birds in the fish ponds

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As mentioned previously I haven't been doing much in Thailand. The total for the last almost-a-month has been a short trip to Khao Yai, two visits to the Chatuchak Weekend Market, a visit to the Dusit Zoo, a morning birding at Rot Fai park, and a failed attempt to get to another local park. I am almost embarrassed. It is like I am letting down the whole birding-mammaling-adventuring side. I am heading off to Assam in a few days time, so I made an attempt today to actually get out and find some birds. The spot I was aiming for was the Muang Boran fish ponds which are just south of main Bangkok (I think they are actually still in Bangkok – it's hard to tell where the city ends).

I had two sets of directions to get to the fish ponds. The first was from Nick Upton's awesome website, but his directions start from the side of the road. See here http://thaibirding.com/locations/central/muang_boran.htm for more particulars, but basically it says the site is near Muang Boran (the Ancient City) and you take a motorbike taxi from beside the footbridge, which is all well and good but it doesn't say which footbridge – there are only about a dozen of them! So I found the following blog by another birder (http://redgannet.blogspot.com/2013/02/muang-boran-fish-ponds-bangkok-feb2013.html) which makes it more specific – from the entrance bridge to the Ancient City (now called Ancient Siam by the way) you continue on along the motorway for about 500 metres to where there is a pedestrian overpass (not the one directly after the Ancient City bridge but the next one) and the bridge next to that is the one you want – and it is an actual vehicle bridge I discovered when I got there, not just a footbridge. I like blogs and websites that are very specific because it makes it so much easier, and that's why I tend to put so much possibly-irrelevant information in my posts, just in case someone is googling to find out something specific and finds my writings useful. And of course with the way I like to travel I make loads of mistakes (on purpose.....) so that I can help others not make those mistakes!

So, anyway, I took RedGannet's advice and rather than taking a taxi all the way from central Bangkok I rode the skytrain to the southernmost station of Bearing and got a taxi from there. Muang Boran is only about 14km or so from the Bearing station so it also cuts down on your taxi fare. It will be getting even easier and cheaper too, because there is currently an extension being built to the skytrain system, running from Bearing almost all the way to Muang Boran! I would guess at it being completed by next year, perhaps even late this year. The driver took me straight to Muang Boran no problem (I had written the name down in Thai in my notebook) and I got him to drop me off at the overpass further up the road where I got a motorbike taxi. I had memorised the directions, and also written it down from both websites, but I still managed to get turned around. Nick's site has a little map – over the bridge, turn left directly after the apartments (my extra note: the apartments are green and the road you take to the left has an archway over it), then follow that road round to a little village and the next motorbike taxi stand – but neither set of instructions is particularly clear about where to go once you hit the village if you can't speak to the driver. We stopped by some women and I mimed looking for birds using my binoculars and showing them my bird book – after all, the only foreigners ever to come through this village are birders so they should know where I'm going. They sure did know, but it wasn't this place I wanted, it was somewhere “over that way” (pointing) and they told my driver where to take me. Off we went again, back to the main road, and I'm thinking despite the directions fitting it must actually be the next bridge I was supposed to take – but instead we ended up at Bang Poo which is another birding site just up the road. I hadn't been intending to go here because it is primarily a wader site and I don't have a scope, and it was high tide so apart for hundreds of brown-headed gulls and whiskered terns (and some plain-backed sparrows on the verge) there wasn't a lot visible. If I had bothered to pay attention to the details of Nick's Bang Poo page I would have seen that at high tide the waders are in some pools just by the entrance road but I hadn't and instead got the driver to take me all the way back to where we started, and back to the village. This time we got lucky and found a taxi driver there who did know exactly the way when I showed him the binoculars and bird book. I can't give any specific directions myself unfortunately, and there's lots of little streets in the village.

The fish ponds are a mix of open ponds (shallow and deep), reedbeds, and dry fields. Some of them look like rice fields rather than fish ponds. There's a main dirt track and then various foot-tracks on the bunds around the ponds, so lots of places to watch birds from. Also there are lots of dogs. Lots of dogs! There are little huts dotted about the place and all of them have between one and five or more dogs, all of which are very barky indeed. None of them seemed to be bitey to go along with the barking, but whenever I've got a pack of five dogs coming onto the path, all looking very nasty, I prefer not to tempt them! Nick Upton says on his site that 70 or 80 bird species can be got in a day here. I got just under 50 but amongst them were both the species I really wanted to see here so that was all good (bronze-winged jacana and white pigmy goose, with bonus watercocks). Of course there were a lot that went unidentified because I didn't get to see them well enough or because they were warblers! I'm pretty sure I saw a couple of ruddy-breasted crakes flushing up from the reeds but they weren't well enough seen, and there were lots of little crakes flushing from beside one bund which I think must have been Baillon's crakes but again I couldn't be certain. Most of the species I have already seen this trip though.

The first pond, to your right when on the main dirt track, is pretty large and has loads of vegetation. There were many barn swallows and whiskered terns hawking for insects here, but I only saw one definite white-winged black tern all morning. Lots of intermediate and great egrets as well as purple herons and unidentifiable pond herons, little grebes, common moorhens, Indian and little cormorants, lesser whistling ducks, and pheasant-tailed jacanas. I was really happy to see pheasant-tailed jacanas for the first time at Lake Inle in Burma and here they were even more common, but even better were the bronze-winged jacanas which I now think are even nicer. Both species were very abundant. Also in this first pond was the other species I particularly wanted to see, the white pigmy goose, which is a dainty little goosey-looking duck. I got a glimpse of what must have been a watercock, another bird I wanted to see, but I had to wait a bit longer to get a proper view later in the morning.

On the other side of the track is a narrow water-filled ditch and beyond that more ponds. In those were cattle egrets, a couple of black-winged stilts, and I got a short view of a flying cinnamon bittern (which actually is the colour of cinnamon). There were lots of bitterns around this morning: I saw several cinnamon bitterns and even more yellow bitterns. In the trees and reeds here and elsewhere were common ioras, golden weavers, black-headed munias, pied fantails, koels, zebra doves, pied starlings, zitting cisticolas, striated grass warblers, Oriental reed warblers, and loads of plain and yellow-bellied prinias. In ponds further along were flocks of black-winged stilts and cattle egrets. I saw one marsh sandpiper but there were a lot of other waders too far away to tell what they were through the binoculars. Grey-headed lapwings and white-browed crakes seemed really common too.

So, a good morning for me. I like the ones where I see lots of birds and nothing goes too wrong!! Maybe I should go birding more often.....

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