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

Bulbulscapes

More photos from the trip to Doi Angkang last week. We've got a really good time eating, relaxing and watching birds from a very comfortable veranda of the Royal Project's restaurant. From our table, we could easily watch all the birds that were feeding down in the trees below while having our meals. There were lots of these Red-whiskered Bulbul (Pycnonotus jocosus) hanging around in the trees below the restaurant. One of them was a small fledgling which was still begging its parents for food. The parent birds would come back to feed the chick every 5 or 10 minutes, so we had a great time observing these beautiful birds interacting with each other.

This species of bulbul is the icon of my local birding club, the Lanna Bird & Nature Conservation Club (LBNC), as well because it was the main reason why the club was founded. Over a decade ago, this bulbul was heavily captured from their natural habitat and illegally sold as cage birds. People like it because of its sweet warbling song which gives it the name "pidjalew" in northern Thai dialect. A very huge competition of this bird with huge amount of winning prize was about to be hold in Chiang Mai in 1999, and to prevent this inappropriate competition, the LBNC was founded.

Finally the competition of that year was canceled and our club began to be active in the nation's environmental scene. Today, the club has been doing annual Red-whiskered Bulbul Count within Chiang Mai city area to see how the numbers of this bulbul have changed from year to year, and the result of this year was quite disappointing, with the number of cage birds increasing from last year, indicating that our work still has to be continued. BTW, let's enjoy how pretty this bird is when living freely in its natural habitat through these photos.

Final Phuket

To wrap things up, here's a series of photos taken during the trip to Phuket with my family. I've been back to Beppu for 2 days now, and feel so strange once again about the shift in temperature degrees. It feels so cold here, guess that's because I've gotten used to the 30+ degrees in Thailand. Sakuras are blossoming everywhere and the city looks really colourful. A bit shame that the wind was too strong yesterday, the flower petals fell out of the trees too much in some area.

Muslim students waiting to see sunset at Phromthep Cape

The Phromthep Cape is one of the most famous places to watch sunset in Thailand, maybe the most popular one, because it is located at the westernmost part of the country. Everyday hundreds and hundreds of people flock together before sunset at the top of the hill. It's kinda unbelievable.

A few more shots

We stayed in a resort called Allamanda. It was nice and beautiful.

Though Phuket, the province, is extremely famous for its beautiful beaches,
the Phuket city is also famous for its old and beautifully designed buildings.

I found several House Swift's nesting colony under these old buildings' ceilings.

Such as this.

Southern people love to have birds in their cages, I don't know why. I'm totally against this kind of things and I feel sorry for those wild birds to have been kept in cages. The most popular species is the Red-whiskered Bulbul which was once common throughout the country but finally disappeared from the south because of caging and now they're illegally trade them from the north. The bird in the upper photo is not the Red-whiskered Bulbul, but the also popular White-rumped Shama, a relative of robins.