THAILAND (8/16/02)

Although birdwatching was what took us to Thailand, I will remember many other elements of this trip, such as: The food, always delicious with a mix of spicy and plain dishes at every meal; completely beautiful women in traditional Thai attire; the polite bowing to us when we spoke to any Thai person; bus loads and hotel lobbies full of tourists from all over the world, many there to celebrate the lusty and long-lasting Chinese New Year (the year of the horse); the extreme cleanliness of the people and of the countryside; the Thai people’s friendliness; the signs of Buddhism on all sides — monks in orange robes, temples (wats) of magnificent mien, covered with gold and guarded by dragons—; the $2-per-hour foot-and-leg massages; the food — oops! I’ve already mentioned that, but it is a very important element of a Thai visit.

Thailand presents a mosaic of scenes intensely interesting and intriguing to Westerners: The reclamation of salt from saline areas of land; miles of rice paddies; acres and acres of cabbages, onions, garlic, watermelon and other fruits; water buffaloes harnessed to ancient plows; the extraordinarily colorful floating market outside of Bangkok; the night market in Chiang Mai; the “tuk, tuk” motorized pedicabs that transport multitudes through the traffic-jammed cities; the colorful Hill Tribes of Chinese or Burmese descent in native dress; the abundance of orchids in gardens and parks; brick remains of old walled cities.

We were soon to learn that this was no ordinary birding tour. The thirteen of us traveled in three spacious vans with a crew of always-smiling eight young men who saw to all our needs, including greeting us with a damp refrigerated towel, a bottle of cold water and a Pepsi each time we came back from a trail to the vehicles. On many days, since we had breakfast at 5 a.m., we would be treated to a mid-morning “snack” that consisted of coffee, tea or cold drinks, platters of fresh fruit, brownies (in a country where chocolate is a rare commodity) and an addictive type of rice krispy cookie, all at tables and chairs carried in a “chuck wagon ” that followed the vans.

However, I stray from the purpose of our trip: birds, which were no less alluring than all the scenes mentioned above, with names such as leafbirds, bulbuls, coucals, laughingthrushes, babblers, sunbirds and junglefowl. Our birding began outside Bangkok where our group went to study the mud flats and salt pans of the Gulf of Thailand to search for a variety of shorebirds. From the many species present, the best were two spoonbill sandpipers, rare almost anywhere in the world.

En route from Bangkok the next day to Ayunhaya, the former capital of old Siam, we stopped near paddy fields to enjoy a concentration of 100s of Asian openbills, a type of large stork. After lunch, among the ruins of old temples which had been sacked in 1768 and stripped of their gold by the Burmese, we enjoyed coppersmith barbets, whose call is reminiscent of a smith banging on copper, common ioras and scarlet-backed flowerpeckers.

We spent three nights at a lovely resort hotel (the place where we discovered foot massages) only a short distance from a tropical evergreen forest contained within a national forest. Here we encountered our first hornbills of the trip, in addition to trogons and a most special coral-billed ground-cuckoo. This 27-inch colorful bird has a 14-inch tail, a coral red bill and legs along with a red and violet patch around its eyes, a black head and upper parts glossed with violet, green and purple.

Often ground birds like this, such as the green peafowl we encountered a few days later, appear more as a mirage and quickly vanish into the mist However, this bird was apparently acclimated to the noise coming from a nearby kitchen, as it foraged in good view for us for at least 15 minutes before blending back into the shadows. In the same area we were fortunate to freeze in position as we watched three Siamese firebacks (a type of partridge) scratching for food in the leaves under a large bush. We were able, with patience, to see their red legs and facial skin and the male’s black head and throat. What a memorable experience!

After a while, it wasn’t just birds that we noticed but also the large number of Thai birdwatchers. In twos, threes and larger groups (of men, of women, and mixed), they seemed to be everywhere we were. Since one of our leaders was the author of the area’s best-known field guide, many of these birders got up the courage to ask him to autograph their books. In all the places that we have ever birded, we had never seen so many others pursuing this interest. Most of the birders also had very high-tech photography equipment.

From this area, we returned to Bangkok and flew to northern Thailand, where we began encountering Himalayan birds. We visited open plains and forested mountain slopes, pleasuring our minds daily with new bird images. We went to the summit of Doi Inthanon, at 8400 feet the highest point in Thailand. The forest birds there — chestnut-tailed minla, rufous-winged fulvetta, snowy-browed flycatcher, rufous-backed sibia, yellow-bellied fantail, and a tiny almost-mouselike pygmy wren-babbler, and a host more — were as trying to see as they were eye-catching when finally viewed.

From there we drove by fields and fields of onions, garlic and cabbages and miles of fallow rice paddies on our way to a resort perched on a mountainside near the Burmese border in an area inhabited by colorfully-dressed Chinese descendants of Chiang Kai-shek’s army and other tribespeople. Each day brought us new birds, but always there were many that eluded us. Never have we seen such skittish birds as those in Thailand!

However, rice paddies provided habitat where larks, pipits, bushlarks and lapwings were plentiful and couldn’t hide as easily as forest birds. Undoubtedly, these birds were attracted to spilled rice and the seeds of weeds that lined the paddies. The best, in my opinion at least, was the Siberian rubythroat, a ground-dwelling skulker with a jewel-like ruby throat. It was quite a relief when all of us finally had a good look at this migrant from northern Asia.

When we left Thailand, our heads were filled with visions of loveliness.

GRAPHICS courtesy of Suppalak Klabdee, Thailand: Upper left: Coral-billed Ground-cuckoo; lower right: Greater Racket-tailed Drongo

For more photos of Thailand, go to http://www.pbase.com/ellie2/