Todays plan was to spend the full day exploring the Dihing Patkai National Park, mopping up the targets we had missed on our previous visit here, of which there were only a handful, but the park promised some nice general birding with an outside chance of an interesting mammal species on the quiet forest roads. The day certainly started well when we spotted two White-winged Ducks flying away as we drove down the road early in the morning.
Our first port of call was a clearing just off the main
road, which we had visited on our previous visit but failed to find the target;
the Pale-capped Pigeon. This was never going to be the most stunning bird, but
fortunately it did not make us wait too long, and whilst we were waiting I had
a new species of Forktail, with a White-crowned Forktail on the small trickle
of water there, along with two Black-backed Forktail.
After this early success we headed into the main National
Park but this is where the day started to slow down, with very little seen.
Despite our best efforts, we failed to locate our main targets and birding
generally was very slow, probably the slowest of our entire trip thus far. We
had a nice male Western Hoolock Gibbon to liven things up, but otherwise very
little of note occurred.
After lunch we tried another area on the outskirts of the
park where our main target, the Chestnut-backed Laughingthrush had been seen a
few days prior. Again despite our best efforts we could not get even a sniff of
this species and although livelier than the morning, we still laboured with
birding in general. A pair of Velvet-fronted Nuthatch and our first Oriental
Turtle Dove were the most noteworthy species we managed to record.
In the evening we said goodbye to Papu, our guide for the
trip thus far, due to him being pre-booked for another tour. An excellent guide
and fun to have around, he made a huge contribution to our trip. We were
introduced to our new guide Palap over dinner, before we tackled the last few
days our the trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment