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Published: October 5th 2006
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A couple of days later an English couple arrived. Jenny was a first-time birder and Gareth was tagging along. They were on a year-long trip around Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia (Sumatra to Komodo and West Timor), Australia, New Zealand and then Chile to Costa Rica! Awesome! They came along to the Temple Gully with me (few birds) then we headed along the Nature Trail. As Gareth said, I'd like to see a party of school children attempt the Nature Trail! The name sort of conveys an easy stroll, not a military assault course. The grade was so steep in places it was almost vertical. Still, this turned out to be by far the best trail for birds. I ended up going back three times and got some fantastic stuff. The Nature Trail comes out eventually at the Chiang Dao Cave. This was truly awesome (for me: to a caver it would seem really lame). I'm not much of a cave person (despite my work environment!) because I don't like small enclosed spaces. This cave had a big entrance and great formations inside. Also lots of bats. Unfortunately the guide wouldn't let us stop to look at anything. Any time we
tried he'd be like "this way, this way" and hurry us along. Obviously I wanted to see the bats but Jenny was an ecologist who had done lots of work with bats back in England so she was also most interested in them. The tour took twenty minutes. Later I found a book on the caves at Malee's and discovered the guide had taken us out through a short cut. We hadn't even seen the entire cave. Two other lots of tourists at Malee's spent an hour and a half on their tours. Made me feel a bit cheated actually. Also I'd left my camera back at Malee's so I couldn't even get any photos of all the structures inside. Apart for the 250-odd horseshoe bats hanging from the roof in one place (Jenny picked up some droppings from the floor and said "definitely horseshoes. See the triple twist in the droppings?". That's my kind of person!), the most memorable part of the tour was near the end when the guide set down his lantern and said "Now you tip me. Tip is up to you." Did we have a choice?
That night I saw my first tokay
geckoes. These are really common in Asia but I hadn't seen them yet. Malee has several living around the dining area, on the walls. Gareth was asking me what the big geckoes with striped tails were, and I was puzzling over the description. Malee pointed out that there was one sticking its head out from behind an ornamental fronting at the top of the wall. I was looking and looking and couldn't see it. "There!" they are saying, pointing. Then I saw it. I'd been missing it because it was so damn big! I thought they were all talking about a big gecko. Big, not tokay size. Tokays get up to a foot long. They're really impressive late at night when they walk upside-down across the ceiling! Fantastic beasts.
The next day me and Jenny and Gareth all went up to the Den Ya Kat substation. All birders go here when at Doi Chiang Dao because this is where you get the Hume's pheasant and giant nuthatch, two very rare birds. We got neither. The only way to get there is by four-wheel drive (or motorbike if you've got the guts). To hire the vehicle is 1500 Baht,
bee nest
I think these are stingless bees. The tube goes to the nest in the tree, and is made from saliva and wood pulp. with driver. There was no way I wasn't going to go and if I'd had to I would have paid the 1500 to go by myself, but I'd been waiting for some other birders to arrive to share the cost, and Jenny and Gareth were keen, so off we went. We were most unimpressed with the driver. His 4x4 was obviously brand new, there wasn't a mark on it, inside or out, and he didn't appear to have yet driven it off a sealed road. When we got to the first uphill dirt bit, he got out and spent 15 minutes putting chains on the back wheels, which even to my eyes was clearly unwarranted in the conditions. Then he drove like a little old English granny the entire way. The trip up to the checkpoint takes 1.5 hours, so when after 1.5 hours we arrived at a few small huts and he told us to get out, we thought this was the checkpoint. We walked for about five or ten minutes then he flagged down a local ute and we rode in the back of that up to the checkpoint 35 minutes further up. We were a bit peeved
at paying 1500 Baht for a 4x4 only to be hitching in a ute. If an old local ute can make it, why couldn't his brand new 4x4? Answer, because he didn't want to get his pretty new truck all dirty. Also what this meant of course was that after walking the 5km up from checkpoint to substation (this is the birding part of the trip) we then had a 3.5 hour walk (proper walk, not birding walk) back down to where he left the vehicle. Then to cap it all, when we got back he told Malee that he pointed out all the best birds to us -- he pointed out a sooty-headed bulbul and two male scarlet minivets, about as challenging to spot as an elephant in a carpark! He also annoyed us by trying to kill a tiny snake on the path with his parang (which he was carrying for no other apparent reason, seeing we were on a road not a trail). I rescued the snake and moved it to the undergrowth by the side of the road. The walk up to the substation was excellent for birds, with six species new for me and many
new for Jenny. The best were the velvet-fronted nuthatches, silver-breasted broadbills and grey treepies. All great birds. When we stopped at the substation for lunch, the seat I was on collapsed under me (it was rotted through) and my spine connected with a gnarly root that a nearby tree had casually grown across exactly the right spot. No damage done luckily.
The rest of my time at Malee's was divided between the different trails, trying to find birds that kept eluding me. Basically the only good places were the Nature Trail and Den Ya Kat. I got no pittas, no wren babblers, no partridges, but I had a good time none-the-less, with 79 species in total, 33 of them new. I'm going back again one day, at a better time of the year.
My top birds for Doi Chiang Dao (apart for the ones mentioned earlier): Mrs. Gould's and black-throated sunbirds, speckled piculet, green magpie, bamboo woodpecker and spangled drongo (the last drongo for the areas I visited, except for the Andaman drongo and I wasn't going to see that because its only found on the Andaman Islands). These aren't rare birds at all, just the ones I enjoyed most. Rare birds (so I am informed) were the long-tailed sibia and red-billed scimitar-babblers up at Den Ya Kat substation.
Today I am back in Chiang Mai, preparing to go to the other main birding destination of northern Thailand, Doi Inthanon. But I am running out of time. Just 22 days to go before my plane back to New Zealand. Me sad :-(
A brilliant spectacle in Chiang Mai at the moment are the flocks of wagtails roosting at sunset in the trees along the canal that encircles the central city area. There are hundreds, probably thousands of them, of four species (white, grey, yellow and citrine). I sat by Tha Phae gate for ages just watching them swarming through the air. Good way to end the day.
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