A Bat Temple and a Parrot Zoo

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There wasn't enough yesterday to do a full blog post, much of the day was spent chilling since I'm staying with my aunt in her house on the outskirts of Bangkok (the Suvarnabhumi Airport side for anyone who knows Bangkok) I've got a nice room and I don't need to worry about spending too much money sitting around doing nothing.





Most of the day yesterday felt like it was spent sitting in traffic in Bangkok as we went into the city. Primarily so that I can get a suit tailor made which I am doing because getting a tailor made suit in Thailand is a comparable price to an off the peg suit from a cheap discount clothes shop in Europe.



At this point, just imagine that clip from Monty Python's parrot sketch is playing: "this is irrelevant isn't it? Well yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to thirty minutes"



Today, however, my aunt and I went on a part-day trip (until 2:30) to the nearby town of… Chachoengsao. Good luck pronouncing that (it’s actually not as bad as it looks once you’ve heard it). I certainly won’t be spelling it out again. The cheap way to get to the aforementioned town from Bangkok is to get a train and from there try and use Songtheaws to get a rode. This is a common mode of public transport which can also function like a shared or private taxi in Thailand which are pickup trucks with covered backs and a bench on either side for passengers. However, we used a private vehicle and are on the right side of Bangkok for going there anyway.



However, to get out of where we are involves going on a notoriously bad road called Ramkamhaeng, bad for traffic that is. And there is also construction going on there. headed out in the morning and sat in the traffic waiting to joing the road for almost an hour. But the road was clearly girdlocked for quite a way and it would have taken a minimum of three hours to cover about 1km to get out of the traffic, so ended up going a completely different way (i.e. completely the wrong direction) to avoid trafffic which added about 30 mins of driving, but definitely saved time.



So Chachoengsao is about an hour's drive away without traffic and there were two places that we were visiting today, as suggested by the title. A bat-infested temple which had been recommended to me and a bird zoo that I had never heard of but my aunt had been to and suggested, and they're only about 7km from each other.



The bat temple is a place called Wat Pho Bang Khla, in the smaller town of Bang Khla just outside Chachoengsao, and the interesting thing (for me) here is a massive colony of Lyle's Flying Foxes that roosts in the trees around the temple. I knew it was going to be a big colony, but wow. That's a lot of bats!



There were easily several thousand bats in the trees all around the temple, several hundred metres in each direction of trees all filled with the flying foxes. Extremely impressive. I'm pretty sure it's the biggest flying fox colony I've seen, it seemed quite a bit bigger than those I've seen in Australia.



There was of course the usual large amount of bat noise that you get with these large colonies of flying foxes, but it wasn't the highest density of them I've ever seen so it was hardly deafening like some colonies I've seen in Australia, they just filled trees going on for quite a way. Despite it being almost ten by the time we were there, there were still lots of bats flying around between the different trees which was really impressive and a lot of bats were fanning their wings too, which was cool. Quite a nice backdrop to have the big bat colony, in a buddhist temple surrounded by all the temple buildings. Because it's a buddhist temple, the animals in it are totally protected and won't be harmed by anyone, so the bats are all really conspicious and easily out and visible all across the temple.



Also of interest, in one of the trees there I saw a Freckle-breasted Woodpecker which was actually a lifer. A very cool temple with a massive bat colony, very nice to see,



Once we had looked at the bats for a while, we headed to our next spot. This was the bird zoo about 7km away called Suan Palm Farm Nok which translates from the thai as Palm Park Bird Farm. It is primarily a large collection of parrots, and appears to be the private collection of a - presumably extremely wealthy - individual that has been opened for visitors.



There is a sign at the entrance that self-proclaims them as "one of the largest parrot zoos in the world" (with broken grammar, but I forget exactly how it was broken). In standard zoo-nerd fashion when zoos claim things like that, the response is to think 'yeah right'. But amazingly, I wonder if they're actually on to something...



The collection, in terms of number of species as well as number of individuals of particular species (think several dozen Hyacinth Macaws. Yes, clearly very wealthy) is really quite astonishing. The zoo itself exhibit wise is very private collection ish. There are some nice grounds with water features and lots of palm trees, but all of the birds are in cheap wire mesh type cages which would not pass in a traditional zoo. Mesh boxes with some wooden perches and nest boxes. However, while aesthetically (and also for photography purposes) awful, all of the enclosures were awful, the vast majority of birds were very healthy looking and well kept. In fact, they all were with the exception of one area with sick birds which I wasn't supposed to go in but all the signs were in Thai and you can claim 'farang ignorance'. Apart from two free-flight aviaries, all of the enclosures were small, although the vast majority would pass as acceptable in a European bird zoo, I'm not talking parrots in a budgie cage at all. In fact, if they were decorated and looked zoo-exhibit ish they wouldn't look unacceptable, but they're purely functional and private collection-ish. In fact, they're exactly the sort of cages you might get in a behind the scenes breeding area for parrots.



In terms of breeding, as the 'farm' suggests, they do breed a lot of birds. There's a building with incubators behind glass and there must have been at least two dozen eggs in active and turned on incubators, and that explains the large numbers of individuals for certain taxa, especially the large macaws. I don't think I've seen a collection with that many Blue-and-gold, Green-winged, Scarlet, or Hyacinth Macaws before. Also insanely large numbers of African Greys, Eclectus (multiple subspecies, but I still need to check them - signage was limited), and Rose-ringed Parakeets. With the latter, there were an insane number of different mutations.



The vast majority of cages held a pair of birds with a nest box. Presumably breeding pairs or attempts at breeding pairs. However, I've been skirting the real amazing part of the place, the collection. It seems like a person, my guess would be a wealthy Thai, has decided they would like some parrots. And that they would like ALL the parrots. And in Thailand, with enough money and enough determination, if you want all the parrots, you get ALL the parrots.



The zoo was divided taxonomically (ish) into various groupings of parrots: Large Macaws, Small (Medium) Macaws, Conures, Amazons, Lories, assorted smaller parrots (various African species, Monks, Blue-rumpeds, caiques, that sort of thing), and cockatoos.



The cockatoo section really impressed me. One species of Black-cockatoo (+heaps of palm cockatoos, at least twenty individual Palm Cockatoos), Galahs and Major Mitchells, the Pesquet's parrot was here for some reason, but what was really impressive were the white cockatoos. I've never seen that many species of white cockatoo (corellas, etc.) in one collection before. It seems that this private collector just decided: right, I want white cockatoos now. And then got them.



In terms of other birds, there is quite an impressive collection of pheasants as well, some peacock pheasants, Bornean Fireback, and an interesting little row of aviaries with a few different subepecies of Silver and Khalij Pheasant which shows how the plumage of those two species varies. There’s a wide variety of domestic peafowl mutations too, as well as a few different waterfowl, Victoria Crowned-pigeon, Eagle Owl and three species of hornbill. There were a couple of mammals too: some domestics, a paddock with Chital and Rusa, and a row of enclosures containing squirrels. Both Black and Cream-coloured Giant and some odd looking squirrels ranging from white to maroon which I think were all subspecies of variable.



The thing that really amazed me was that I hadn’t heard of this place. And I don’t think there is any mention of it on ZooChat at all. It’s not a massive world-class zoo or anything, but it’s quite an impressive parrot collection. Not the world’s biggest or anything, but significant. I would definitely recommend doing a combined bat temple + parrot zoo day around Chachoengsao, although doing so as an independent traveler would probably require hiring a taxi or songthaew from Chachoengsao station to drive you to and between the places and wait, which I guess would cost 800 baht-ish, you should be able to get it for less than 1000 from Chachoengsao, more from Bangkok, which would be a significant cost for a budget traveller in Thailand. We spent a few hours at Farm Nok (nok is bird in Thai, pronounced something like rhyming with look) which was very enjoyable, great collection. I could have spent longer there, and I would recommend four hours to look around it all at a slow pace, then headed back.



Although much of the day had been over cast, the heavy rain didn’t start until the late afternoon after we got back. On the drive in the fields and rice paddies and such there were loads of birds, a dramatic contrast to Vietnam. There were loads of egrets and openbill storks and jacanas and mynas and rollers and weavers just everywhere. The fields in Thailand seemt to be full of birds, and in Vietnam you’d have absolutely none at all in roadside fields like that.



Overall, an excellent combination of locations to visit as a day trip from Bangkok. Ideally, I will do a species list for Farm Nok (on ZooChat), but I don’t know if I will get around to it. Most birds were unsigned so I will have to check IDs.



The next blog post likely won’t be for a few days, possibly not until Sunday. I’ll be in Bangkok mainly just relaxing. I’ve been eating a lot of Salak fruit which is weird because it’s mainly an Indonesia fruit, but I like the stuff.



New mammal:



Lyle’s Flying Fox



New Bird:



Freckle-breasted Woodpecker

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