Summer is here...?

The weather has finally become more June-like after endless weeks of crap. That's the good news. The bad news is that the crap is predicted to return by Thursday. Deep joy. The BBC website, anxious to avoid allowing Joe and Jane Public to comment on important issues, asked what people's names were for 'raining'. Not surprisingly, 'pissing down' appeared most often...

Being out and about today, all over the place, produced these (click for largest) -

Looks almost Mediterranean - we wish...

A bad photo of a Hobby - but what a great year tick! Everyone needs to have a hobby, right?

Another bad view of the Hobby

Buzzard

Buzzard

Peregrine

Peregrine

Peregrine

Peregrine

Meadow Pipit

Meadow Pipit

Looking out to sea - Carrion Crow

Bad photo of a displaying Skylark

Meanwhile, back at home, here's 'our' Blackbird. He's probably one of quite a few male Blackbirds in the vicinity but we still call him 'Mr. B'.

By the way, I did pay the visiting Great White Egret a visit. Unfortunately, he was too far off for a good photo and I only got a long-distance crap record shot, which isn't worth wasting my time processing so, instead, here's a photo from last year, taken at Blashford Lakes, near Ringwood.

Great White Egret, Blashford Lakes, February 2011

Peregrinations

In between one lot of work and the other lot of work (in another town) today I decided to see what was around. Surprisingly, quite a lot. The weather was dull and overcast although this evening a mysterious yellow light has appeared, casting shadows. Unfortunately this bit of sunshine is not predicted to last, with vile weather forecast to make a return from tomorrow afternoon.

Most of the birds were common stuff, Goldfinches, Buzzards, Jackdaws, Carrion Crow, Herring Gull, Robin, Blackbird, Meadow Pipit, Greenfinch, Swallow, etc, so I just got some photography practise in. There was a Peregrine around as well, but my photos of it aren't that clever are crap, thanks to the awful light - it says a lot that these actually happen to be my best-ever Peregrine shots. :-/

Click on each photo for the largest. Blogger compresses the hell out the previews and the full versions do look better.

Poppies growing the other side of the footpath fence

Poppy close up

Monsoon

Ever since a 'drought' was declared back in April, it has done nothing BUT rain for the past couple of months, barring a nice 10-day warm spell toward the end of May. I can remember the fine summer of 1976 when it was hot and sunny for what seemed like months and months (I was only six years old then, so maybe it wasn't as long as that). The Government of the day, in their infinite wisdom, appointed a 'Minister for Drought', whereupon the fine weather promptly broke down and the wet stuff returned. Funny how, every time a drought is declared, the rain comes back but when a drought is declared over, the reverse never happens.

According to the BBC, 500 people were treated for hypothermia at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee river pageant last week. Hypothermia - in JUNE! Osprey chicks at the Dyfi Osprey Project in Wales have died and people have been flooded out of their homes and camp sites.

Anyway, it's still droughting down outside, torrentially now. The water companies and DEFRA know where they can stick the hosepipe bans and the so-called 'drought'.

You can stick your drought up your arse

Couple of sightings from my work rounds today - current job gets me out and about a lot - two Pied Flycatchers, one GS Woodpecker, a couple of Buzzards. Not much about but who can blame them in this crummy weather?

Red Kite

My sister lives in Newbury, Berkshire, which is on the southern end of the current UK range of Red Kites. The kites are slowly spreading south and one or two turn up here from time to time. However, none of my visits to my sister - the most recent of which was yesterday - have let me get any decent shots of the birds at all. One flew over the house yesterday afternoon but I failed to get a close shot.

In the absence of a decent kite shot from Berkshire I'm going to cheat and upload three photos I took in Oxfordshire in 2008, on my way home from the Bird Fair. I'd taken a detour off the motorway to a place called Shirburn, which has loads of the birds.

A new beginning

I scrapped my old Blogspot blog 'Fay's Birding and Photography Blog' a couple of months ago as I had got fed up with it and it had become dormant (i.e. stagnant). I was doing very little photography and almost no birding so I felt that there was no point in carrying on, as I had probably lost my reader as well! I'd also got kind of disillusioned with the whole birding scene - everyone seemed to be seeing better birds and having a better time than me and I dipped on every rarity going! The hunt for my 'own' birds never turned up anything out of the ordinary either.
Not only that, looking at the superb photos from other birders on the net just made me want to chuck my camera stuff in the nearest skip. However, I am trying to get back into the groove and so the blog lives again. This blog will feature not just birding but other wildlife, such as mammals, plants and insects. I am also going to try and get decent photos of common species rather than poor photos of rarer species - if I am ever able to catch up with any!

I have not been out birding since early winter, although I did see a few new birds during my latest trip to Texas in April and I saw a living Roadrunner for the first time (the previous sightings had been uncountable ones of RTA victims). All those visits to the west of the state and I see a Roadrunner on a friend's drive in New Braunfels! I am hoping my next visit will turn up a male Painted Bunting...

I am still on the Isle of Wight, still living the same life and doing the same old stuff, although I am contemplating returning to Ecuador (or going somewhere else), possibly for good, when my elderly dog passes on. Once she is no longer with us, then nothing will be keeping me here...we'll see.

Hear are some photos of White-tailed Deer at New Braunfels, 30 miles north of San Antonio. Click on each one for largest size.

That's all for now

I am now back in the UK after an excellent, although not entirely trouble-free (are they ever?!) trip. It was trimmed from the original 2 months and 3 weeks to just under 2 months, due to the fact that Australia ended up costing me a packet. Prices in Australia have gone up a lot since I was previously there in 1997 - more than I realised, in fact it's as expensive if not more so, as the UK - and I ended up trimming two weeks off Australia and 9 days off Thailand. Next time, I'll omit Australia and just do Asia.

The trip has had its ups, downs and grey areas, but it was highly successful. I saw most of the birds I wanted to see, apart from some seabirds due to the postponed pelagic, and got some pretty good photos, too.

 Ups: the birds, of course. Also, the Great Barrier Reef, the Warrumbungles, Cassowary House, Doi Inthanon, Khao Yai, the people I met such as Tony, Rob, Marie, George, Mr and Mrs Daeng, Somchat and 'Mr Nine'.

Downs: The biggest bummer was that the vile weather in NSW that week ensured the SOSSA pelagic from Wollongong got put back to the following week, which was a total bugger because I was leaving for Thailand before then, and the weather in Australia was pretty bad for a proportion of the time - I got wet in Cairns, Coonabarabran, Wollongong and Sydney.
Getting to Bangkok was a culture shock and the city itself  is a nightmare, gridlocked and polluted.

Things I'd do differently next time: Leave out or shorten Australia and lengthen Asia. Not be so short of money that I can't hire a car - public transport is a crap way to get around no matter where you are. Except perhaps in Singapore. Go to Asia in the winter (dry season).

Despite the troubles of the first few days I got to like Thailand very much, it's a fantastic place once you are out of Bangkok, and I hope to go back to do some more birding there, in the dry season.

Khao Yai

After arriving back in Bangkok from Chiang Mai, I stayed one night in the All Seasons Bangkok Siam Hotel in the city centre. I got a taxi from the airport and showed the driver a map with directions but, true to form as seems to be the case with Bangkok taxis, the prat still got lost and we took 2 hours to get there instead of 30 minutes. He spoke no English, it seemed, until he asked for a tip when he suddenly found he could speak very good English. He did not get a tip.

The next day, Monday, I set off for Khao Yai - taxi to Mor Chit bus station, a three hour bus ride to Pak Chong (during which I added Asian Openbill Stork to my list) and then a 20 minute journey by songthaew (pick up truck buses) to the Greenleaf Guest House 7.5 km outside Pak Chong, towards Khao Yai NP.

I booked a guide for the next day, 'Mr Nine', and we set off in his truck for the 'Cold Mountain' at 0545 the following morning. I had had no sleep the night before due to the combination of (the fear of) spiders and cockroaches, heat and a very hard mattress but I felt fine. The first birds of the day were Red-breasted Parakeets, Black-shouldered Kite and Black-collared Starling. 

On entering the park and paying the 400 Baht entrance fee we carried on to the first look out point and soon found Lineated Barbet, Golden-fronted Leafbird, Grey-eyed Bulbul, Bar-winged Flycatcher-shrike and Common Iora. Further up we found male and female Great Hornbills and their nest with a grown young one inside it, who was still being fed by the parents. We stopped and took quite a lot of photos and I managed to get some nice flight shots.

[caption id="attachment_196" align="alignnone" width="480" caption="Great Hornbill, Khao Yai NP"][/caption]

We went for a walk in the jungle. I got my camera out of the car and moved to the back of the vehicle. There was a sudden pattering noise, like falling rain, and I looked up, to see a Pig-tailed Macaque right above where I had been standing a second earlier - I had only narrowly avoided being pissed on by a monkey!
On the jungle trail, which was dense, leechy and spidery, we got good, but brief, views of a Siamese Fireback pheasant, which was one of my target species, although I didn't get a pic due to the brevity of the views and the fact it was too dark in the forest. We also heard Imperial Pigeon and Sultan Tit, and while I didn't see the pigeon (but saw one later) I got a very quick view of the tit plus we saw Barking Deer (Muntjac) in the dense vegetation. Other birds were Greater Flameback and Greater Racket-tailed Drongo.
There were a lot of spider webs strung between trees, fortunately well above head height (unless you were taller than 6'7") as these contained huge orb spiders bigger than a man's hand. To a spider-phobic person like me, these were frankly nasty-looking although they are not dangerous unless you are an insect or a small bird.

[caption id="attachment_197" align="alignnone" width="480" caption="This spider was bigger than a man's hand"][/caption]

The leeches, as expected, were a nuisance. I had taken all the precautions against them, such as leech socks and plenty of repellant but I forgot one small, but important, detail. I didn't even think about tucking my shirt in, with the result that I got leeches all round my middle and on my back, happily helping themselves. My off-white (naturally!) cotton shirt, fortunately an old one, looked like I'd been the victim of a stabbing, as it was soaked in blood because leeches inject an anti-coagulant so you bleed profusely and stay bleeding for a while afterwards. The shirt has subsequently gone in the bin as the blood didn't wash out despite using 'Vanish' on it. Oh well, you're not a world birder until you have been bitten by leeches while in the pursuit of birds...!

We spent the afternoon at the top, where we found an Oriental Pied Hornbill family - the female was busy de-legging the biggest centipede I have ever seen in my life, it was easily a foot long -  and the other side of the mountain and also took the road up to a military installation where the soldiers were kind enough to let me use the 'facilities' as well! We didn't see much up there, apart from a Stripe-throated Bulbul and a lovely view so we drove back down. About a quarter of the way down we found a small party of Silver Pheasants - male, female and juvenile male - stunning birds. We got some photos; Nine is a keen bird photographer, too  and we had great fun taking pictures and comparing them.

By 4.30 I was falling asleep and feeling dizzy because of the lack of sleep the previous night, but I soon woke up when we stopped, got out and saw a Crimson Sunbird, of which I got better views than I did of the one I saw in Singapore.
Back up the mountain the lifers kept coming: Red Junglefowl (the ancestor of domestic chickens and another target species for me), Green-eared Barbet, Crested Goshawk, Needletail Swift and the gorgeous Indian Roller, another target species and one that had hitherto eluded me. I photographed the Roller, but the light was going and 1250 ISO does not really make for anything other than a record shot.

[caption id="attachment_198" align="alignnone" width="264" caption="Indian Roller at Khao Yai"][/caption]

Sadly, it was time to head back out of Khao Yai and back to the guesthouse, but not without adding Wreathed Hornbill and Thick-billed Green-pigeon to the list. I was hoping to see Asian Elephants, but although there were signs of their presence, such as droppings (in the words of Dr Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: 'That is one big pile of shit!') and wrecked vegetation, I didn't see so much as a flapping ear. Likewise the gibbons - there were hoots and screams and gibbon songs all day but I didn't see anything swinging through the trees. However, the brilliant birding was what I went for so the lack of ellies and gibbons wasn't that disappointing.

The guide cost 4000 Baht, around £78, but was worth every satang, as I saw birds and more of the park than I would otherwise have done. It was brilliant and I want to go back one day.

Travelled back to Bangkok the following day. I got accosted at Mor Chit II by taxi touts (one of the less savoury things about travelling in Asia is that foreigners get hounded all the time - 'Hey you, where you go?' and while I hate it and it is very annoying, it is just one of the things you have to put up with) and ended up paying over the odds for a ride back to the All Seasons Bangkok Siam, because I couldn't be arsed to argue, but he didn't mess about and I was there in five minutes flat!