and greater yellownape woodpeckers. (You might notice many of these are the same species I was seeing at Bukit Fraser so not a lot of increase in the total for the trip list). Apart for that one really good bit everything else in the day was in dribs and drabs. There were some velvet-fronted nuthatches and a grey treepie in the trees, and two common buzzards in the sky overhead. The only mammal for the day was a Himalayan striped squirrel (same as at Bukit Fraser), which I managed to get some photos of.

The second day I found some of the same birds and some different ones. This time I arrived in the early morning as yesterday, but I had brought my torch and arranged for a pick-up at 9pm to allow me a few hours of spot-lighting. The forest there looked good for slow loris and civets at the least. Maybe even some wild cats. This was the only night I tried spot-lighting in Burma (in most places it just seemed a bit pointless) and I found nothing. Not even an owl calling. I said earlier how I had come out into farmland when walking round the lake – I might be wrong but I think the forest here is basically a little island surrounded on all sides by cultivation and dry scrub so there wouldn't be anything larger here (like clouded leopard etc).

Bird-wise, on that second morning I found a fantastic spot right before reaching the reservoir where there was a lot of activity, especially from bulbuls. I finally worked out what the flavescent bulbuls were (only took me two days!) and there were also red-vented, red-whiskered, black-crested and ashy bulbuls, as well as velvet-fronted nuthatches (in a flock! What's with that?), yellow-cheeked tits, scarlet minivets, blue-winged minlas, long-tailed sibias, and a couple of large cuckoo-shrikes. There was also a small entirely-brown squirrel on the base of a tree but I didn't get a good look at it before it vanished; might have been a Dremomys. For the rest of the day there wasn't much to tell, although I got really good views of a pair of puff-throated babblers when I heard something searching through dead leaves off the path and stood for ages in silence waiting for them to emerge, which they did and then foraged along the edge of the path. Lovely wee things. In the very late afternoon I saw my third squirrel species for the day (the others being the unidentified brown one and Himalayan striped squirrel) when I watched a Phayre's squirrel through my binoculars on the other side of a gully. Really nice squirrel that one! Wish I could have got some photos.

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