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Published: February 10th 2009
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I was up at 5:00 AM for a 5:45 pick up by the Sam Veasna Center. It was me, the guide, a Khmer guide, two Canadians, a Portuguese, and a Rastamerican. We drove out to a river in a van, then boarded a standard tourist boat. We took this boat past floating villages, up to a more major floating village to present ourselves for permission, then across Tonle Sap Lake and through a private fishing lot to a river on the other side. There we progressed for about an hour and transferred to three shallow-draft wooden boats, each poled by a guide, roped together and propelled at times by little outboard motors on the first two boats.
These motors were quickly fouled by water hyacinth stems and needed to bee cleared, and the water hyacinths and encroaching branches chopped out. The water level changes tremendously at different times of the year; many of the trees had vegetable muck dried 10 or 15 feet up in their branches. It's the dry season, so the low water made for narrow channels and necessitated the use of a machete at times.
We had to walk the last 50 meters or so in
ankle- to above-the-knee-high water. It was actually easier to do carefully with bare feet, since sandals stuck in the sucking mud, there to remain forever. We reached a platform pretty high up in a tree and ascended to see one of the breeding colonies in the Prek Toal Core area. After lunch, we descended, walked back to the little boats, returned to the big boat, crossed the lake.... You get the picture.
Those were the mechanics. Here's the part that will make Marcia want to visit Cambodia. I saw
*Asian open-billed stork (Anastomus oscitans)
*Barn swallow (Riparia paludicola)
*Black-capped kingfisher (Halcyon pileata)
*Black drongo (Dicruris macrocercus)
*Black-headed ibis (Threskiornis melanocephalus)
*Blue-tailed bee-eater (Merops phillipinus)
*Brahminy kite (Haliastur indus)
*Brown-headed gull (Laurus brunnicephalus)
*Chinese pond heron (Ardeola bacchus)
*Common kingfisher (Alcedo atthis)
*Darter (Anhinga melanogaster)
*Eurasian treesparrow (Passer montanus)
*Great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo)
*Great egret (Ardea alba)
*Greater coucal (Centropus sinensis)
*Grey-headed fish eagle (Icthyophaga icthyaets)
*Grey heron (Ardea cinerea)
*Indian cormorant (Phalacrocorax fuscicollis)
*Intermediate egret (Ardea intermedia)
*Large-billed crow (Corvus macrorhynchus)
*Lesser adjutant (Leptoptilos javanicus)
*Little cormorant (Phalacrocorax niger)
*Little egret (Egretta garzetta)
*Little grebe (Tachybaptus ruficollis)
*Purple heron (Ardea purpurea)
*Purple swamphen (Porphyrio porphyrio)
*Rufus-bellied
woodpecker (Dendrocopos hyperthrus)
*Spot-billed duck (Anas poecilorhyncha)
*Spot-billed pelican (Pelecanus philippensis)
*Whiskered tern (Chlidonias hybridus)
*White-vented myna (Acridothere grandis)
*Yellow bittern (Ixobrychus sinensis)
*Yellow-vented bulbul (Pycnonotus goiavier)
Do look up photos of these birds. Some are endangered or have only a very small range. I was especially please to see the blue-tailed bee-eater (common, but I've never seen one, and very elegant), the black-headed ibis, and the darter. We saw only one or two of some of these (like the rufus-bellied woodpecker), but hundreds upon hundreds of some, like the darter, cormorants, and whiskered tern. Around 5 other birds were spotted by other people, but I was in the back boat on the way out and missed a few.
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Marcia
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birds!
greater, lesser, elegant, little, intermediate, immature, mature, least: they're all good!