Thailand Birding: Spoon-billed Sandpiper Returns

I spent a couple of days with my wife in Petchaburi province on 29th and 30th October doing some birdwatching and some lazing on the beach.

On the afternoon of 29th I headed to Pak Thale to see if I could find a returning Spoon-billed Sandpiper. A new road was being layed part the way into the site and I was unable to drive in, leaving me with a long and hot walk. The workers said it would be finished in three days though. They were laying a concrete road and where it joins the dirt road towards the sandpiper site there is now a large drop of about 7-8 inches. Unless something is done about this, access to the site will be impossible in a saloon car or even a minibus. A vehicle with very good ground clearance will be needed. I will look at the situation on my next visit.

Despite much searching I could not see any Spoon-billed Sandpipers. Lots of commoner waders were present - Marsh Sandpiper, Spotted Redshank, Broad-billed Sandpiper, Rufous-necked Stint, Long-toed Stint, Temminck’s Stint, Curlew Sandpiper, Eurasian Curlew, Common Greenshank, Lesser Sand Plover, Greater Sand Plover, Kentish Plover, Black-winged Stilt, Common Sandpiper. Also seen were about a dozen Great Knot, 1 Turnstone and 1 Grey-tailed Tattler.

Having sweated myself silly I moved off and checked some wader flocks on my back to Had Chao Samran. Somewhere near the sign which demarcates the boudary between Laem Pak Bia and Pak Thale I checked out a flock of stints and found a single Spoon-billed Sandpiper amongst them! Hooray, it’s back!

I checked out a couple of other spots and found lots of Brown-headed Gulls with a Caspian Terna dna Black-headed Gull, a flock of c40 White-shouldered Starlings gathering to roost with huge numbers of White-vented Mynas and in some freshwater wetlands a Painted Stork was in the company of an Asian Openbill, a male Painted Snipe and 2 Purple Herons.

Khao Look Chang
A few months ago David Scott took me to some dry dipterocarp woodland at Khao Look Chang, Petchaburi. My wife and I went there for a quick look on 30th October. We arrived at 11.30am so I didn’t really expect much, however, within 30  minutes I had seen an Asian Barred Owlet, 5 Black-headed Woodpeckers, 4 Lineated Barbets, 5 Greater Racket-tailed Drongos, 1 Spangled Drongo, 1 Green-billed Malkoha, 1 Rufous Treepie and a Puff-throated Babbler, not bad for such a quick stop in the middle of the day.

Khao Yoi
Later in the day (about 4.30pm) we were nosing around in rice fields near Khao Yoi. Most of the normal birds for that habitat were easily seen but most impressive was a flock of Black Kites. At first I saw 2 birds but then noticed many more sitting in palm trees. Through my telescope I could see that there were large numbers in all the surrounding palms and more birds began to descend from above. I counted an impressive 473 Black Kites sitting in trees and wheeling around in the sky but with many many more high above and many birds unviewable on the blind side of the trees I would imagine the real total to be somewhere between 6-700.

As we were leaving a superb adult male eastern Marsh Harrier flew alongside the car, hunting over rice fields.