A Final Bit of Birding and Zooing

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Yesterday afternoon, after posting that last post, we went to a nearby weekend market at a temple (Wat Bang Peng Tai). This is worth noting because there were a number of exotic animals kept at the temple including Red-necked Wallabies, Sulcatta tortoises, morbidly obese Black-tailed Prairie Dogs, and quite an extensive collection of exotic waterfowl. Nothing incredibly rare, but not the sort of stuff you'd find commonly in a duck pond and reasonable diversity - three species of whistling ducks and four species of swans for example. Even Greater Flamingos too. The temple is on a Khlong, one of the many canal things that go through Bangkok, and the waterfowl enclosures are mostly entirely on the Khlong with floating wooden areas as the land area (some of them also have a bit of actual land). Actually rather good enclosures, decently large in both water and land areas and best of all for exotic waterfowl, all were fully netted over so the birds could be fully flighted. The largest enclosure was even a walkthrough.



Also at the market I had quite an interesting experience. At a fruit stall, I saw some fruit that I hadn't seen or tried before called Langsat (and also know as Longan which is confusing because that's a different tropical fruit that I have had before, and also bought at this market. Langsat comes up in Google as the thing I'm talking about though). They look like little potatoes and inside They're segmented rather like a mangosteen with lychee like flesh and a distinctive flavour. The flavour is really distinctive and nice and when I tried this mystery fruit for the first time, I just couldn't place the taste. I really remembered this distinctive flavour but have no memory of ever eating the fruit. It's a really distant obscure memory and only of that flavour not anything else, and it must be that I've had that fruit before when I was very young and growing up in Thailand (where I lived until I was six). A really weird distant memory of the taste only.



Anyway, this morning, on my last day, my aunt and I headed out very early for a day trip. I decided that the best thing to do would be to visit Bang Pra Lake. This is a birding site, well over an hour from Bangkok but definitely a day trip distance, and a place I visited when I was in Thailand in April of last year and really liked. It's located extremely close to Khao Kheow Open Zoo which I also visited on that same trip to Thailand last year and is a really good zoo, although having been recently I didn't feel a desperate need to go back, and instead I decided to visit another place that's similarly close and that I hadn't visited before: the Bang Saen Aquarium. If you didn't spend too long birding, and certainly by private transport only, you could do all three places in a day trip from Bangkok if you got back to the city late (which I couldn't do).



Bang Pra is a semi-natural lake and is a 'non-hunting area' meaning locals can use it for various purposes (including fishing) but not hunt the wildlife. There is also a government run waterbird and wildlife breeding/rescue centre located here, but it's not open to the public and although some people have managed to get in, when I tried to visit last time I was turned away.



As we left early, before sunrise, we got to the lake just after 7:30 with about an hour and 45 mins drive. Soon after getting there, I remembered why I like this place so much. There are large numbers of conspicuous birds everywhere and a really high diversity too. This is because of the wide variety of habitats with the open water of the very large lake, marshes and reed beds along the sides, grasslands and open forest, and further back the surrounding hills are rainforest. This means you get a very high diversity of birds and the lake is a shallow reservoir meaning high productivity and therefore large numbers of birds. The standouts must be the large numbers of big birds, storks especially, that can be seen flying overhead. There are lots of Lesser Adjutant Storks which are descended from reintroductions. There are lots of prinias and bushlarks and birds like that too and I saw loads of Stork-billed Kingfishers which was surprising given I didn’t see any at all when I was in Thailand last year. And because of the forest nearby, there are forest birds about too including barbets, laughingthrushes and treepies and amazingly for me I found an owlet! Maybe it’s not so amazing for me any more, I seem to be seeing loads of owls…



From the public access track you can see the edge of the wildlife breeding centre and the enclosures visible include both species of adjutant stork which is cool. Although lessers can be seen flying around, Greater Adjutants are quite an unusual species. Today, I noticed that the big ‘no entry’ gate was open… Well it wouldn’t hurt to go in would it. I can always claim ‘farang ignorance’ if I get told to buzz off. However it turns out that there was some kind of event happening today where a fairly large group of probably mildly important people were being guided around with various visitors with the group milling around too. The perfect opportunity to have a look around! So that’s what I did…



The centre is actually really extensive, from the path you can see a few waterbird breeding aviaries, but it actually goes on a long way and holds a wide variety of birds and mammals as well as some reptiles. I checked out the waterbird breeding aviaries first, including both species of Adjutant as mentioned as well as Asiatic Black-necked Stork and Sarus Cranes and, most excitingly White-shouldered Ibis! I had seen some mention of the centre holding this extremely rare species, and I’m very pleased to have been able to go in and have a look. They didn’t seem to have many individuals though, seemingly only three with two in one aviary and a singleton in another. Continuing on from those waterbird aviaries was a large free-flight aviary that was exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a proper open-to-the-public bird park, although this was certainly the exception and the only enclosure that wouldn’t fit the description of “decent and functional for a breeding centre”, with the exception of a few small cages holding some mammals that I think/hope were temporarily separated from main groups. Further on were some more birds, with a row of aviaries housing mostly pairs of hornbills of several species. There were also a few birds of prey, a couple of groundbirds, and some other waterbirds like Whistling Ducks and Darters.



Then I got to the first bit with mammals which was several rows of aviary-type cages holding dozens and dozens of slow loris. Presumably all confiscated from the illegal pet trade. This then continued to the main primate area (which also had a single Dusky Pademelon for some reason) with a number of callitrichids, a few different macaques, two species of gibbon (lar and Nomascus sp. Which I haven’t had a chance to look at yet), and three species of langur (I think dusky, phayre’s and a third species that was jet black all over but with whitish on the head that I’m not sure of the species. My photocopy of the Francis field guide plates has been wrecked and I can’t see anything appropriate on google. I do have photos, but in the mean time this is a horrendous picture from google of the same individual )



There were also large numbers of Asian Small Clawed Otters, several groups with some young ones separate and being given milk in isolated cages, and various other birds dotted around. One building had quite a few parrots of different species and hundreds of tortoises of three species, Radiated, Indian Star, and most interestingly Ploughshares. The latter comes from a confiscation at Bangkok airport from a few years ago and I had heard about them being sent to the Bangpra (there are news articles from 2013 a about this) and it seems they’re still there. As we left the centre back into the birding area, it seemed like the visiting group had done a symbolic release of captive bred Lesser Adjutants, Lesser Whistling Ducks, and White-breasted Swamphens. I say symbolic, especially for the ducks, because they were released into the hunting ground of an awaiting White-bellied Sea-eagle.



Quite an interesting centre, and a shame that under normal circumstances it’s not open to the public, because it’s a great thing to do with a birding trip and potentially also a Khao Kheow Zoo trip which is only 7kms away.



After the birding and looking around the wildlife centre, in the afternoon we headed down to Bang Saen which is just on the coast in order to visit the Bang Saen aquarium. This is quite an old, but perfectly nice, aquarium which is part of the Marine Sciences Institute of the local university and it’s worth a visit for an hour or so. The focus is local marine life, and there was a very nice display of quite a few species of jellyfish. Nothing super-exceptional, but a nice enough little aquarium and worth a visit since it fitted in well with out itinerary.



We then had a late lunch at the food stalls on Bang Saen Beach and then headed back to Bangkok. I’m in a hotel tonight for my last night in Bangkok before my flight early tomorrow morning because, for rather complicated reasons that I’m not going to go into here, I have been evicted from where I was staying at my aunt’s house tonight. Those are the same complicated reasons that made it necessary for me to move my flight forward to tomorrow rather than three days later on Thursday as was originally planned since I didn’t feel like sitting in a hotel in Bangkok for three more days. I was going to move my flight so I’d have flown out yesterday but I was assured that I would be able to stay in my aunt’s house until tomorrow. Oh well, it’s one night in a hotel which is no biggie, and I fly out early first thing tomorrow morning anyway. It was definitely worth staying for that Bang Pra trip though, great birding and I’m stoked to have been able to get into the no public access breeding centre.



New birds:



Chestnut-capped Babbler

Lineated Barbet

Common Hoopoe

Yellow-eyed Babbler

Blue-tailed Bee-eater

Indochinese Bushlark

Green Bee-eater

Brown Shrike

Grey-breasted Prinia

Green-eared Barbet

Australasian Bushlark

Spot-billed Pelican

Pied Kingfisher

Spotted Owlet

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