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.

The Last Few Days

Barn Swallow - EOS

Alas wretched work commitments mean birding, photography and blogging have to take a second place! Of course I can still manage some birding but just a little. I'll leave these pics of some common birds that I have seen these last few days. News from the major sites is that a Cinereous Vulture remains in the Wat Norng Blah Lai area though no recent sightings of the Himalyan Griffons. In Kaeng Krachan Spot-winged Starlings have been sighted fairly regularily since Christmas. This represents a new record this far south for Thailand.

Scaly-breasted Munia -EOS (front garden)

Zitting Cisticola - EOS

Lotus flowers - digiscoped

Little Egret - digiscoped

Purple Heron - digiscoped

Pied Kingfisher - digiscoped

There are plenty of good birds locally. Yesterday we saw a fair few black-shouldered kites, a black kite and green-billed Malkoha as we toured around the Huay Mai Teng reservoir and its surrounds. Tonight a quick half-hour at the loca rice paddy produced a female Pied Harrier and a Common Kestrel plus Yellow-Rumped and Plain Prinias and an Oriental Reed Warbler. At the school camp, notiwthstanding the racket created by 200 + kids, an unidentified phylloscopus warbler, possibly an Arctic, and one other, two-barred but thereafter who knows and a very pretty Ashy Drongo. I was very pleased to get the digiscope onto the birds for both of the photographs below; the warblers move at speed and the drongo was equally swift. 

Phylloscopus Warbler - unidentified

Ashy Drongo

Birds of Bacolod City,Negros Occidental

Don Sausa took me out today for a drive round Bacolod City today and  we saw some nice birds. Sadly no photographs as it was raining hard though I may add some from Don as he was shooting with his 500 mm telephoto lens, a real monster! The highlight however was the barred rails in the Town & Country estate, including a family with three chicks. Beautiful birds with very distinctive markings and good to know that they are breeding and to all intents and purposes in good shape. [Edit 14.10.10: I omitted the small matter of a beautiful lifer, namely a java sparrow in the same estate, in fact there were four of them, quite distinct, in among the barn swallows below.....no less a lifer! I don't know much about the provenance of these sparrows but their counterparts in Bangkok are thought to be from once captive birds; they are beautifully coloured birds and would make ideal caged birds for those of that ilk.] Elsewhere we spotted a pied bushchat in the estate and probably an olive-backed sunbird and plenty of barn swallows all looking rather ragged. Just outside the estate a lesser coucal was in the tall grasses and lots of scaly-breasted munias plus a striated grassbird or two and of course the ubuquitous collared kingfisher. On the estate near Don's house more brown shrikes and a number of white-breasted woodswallows. In the nearby mudflats at high tide there was a common sandpiper and many whiskered terns. We drove downtown, near to the shopping malls and there is a significant area of mudflats nearby and there were lots of little egrets to be seen and who knows what else. Conditions very wet so really only a half-hearted attempt. Clearly there are a lot of good birds in and around Bacolod City and thanks to Don  I am getting to know where to find them.