The Soi List

Olive-backed Sunbird

Soi 11.02.11

ซอย pronounced Soi means street in Thai. It doesn't mean the main drag rather a smaller road, think of Sukhumwit in Bangkok and the hundreds of sois that run off it. We live in a soi and our soi like most sois has soi dogs! We have a lot of stray dogs all over Thailand.  Our soi also has a lot of birds and I think the time has come to start a soi list. I say this because I was amazed by the number of species I saw in the course of an hour while pushing my baby boy about in his pram after work in the late afternoon.

Yellow-vented Bulbul

Soi 11.02.11

Our house is situated in a small estate facing  a golf driving range. There are a couple of little side streets running off the main soi and they abut onto rice paddy but the village does not have a through road so apart from when the soi dogs kick off it is fairly peaceful here. While the area is residential it is not too built up and beyond the golf range it is very much cultivated rice paddy with pockets of trees and scrub and various natural and man made irrigation channels. The driving range is busy late afternoon and early evening so not many birds then but in the mornings there can be several hundred cattle egrets feeding on the grass.

 Green Bee-eater

Soi 11.02.11

The criterion for getting onto the soi list will be that the bird can be seen from the soi. Number one on this new list will be Pied Harrier, a male, which I watched flying over the little bit of rice paddy nearby before flying off in the direction of the main rice paddy area. Next Scaly Breasted Munia, Little Egret, Common Myna, Pied Fantail, Brown Shrike, Red-collared Dove, Spotted Dove, Peaceful Dove, Streak-eared Bulbul, White-vented Myna, House Sparrow, Tree Sparrow, Plain-Backed Sparrow, Yellow-Vented Bulbul, Sooty-headed Bulbul, Asian Pied Starling, Asian Koel (heard), Green Bee-eater, Olive-backed Sunbird and Scarlet-backed Flowerpecker. Excluding the Koel that gives the soi list a kick start of 20 species! I'll not add sightings prior to today and I will try to get photographs of as many of these birds as possible.