Monday 29 January 2024

Thailand; Day 1 - arrival

   So begins the first day of the next birding trip, and the first in 2024. This time I was travelling with a group of friends from Spurn; Paul Collins, Sarah Harris, Rob Hunton and Kate Fox. We had fancied heading to Thailand for some time, and we finally got it arranged for early this year, with the hope of visiting some of the northern national parks and then heading to the south for a few other birds.

  We left Manchester on the 28th, departing at 08:00 in the morning, and arriving at our change in Bahrain early in the evening. After a four-hour wait there, we then continued on to Bangkok, arriving in Thailand at 09:00 in the morning. Here we had a six-hour wait before we would take an internal flight up to the city of Chiang Mai in the north, so that gave us some time to bird around the airport. We had plenty of Painted Storks fly over, and had even a few new birds with Great Myna, Asian Palm Swift and House Swift.

  Late afternoon, around 15:00, we boarded our flight north and finally reached the end of our travels. We quickly picked up the car, a Nissan X-Trail we reserved through Europcar, and set off out of the city to a small homestead to the south, halfway between Chiang Mai and the first national park we would visit in the morning, which Paul had reserved through booking.com. We were absolutely exhausted at this point so showered and crashed, ready to get started with the birding the following day. 

Species List:
Suvarnabhumi International Airport: Feral Pigeon, Red Collared Dove, Spotted Dove, House Swift, Asian Palm Swift, Painted Stork, Little Egret, Great Egret, Red-rumped Swallow, Common Myna, Great Myna, House Sparrow, Eurasian Tree Sparrow, White Wagtail, 

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