Hanging Around in Bangkok and Some Field Guide Discussion

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It's been a few days since I last posted a blog, primarily because I haven't been doing anything particularly blogable. I've mainly been getting a few jobs done where I'm staying at my aunt's house. There are a couple of things I would do in Bangkok, namely the snake farm and insect park, but the issue is that I'm staying quite far from the city and in an area that makes it difficult and time consuming to get in to the city. I've got no immidiate access to public transport and getting a taxi in Bangkok is cheap enough but getting in to the city takes literally hours and sitting in traffic for hours is extremely slow and frustrating. If I was really bothered, what I would have to do is actually go and stay in accommodation in the city centre to do things in Bangkok but I'm not all that fussed, and it feels like too much work. Lots of nice fruit around here though, I bought almost 3kgs of mangosteens the other day which I’ve just about eaten all of. (mangosteens have a lot of shell, so that’s not as insane an amount of fruit as you might think)



The other thing that I would have done is visit Khao Yai National Park for a few nights. This is doable, you can get a bus and then a songtheaw and then you have to hitch the last bit into the national park itself - apparently quite easy - and it's cheap to camp in the National Park. However, I went to Khao Yai went I visited Thailand in April of last year and I feel like I did it quite well then so don’t have a desperate urge to go back. I would quite like to go and try and find a Bengal Slow Loris so that I could make it a four-loris trip, but I saw a Bengal at Khao Yai last year, so I’ll just have to accept four species of slow loris in two years. Poor old me.



I’ve also started uploading a few pictures to ZooChat, plenty more to come, and hopefully I’ll get around to putting some up on the travelblog site too where I intend to add some more scenery and non-wildlife type pictures in addition to the photos of animals that I’ll be putting on ZooChat. I don’t know if I will get around to doing all of that stuff though, because once I return to Warsaw I’ll have less than three weeks before I’m heading off again, this time to start university in the UK. (and there obviously won’t be a blog, I don’t think there are many slow lorises in Oxford. Even with my loris abilities, I think I’d struggle. Well, there might be some specimens actually but that’s not the point I’m getting off topic. It’s not easy to pad these out to thirty minutes)



Originally, I had my flight booked to return to Warsaw on the 13^th, that’s Thursday. However due to some complicated issues where I am, I have had to change that and I’m now flying back on the 10^th, which is Monday. It’s unlikely that I would have done much on those three extra days anyway, so it’s not really a big deal but it means I’m flying back the day after tomorrow.



Tomorrow, though, if all goes to plan I’ll be doing a nice all-day birding day trip to round off. So that should be good and expect a blog post on that, and then I’ll be flying back on Monday morning. Of course expect a blog from the flight home because where else would I write my random nonsense about planes? My field guide should just about make it through one more day of birding, but if the trip was going on for much longer, I would genuinely be buying a new Birds of South East Asia field guide because of how utterly wrecked mine is.



So a couple more blog posts and I also intend to do a roundup post of the complete costs and also species seen over the whole trip. I was going to include this at the start of my next proper post, but I’ve managed to turn what should be a couple of sentences into a post over 600 words long so I’ll just post this.



While I’m here though, I thought I’d include a little bit of field guide discussion because that’s always fun. Some of you may be aware that there’s a new field guide out for Thailand. I haven’t actually seen it yet, but I’m already highly critical of the concept and it’s ok I’m British so I’m allowed to have strong opinions about things I don’t know enough about. I will probably get the book eventually, although it does cost 60 euros.



The current bird field guide for Thailand is the Robson one, which is the same as the Robson guide for South East Asia just with the non-Thai birds removed and this is the guide that I’ve got and I’ve been using. It’s quite good, I’ve got the ‘concise edition’ so it’s incredibly compact and it’s by far the most compact but still effective field guide I’ve ever used. It is getting a bit out of date though – the taxonomy really is dire in parts – and it is a bit out of date. There is a new field guide though, the Lynx and Birdlife Field Guide to the Birds of Thailand and it’s the first in a new series of field guides being published by Lynx and Birdlife and they’re due to be a series of field guides that all match and are compatible which is theoretically I good idea I think. The next one to be publish is for Vietnam and I do really like how they’ve done the covers. There are a few interesting and novel features: they’ve separated the subspecies ranges on the map and the text and plates do look very neat. However, based on size and weight information, they’re unusable in the field. They’re also being published in hard back, hopefully a paperback version would be to come, but they’re still unusable.



Then some ridiculous things: next to each species account is a QR code that links to images from the internet bird collection. What is the point of that? What birder decided that a very useful thing they would like in the field is a QR code linking to images. If you have the ability to scan a QR code and load some online images, you are able to google it in far less time. Pointless. And a big thing with this new Birdlife and Lynx series of books is that they are all ‘consistent’ with taxonomy by using Birdlife’s taxonomy. Which is quite possibly the least consistent checklist of all the large ones available, it’s really splitty in some areas and lumps heaps in others.



I really like the guides in theory, but I don’t see what they’re actually for. They’re not efficient compact field guides that you would carry around in a backpack. Are they trying to be a home refence? If that’s what they’re trying to do then that’s what they should go all out on and they shouldn’t call themselves field guides. And while I think there is certainly a need for field guides to use in the field, I’m not sure whether there really is a need for field guides that sit at home, especially for birds with the online hbw.com and I would rather the information and work put into field guides like that be put in to HBW Alive to make it even better.



Thoughts? Has anyone actually got the book? (yet)



For reference:

https://www.lynxeds.com/catalog/lynx-birdLife-international-field-guides

https://www.lynxeds.com/product/birds-thailand-0

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