A Good Day: Plastered in Mud, Soaked in Sweat, and Stained with Blood.

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It was raining when I first woke up at dawn, which is weird because it generally rains in the afternoon, convectional rainfall and all that. It's been clear until 11 every other day in Vietnam. Anyway, it was 5:30 so I went back to bed. And then I didn't wake up until past 7! Shockingly late! Of course if it was anything other than birding, it be complaining about having to wake up so early.



After breakfast, I decided that in order to do the grasslands area properly, I should hire a bike because it's quite a way. They charge 150k for 8 hours which seems very high, although again, that's only high relatively to local prices, as it's about £5. More than a bike cost me for a day on Pulau Ubin in Singapore though!



Cat Tien seems quite well suited to bikes because it's totally flat (unlike Pulau Ubin which is rather hilly) the road through the grassland is quite long and good enough, and for birding purposes, in open country birding covering more ground is generally more effective that doing small areas thoroughly, like would be better in a rainforest.



A flock of laughingthruses was entertaining in the bamboo forest before the grassland and very soon after I entered the grassland I flush a small quail from the grass just by the road which I watched fly over the grass a bit before completely disappearing. My first buttonquail! (Rather than true quails that are sometimes called buttonquails). This one proved to be a Yellow-legged buttonquail. There must be so many little quails and things totally hidden in the long grass!



It took a little while to find my main target here, a Green Peafowl, but I knew they were here because I had heard one when I was here at night and after a couple of hours I found one with the help of one of the watch towers that look over the grassland. Beautiful bird, although this one wasn't out in thr open, presumably because it had already become quite hot in the sun. I probably need to get down to the grasslands at dawn to see them out in the open and get some pictures. (Although only just past 9 at this time, it was already really hot in the sun)



A bit further on, as I was biking along, a dark patch in the middle of the road started to move. It elongated from a ball and then popped up on legs and a nose emerged. It was a Small Asian (Javan) Mongoose! It trotted off into the grass by the side of the road, but it didn't seem to have gone far, so a bit further along I stopped and waited to see if it would come out again. A few minutes later, a nose cautiously emerged from the grass, then the mongoose slowly walked out into the middle of the road, looked around a bit, and then crossed the road to the other side. It was really close, just a few metres away, and I had no difficulty getting some pictures as it crossed. Each time it heard the camera shutter, it would pause briefly and look around. Such a cute little mongoose! The last time I saw a mongoose was all the way back on my first day of the trip at Kuala Selangor near KL (that was a different species) which feels so long ago!



Although the road remained good for a few hours of biking, it didn't stay so for the whole way. I reached the point where there were quite large patches of very boggy mud, and navigating these became challenging. Of course I could have walked the bike through those patches, but where's the fun in that? If I built up enough speed before getting to the muddy spot (of course looking for animals from a bike involves going quite slowly in general), I could generally force my way through, creating a bow wave in the muddy water and pushing through the boggy spots. I had to choose my exact route through the mud beforehand of course because I had to keep the bike as straight as possible and avoid the slippery, muddy edges of the ruts to avoid sliding and ending up in the mud. I was largely successful. Although it's never the 50 successful navigations that matter, it's the one failure where you end up totally coated in mud.



The road eventually ended at a ranger station thing with a gate across the road where I turned round and headed back. I saw another mongoose in the road just before there though! I think they're probably it quite common in the tall grass and secondary vegetation, and when I got back to the stop where I saw the first mongoose, there were then two sat in the middle of the road that let me approach quite close and when I got really close they would trot off into the grass, before coming out again as soon as I walked away. Great little animals.



Other interesting things seen while out on the bike in the grassland (and patches of forest between patches of grassland) included two species of macaque (Long-tailed and pig-tailed, the latter being Northern which is new for the trip), two species of treeshrew, including Northern which I hadn't seen yet, and a few nice birds like some parakeets, birds of prey, and an excellent view of an Orange-breasted Trogon. Quite a successful day in the grassland area on a bike. I covered much more ground that I otherwise would have. I was, however, rather sore by the time I got back to return the bike in the late afternoon, the seat wasn't particularly soft and I went a bit overboard with the into the mud at full speed stuff. I was also plastered in mud all over, soaked in sweat, and covered in blood (from leeches). Muddy would also have been an accurate description of the bike. Not quite as accurate as, "bloody hell, how did you manage to get mud THERE?!" but no one checked the bike when I returned it, so no problems.



I had a bit of a rest and snooze for a couple of hours before dinner so that I'd be reenergized for spotlighting. All that biking was tough work. When I have a meal, I like to try one of the various soft drinks that they have, rather than just blindly asking for a coke every time. Tonight I had a 'nutri boost: milk + juice drink with nutrients delicious + refreshing strawberry flavour' which sounds alright, like a yogurt drink maybe. It was not. It tasted like the sort of artificial nature-identical strawberry flavour jam that you might get with a cheap breakfast and mixed with water and the cream from strawberry flavoured Oreos. The fakest, most disguistingly sweet, thing ever and with that weirdness that you get with milk mixed with water. There was some Vietnamese text on the bottle with the word New Zealand in big blue letters. It's clearly the kiwis' fault for this monstrosity of a drink.



After dinner, I headed out for spotlighting. Still determined that the forest on the other side of the rapids along the road to Crocodile Lake is the best chance for loris. I passed a car going off into the grasslands with a group of tourists for spotlighting and even as he was passing with the too-dim spotlight waved around chaotically, it was obvious he didn't really know what he was doing (those night drives don't try for loris anyway, they're targeting ungulates in the grassland). My need for a ridiculous sugary drink had not been met by that disgusting abomination of a drink, so I bought an - odd but delicious -mixed dark berry fanta for the road.



The first thing seen, about a km down the road, was the cutest most adorable little owl ever! A cute widdle Collared Scops Owl sat on a vine right by the road sat there and looking around, posing excellently for photos. Two (different) owls in two nights, both completely self-found is very good for me! It's the same number of owls as I saw the whole time I was in Malaysia, and none self-found there. The Collared Scops was definitely pygmy, and quite slow because it just sat there. Not quite a loris exactly. If you squint really hard and have half a jerry can of the rice spirits that they make at crocodile lake maybe? I continued on for the pygmy slow loris. There aren't really any mountains for me to climb in Cat Tien, but I will ford every stream to find the loris.



The next thing of note (apart from an inidentifiable rodent running off instantly), 4km later, was a Large-tailed Nightjar perched nicely on an expose branch. That makes two species each of nightjars and owls at Cat Tien because I'm now suddenly good and finding night birds but terrible at finding lorises apparently. At Danum Valley when I wanted night birds I never saw any but saw three or four lorises every night (seriously) and now that I want lorises, all I can find are night birds. Typical. I did a long way tonight, I wasn't far off from the crocodile lake trailhead when I turned around. Unlike yesterday, I continued through the horrendous mud. I've already been through one cycle of getting extremely muddy and clean again, so what's another? (I didn't actually fall in it this time of course, so the mud got no higher than my knees).



As I was walking back, almost back at the rapids (just after the concrete paving slabs start along the Crocodile Lake road for anyone who knows Cat Tien), I saw some eyeshine. It was not huge but clearly mammalian and moving quite slowly in the middle story. The right colour too. Could it be? I got up to where the eyeshine was and it had disappeared. It took about five minutes of moving the torch around just in that spot and I located the eyeshine again. It had been three metres directly in front of me the whole time, in dense vegetation. Hell yeah! I'd only gone and found myself a Pygmy Slow Loris! I was actually shaking with excitement, it was there right in front of me, moving ever so slowly and delicately through a bamboo thicket. Now that I had located it, I saw it really well. It's so tiny! Really noticeably teeny tiny and really frail looking. Gorgeous little loris. They don't move very fast, so I obviously got to watch it for a while and even got some record shots that are probably just about recognizable. I can totally see now why they're difficult to find. They're very small, very shy, this one at least was in really thick vegetation, and the eyeshine is extremely difficult to pick up. My loris skills are back! I was grinning the whole time. In fact, I'm still grinning. The loris slowly retreated into the vegatation, and once it was far enough into the bamboo, the eyeshine looked so very insect like that I may not have given it a second look. Not an easy mammal to find, but well worth the effort. Such a wonderful, wonderful primate. And an outstanding view of it too (although once you've found a loris, unless it's really high up in a tree you do generally get great views). I'm so stoked with that sighting, probably much more so because I really had given up by then. I saw the loris a bit before 11 which is well over 4 hours after sunset, and close to 5 hours really.



There were lots of a Siamese Algae Eater like fish on the ford by this time and they really didn't want to move out of the way for me to get past. I saw little else of note on the way back, but yeah. Pygmy loris. And with that, I've found all four of Cat Tien's speciality primates. The last 1.5ks back to the HQ from the rapids were a bit of a slog. I'm exhausted.



New birds:

Indian Roller

Yellow-legged Buttonquail

Green Peafowl

Rufous-winged Buzzard

White-rumped Falcon

Blossom-headed Parakeet

Collared Scops Owl

Large-tailed Nightjar



Mammals:

Small Asian Mongoose

Northern Pigtailed Macaque

Northern Treeshrew

Pygmy Slow Loris

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