Mae Kampong Village

I went to Mae Kampong village in the eastern part of Chiang Mai with Prof.Mark on September 20th. I've heard a lot about this village and I wanted to explore the birds over there. The village is well-known among foreigners as a popular home-stay village and a place of Thailand's "Flight of the Gibbon". The forest around the village's still looking really good and we saw more than 30 species of birds in just one day.

The most numerous species was definitely the small Oriental White-eye (Zosterops palpebrosus). We found several fast-moving flocks almost everywhere we stopped the car. We also enjoyed watching a young bird being fed by its parent while we were having lunch.

Black-crested Bulbul (Pycnonotus melanicterus)
Red-whiskered Bulbul (Pycnonotus jocosus)
Common Tailorbird (Orthotomus sutorius)
Speckled Piculet (Picumnus innominatus)

Most of the birds we found are general forest birds, but they were in quite a great number. The place should be much better in winter when there are many migrants. The stars of the day were surely the Scarlet Minivets in this post and the above tiny Speckled Piculet. Piculet is a tiny member of the woodpecker family. The bird is just roughly 10cm long. The bird stayed around in the wave for almost an hour.

Mae Kampong Village
Prof.Mark shooting photos of the Red-whiskered Bulbuls
A view from the top of the mountain

Scarlet Minivet

Some of you might have heard news about the recent unrest in Thailand caused by the two opposite groups, the red and yellow shirts. Forget about those conflicts, there's a family of forest birds in Thailand called 'minivet' where the male's got bright red plumage and the female's replaced with yellow. I got a chance to photograph these striking Scarlet Minivets (Pericrocotus flammeus) yesterday while I was on a trip to Mae Kam Pong Village with Prof.Mark. A flock of about 10 birds came in with a bird wave and stayed around for about an hour allowing us to grab some shots of them. Although having those striking colours, they are never an easy target since they mostly stay up in the canopy. You can see that in the nature, red and yellow proved to be companions.

Male Scarlet Minivets (Pericrocotus flammeus)

Female birds and juveniles have yellow and grey plymage. The one with some red on its tail and underparts feathers is a young male bird. It will moult into a full black and red plumage later on.