My wife and I got up early to take a drive along the road to Ban Kuntien. This is close to where I used to live and work and where I used to do a little birding from a bicycle. However, there has been a lot of development in the four years I have been away and it took us a bit longer to get into some reasonable habitat than it did in the past.

Still, a pond which always held good numbers of Cotton Pygmy Goose was still worth a stop and I counted 73 of this attractive little duck. In fact, for this region that is a significant number.

A little further along the road we stopped at a drained pond which was covered in egrets and pond herons. I counted 214 Little Egrets here and a similar number of pond herons was present. 3 Javan Pond Herons were entering breeding plumage but there were no Chinese Pond Herons showing signs of their colours. On this muddy pool were also good numbers of Greenshank, Marsh Sandpipers and a couple of Common Redshank.

As we moved towards the University at Ban Kuntien I was sad to see that the small patch of mangroves that used to serve as an interesting myna roost has been cut down – for no apparent reason. Perhaps the people who have built a house on the other side of the road ordered its destruction so they didn’t have to put up with the noise??

A little further round the corner the birding was okay though with 2 nice Striated Grassbirds, a couple of Asian Golden Weavers, a Purple Heron, 2 Yellow Bitterns and some Black-crowned Night Herons still hunting at 9.30 am. We watched a large water monitor lizard, about 2 metres long, stalking a Pond Heron, but it didn’t get within a metre of it before the bird flew away.

As the weather warmed up things slowed down but a Black-browed Reed Warbler was nice, although by the time we came back past this area, locals were cutting down the small patch of reeds we had seen it in. With this depressing sight we went back home.

birds, birding, thailand, nature