....and back at Doi Chiang Dao

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After Doi Inthanon it was time to revisit Doi Chiang Dao. As I mentioned before, I had been here in 2006 and had always intended on returning but never did. This is still the only place that I have ever got well and truly lost, having to sleep out overnight in the jungle, so fun memories. The impetus for this return visit was that I wanted to try to add one more pheasant to the trip list. There is a site on the mountain there called Den Ya Kat where the Mrs Hume's pheasant lives, along with the giant nuthatch. Pretty much every birder who goes to northern Thailand goes to Den Ya Kat to find these two birds. I had attempted it in 2006 without much luck. But I decided to give it another go, and because Tjeerd was going there as well it meant we could divide the cost of the vehicle to get up there.

We made a good job of getting from Doi Inthanon to Doi Chiang Dao, it costing us only 40 Baht each (about NZ$1.50). First we hitched a lift from Mr. Daeng's to Chom Thong but it turned out the car we got a lift with was actually heading to Chiang Mai so we got a free ride all the way there and they dropped us off at the Chang Puak bus station (about two hours driving from Doi Inthanon). From there we got a bus for 40 Baht to the tiny town of Chiang Dao, about 1.5 hours from Chiang Mai. The only transport from there to Malee's Nature Lovers Bungalows, 7km away, is by songthaew which costs 150 Baht. Being on a bit of a roll, we just walked about ten minutes from the bus stop up to the side-road which leads to Doi Chiang Dao and hitched another ride. Easy-peasy.

In 2006 there were only two places to stay at Doi Chiang Dao – Malee's and The Nest – but now the road is lined with guesthouses and restaurants, including The Nest 2 and The Nest 3. Malee's has increased in size (more bungalows, big new restaurant, even a swimming pool) but fortunately the cheap rooms are still there for 250 Baht each. She recognised me from the last visit but that's like saying someone recognised Frankenstein's Monster or the Hydra after eight years; not difficult. I think Malee's caters more to regular backpackers now. Birders do still stay there obviously, but more and more seem to stay next door at The Nest. The meal times certainly aren't designed for birders, with the kitchen only being open for breakfast between 7.30 and 10.30am (birds are most active first thing, so 7.30am is way too late) and for dinner between 5 and 7pm (times when most birders are still out birding). There is no food available at any other time of the day so you either have to arrange to get a packed meal beforehand or eat at one of the other places. I also got severely mauled by bed-bugs although they can appear anywhere of course; in fact I'm surprised I have met so few over the last eight months – probably only at two or three places.

Everything was on fire at Doi Chiang Dao. Slow-moving low-flamed bush fires were crawling through the forests on all the hills and the air was hazy with smoke. At night the hill right beside Malee's was glowing red and the popping sound of exploding bamboo was a constant.

The main trails near Malee's are around the local temple, so no park fees involved, but we didn't do too well really. On the first morning on the walk up the temple's 500 steps we saw streaked wren-babblers (surprisingly large after the small species at Doi Inthanon) along with female Siberian blue robins (and a brilliantly-coloured male later) so that was a good start, and up the top there were pin-tailed green pigeons and mountain imperial pigeons, but otherwise there were just a lot of rather common birds. The Temple Gully trail was quiet – we tried waiting at the pools that were left in the mostly-dry stream but nothing really turned up. The Checkpoint Road and the gully trail which runs off it were also slow with just a few good birds here and there. There were a lot of cuckoos about over the days though, including large and Hodgson's hawk-cuckoos, Oriental, Eurasian, plaintive and emerald cuckoos (only two of those made it onto my lists though). Some attempts at spotlighting were a bit of a failure despite the number of different owls found up here.

But it was Den Ya Kat for which I was really here anyway. The access road is extremely rough, requiring a four-wheel drive. You can get a car and driver at Malee's but it is expensive – 1500 Baht if by oneself, 1000 Baht each if there are two of you, and so on. We had put it off for a couple of days in the hope that some other birders would turn up to share the cost but nobody did so we paid 1000 each. Actually we paid more than that because it turned out, unbeknownst to us until after the fact, that there is also an overtime charge of 100 Baht per hour and we went three hours over that time. Might have been nice to have been informed of this beforehand!! Den Ya Kat is about 1.5 hours from Malee's, and we left at 5am to get there for first light. Last time I was here I shared the cost of this trip (then 1000 Baht total from memory) with two English birders called Jenny and Gareth and we saw some nice birds including silver-breasted broadbills (and a couple of snakes) but no pheasant or nuthatch. I was hoping this wouldn't be a repeat because it is quite a lot of money, especially when one is running on empty pockets! The driver didn't speak much English at all, but he takes a lot of birders up there so he knows the best places to look for the giant nuthatch. We stopped at a seemingly random spot on the way up, and after a short search with the driver listening out for the calls, he pointed one out high in a pine tree. It was silhouetted at first but it moved here and there amongst the trees and I saw it well enough during this time.

Up at the substation where the road ends there is the Summit Trail. The Mrs Hume's pheasants are usually seen either on this trail or on the so-called Firebreak Trail about a kilometre before the substation. We tried the Summit Trail first. There was I think a slight handicap in that the fires had swept the ground level of the pine forests clean. For maybe three-quarters of the trail there was no undergrowth at all, just blackened ground. Every step produced a puff of soft ash into the air, and the charred remains of sticks and bamboo stems left criss-crosses of charcoal across my trouser legs. It did not look good at all for pheasants. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but with the haystack burnt to ashes and the needle moved to some other haystack somewhere else. There were a lot of other birds around during the day including Burmese shrikes, pale blue flycatcher and long-tailed broadbills, but the trouble with searching for one particular bird (the pheasant) is that you can't stop for everything else. It is a bit of a catch-22. Best sighting of all was not a bird at all, it was a mammal. We had paused to check out some movement or other up a hill, when Tjeerd saw something running across the path up ahead. My brain's initial reaction, based on it being fairly large, was “muntjac?” but it was moving in a loping way like a langur does on the ground – and it clearly couldn't be a langur – and then I realised it was a yellow-throated marten, basically a super-sized weasel (think of a brightly-coloured ferret the size of a dog). Even more exciting, there were actually TWO yellow-throated martens, chasing each other over the hillside. I couldn't get any clear shots of them and when they disappeared over the top of the rise I ran up after them but they had gone. That was my money well-spent at least!

We came down from the Summit Trail around noon and had lunch, then went back down the road a bit to the start of the Firebreak Trail. This was more of the same – ash, ash and more ash, but no pheasants. I did finally get to add slender-billed oriole to my life list though. They look very similar to black-naped orioles and I had never seen one which I could see well enough to identify with certainty. We came back down at about 5pm, taking a slight detour which came out on a bank above the road. Tjeerd went down first, and when I jumped down, just as I landed, Tjeerd suddenly cried out “Pheasant!!” By the time I had come to a proper halt and could look where he was pointing, the pheasant was gone! Aaargh! There was a wide firebreak running down the hill on the other side of the road, in the direction the pheasant had flown, so we thought we might as well go down and see. The bottom of the firebreak wasn't far down, maybe one or two hundred metres, but it was straight down! There was, of course, no pheasant at the bottom. Tjeerd's plan had been to then cut back across the hill through the “meadow” to the substation but it was far too dense, so we climbed all the way back up to the road. By the time we got back up there we were soaked with sweat and gasping for breath ….. and there was the driver standing there saying (in sign language) “oh hello chaps, there are two Mrs Hume's pheasants just twenty metres along the road over here.” Damn pheasants!!

Sure enough, just right beside the road a little further along, we could hear the pheasants moving around in the thick undergrowth. We waited, following their movements through sound, and then the male came wandering out into the open forest a bit down the slope. Both Tjeerd and I sort of went “wow!” at the same time when we saw it. To be honest, I had seen the picture of the bird in the Robson field guide and it just looked a bit like a duller and more boring version of the common ring-necked pheasant. I had seen yellow-throated martens and I couldn't top that for the day, so I wasn't all that concerned if I didn't see the pheasant at all. However, the Mrs Hume's pheasant does not look like the picture in the field guide! It would be like searching for a paradise tanager and thinking it was going to look a bit like a sparrow! It is simply staggeringly beautiful. I have seen a few different pheasants over this trip, including golden pheasants, Temminck's tragopans and white eared-pheasants, but I think the Mrs Hume's pheasant must surely be my favourite. Best of all, the male spent ages foraging in the forest down the slope, in plain view. I tried to get photos but I couldn't focus on it properly so they were all rubbish shots. When he went back into the dense undergrowth the driver said he was going to be crossing the road soon, so we sat and waited and sure enough the pheasant did exactly that. Unfortunately the light had gone by then and the photos, while better focused than the previous ones, were too dark to show the colours.

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