Second Kaeng Krachan Day - with a Professional Bird Guide this Time!

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My second day in Kaeng Krachan involved a very early start with a guide and we were leaving Baan Maka (after having had breakfast) at 5:30, so I set an alarm for 4:45 which is quite early even for birding standards and especially early for my brother who is sharing the room. Our guide appeared just before 5:30 as we were finishing breakfast in a big 4x4 pickup truck to take us into the national park. Throughout the day, the guide proved to be very good at spotting birds and identifying birds especially by their calls. His English was very poor, but we managed well by gesturing pointing at guide books and with translations from my mum, and getting a guide proved to be a very good decision especially since we would have hired a 4x4 to get to the top camp anyway because the road is terrible.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself here (you can tell I haven’t thought about what I’m writing, can’t you? ), we got the guide and headed into the national park and one of the very first things we saw was a golden jackal running along the road ahead of us for a bit before disappearing into the trees at the side. We didn’t stop on the drive up and drove straight up to the top camp, though when we saw some birds at the side we just stopped the car randomly in the middle of the road to have a look, because that’s what you do on tiny winding narrow dirt roads on the edge of a cliff apparently. Particularly awesome was hearing the traditionally farmyard sound of roosters calling at sunrise in the middle of the rainforest miles from anything from the red junglefowl.

It took quite a while to get up to the top of the road, but it was still early when we go to the higher camp (which is around 1000 metres in altitude and that is quite high considering the see is not very far away really). Before starting to look around for birds, I went to the toilet and was startled when coming out of the toilet to see a Yellow-throated Marten sitting there a few metres away! We then looked around the area with the guide seeing loads of cool birds like barbets, etc. and also heard the amazing dawn chorus of gibbons while looking across the mountains. After birding the camp, we drove back down a bit and stopped all along the way to look for birds which the guide was great at pointing with things ranging from trogons to Banded Kingfishers to hanging parrots and there were a couple of heard-only things too like Green Magpie and Brown Hornbill. There was an awesome gliding squirrel too. We soon came up to a group of bird photographers (who happen to also be staying at Baan Maka) camped around a Long-tailed Broadbill nest. Bird photographers are odd, anyone who has seen a group of them in the wild will know what I mean. They had a guide with them who was using a laser pointer to show exactly where they should point there cameras and when they couldn’t see, he just moved the tripod and positioned the camera for them, leaving them only to push the shutter. The broadbill was awesome though.

We then had lunch back at the upper camp and after lunch our guide took us down an obscure little forest track to a bird hide (more of a tent) where we could see an area where some mealworms had been spread around. There were lots of little flycatchers and things, but the most exciting thing, and also the only thing to really get the guide himself super-excited, was a Rusty-naped Pitta that put on a show. After maybe 45 minutes in the hide (which was during the middle of the day so too hot for much anyway) we headed out again to very slowly make our way back down the hill stopping at lots of places along the way for birds. We stopped at the same Long-tailed Broadbill site that was surrounded by bird photographers earlier and funnily enough now that the laser pointer and people cutting down plants to get a view of the nest were gone, the pair of broadbills that were building a nest were much more active and I got a greater view. I later discovered that the bird photographers had gone off to bother some owls later in the day. We also spotted one of the White-handed Gibbons that had been making all of the noise around here and of course loads of birds. We continued to bird along this road and also a bit around the lower camp, and then stopped for loads of birds on the last bit of road to the exit, most of which I have no idea how the guide spotted from a moving car. Again we just left the car in the middle of the road to look at the birds. Most exciting was a nest site of a Collared Falconet which the guide knew of just off the road. There was one bird sitting on an exposed branch and one bird sitting in its tiny little nest hole which was really cute.

We had about a 13 hour birding day that day (and the same again for tomorrow) and I saw loads though I missed a couple of things that I really wanted to see like giant squirrels, banded leaf-monkeys, Racket-tailed Treepie (though I think I only care about this because birders visiting Kaeng Krachan are supposed to) and tickell’s brown hornbill but I have another full day tomorrow (the last day in Kaeng Krachan) to see them.

I didn’t go spotlighting tonight because I was exhausted (and the long dirt road with only the chance of owls and nightjars isn’t great anyway – I’d probably go spotlighting if I was in a national park) but I saw a huge Tokay Gecko in the restaurant so that’s cool. Now that I’ve written this I’ll be going to bed very shortly because it’s another 4:45 AM start tomorrow! (but I will be posting this a day later because there is no internet in the room)

Note: the reason I haven’t posted my big year list yet is because I have to check taxonomy for quite a few birds and I can’t do that until I have faster internet.

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