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Samoan skink (Emoia samoensis)
photo actually taken the day before at Mt. Vaea but I needed something for here! I’d had a strange feeling that today was going to go badly and I was right. The bird I was going to find was the ma’o-ma’o, a giant forest-dwelling honeyeater (just called a mao in “English”) which is dependent on mature rainforest. They used to be found at Mt. Vaea until maybe a decade or so ago but no longer. Instead I was going to the Vaisigano watershed outside of Apia. I had several trip reports from other birders’ visits to Samoa but they didn’t all tally very well in their directions and name-usage so I wasn’t entirely sure I’d even be able to get there. The one thing they all did agree on was that it was easy to get a taxi to the start of the walking point, a reservoir tank at the top end of the 6km Magiagi Road. I guess the road has degraded in the meantime because it is now more of a four-wheel drive track than anything else. The taxi driver was not happy!! He decided that he couldn’t come back later in the day to pick me up because the road was just too bad. This could have been tricky because there’s nothing up
Samoan whistler (Pachycephala flavifrons)
photo actually taken the day before at Mt. Vaea but I needed something for here! there except forest and plantations – that is, no villages – but fortunately we passed a group of workers planting taro who said that if I could get back down to them by noon then they would give me a lift back to Apia in their truck. It meant I’d only have a few hours to look for the bird but beggars can’t be choosers!
The taxi dropped me off at the reservoir tank and I headed further up the road/track until I found the old trail leading off towards the valley. I was pretty sure this was the right spot but since the December cyclones the trail has been left to its own devices and it was heavily overgrown with waist-high vegetation and with numerous fallen trees. The trip reports all seemed to agree that the trail was about half a kilometre to the valley floor and then another kilometre or so up the valley itself, but after almost an hour I was still nowhere near the valley floor or the forest. I was literally soaked to the skin from the waist down from the dew-laden plants I was pushing through, and I became certain this
Polynesian starling (Aplonis tabuensis)
photo actually taken the day before at Mt. Vaea but I needed something for here! just couldn’t be right. None of the trip reports, for example, had mentioned part of the trail being a near-vertical series of mud foot-holes!! Eventually the trail just disappeared altogether into a flooded taro swamp. I turned around and climbed all the way back up to the road again. By the time I got up there I was so drenched in sweat I looked like I
had reached the river and had then fallen into it! I tried walking further along the road , which soon became little more than a rough trail itself, but there was nothing up there but more plantations. It was a thoroughly disappointing morning, made even worse through having a time limit for my ride back so I couldn’t keep trying. I headed back to the tank, hoping I might see some parrot-finches there, but no, so I walked back down the road until I found the workers.
The mid-afternoon was better, because I went to sleep back at the hotel. The late afternoon was also good. I took a taxi back to Mt. Vaea to see if I could at least find a Samoan broadbill flycatcher. There was a stiff breeze and the sky had clouded over, so it was quite pleasant up there. I saw most of the same bird species I’d seen yesterday and another (or the same) Samoan fruit bat, and then finally – drum roll – a male Samoan broadbill!! Result. He really was a little pearler of a bird, with his salmon-reddy-orangey throat and satin back. I didn’t get any photos although he posed very nicely for several minutes within comfortable binocular range. Shortly after I saw a pair of broadbills attacking a Polynesian starling; perhaps they were nesting somewhere nearby.
Back in the grounds of the Museum below it was just coming on to dusk, and the lawns were speckled with banded rails. They really are absurdly visible in Samoa! I thought I’d do a quick count-up of how many I could actually see at one time, but was distracted by the realisation that one off near the bushes had a red bill. I had a better look and it turned out to be a purple gallinule. Hmmm, maybe I should do the count through binoculars I thought. Good plan. Amongst the banded rails (twenty of them, by the way) were two Pacific golden plovers and a rooster! Before leaving to find a taxi I finally got a perch-view of a flat-billed kingfisher instead of the fly-by views I’d had to accept before. It looks much like a sacred kingfisher so not too exciting, but still nice to see.
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