Birding in Thailand – Doi Inthanon & Doi Angkhang

Thailand is a best place for photography, be it temples, landscapes , people or nature.
It was a last minute sketch to do bird photography in thailand. One of my friend Mr.Lean Yen Loong from Oriental Bird Club hinted some pro & cons for bird photography in exotic kingdom of thailand. Prior to travel I had exchanged emails with experts in birdwatching who are pioneers for many years in their geographic regions. I was accompanied by my friend Srihari who is also a travel agent.
My first stop was northern thailand & then on to western thailand & central offcourse.
Pure vegetarians will have problem with food in this country, I managed to pack few “ready to eat” from MTR Bangalore. But Bangkok had a vegetarian restaurant called “Aryas”

Touchdown was Suvarnabhumi airport at Bangkok & took a connecting flight to Chiangmai. At Chiangmai airport our Selfdrive 4WD Toyota pickup truck was waiting & immediately without wasting time we drove to Doi Inthanon which is around 85Kms.
First check point at Doi Inthanon National Park , Entrance fees is 400 baht / head.

Saw this tepmle on way to Doi inthanon

Next stop was the Wachirathan waterfalls, found Plumbeous Redstart & Slaty backed forktail here.

Plumbeous Redstart -Female

Slaty-backed Forktail

Saw one more signboard of a waterfall , but no birds there.

Next stop was at Mr.Deang Shop for breakfast, Mr.Deang is a veteran & a master in birdwatching around this place. Local birdwatcher visit this place & report latest sightings in the log book which is kept at this place & is maintianed for years. This shop has some rooms for those who want to stay overnight & do birding next day. Shop is full of bird photographs taken by best photographers who visited this region & has collection of books on birds , field guides & even a map sketched by himself for birdwatching around his place.

We then headed to the summit(Top) of Doi Inthanon & did some bird watching & photographing ,Doi Inthanon is a fabulous sceneric place to photograph landscapes .

Grey Bushchat – Male

Gey Buschat – Female

Mrs. Gould’s Sunbird

Yellow Vented Warbler

Found some record shots of flycatchers at Mr.Deang place, sorry for poor quality 🙂

Hill Blue Flycatcher- Male

Hill Blue Flycatcher- Female

Verditer Flycatcher.

Later that evening we proceeded to Doi Angkhang

Doi Angkhang was a flop show as I had high hopes of bird count there, many photographers had good count of birds shown in their blogs , but for me it was more of a scenic place & less of bird photography , I managed to get some bird photos but not to my expectations. 🙂

I started birdwatching in the early morning & its very difficult to photograph as the tempertuare was around 9 to 10 degrees with fogging & poor visibility, Sun usually can be seen here at around 8:00AM, at around 8:30AM I head to the nearby military campsite & started birding around. The army personnel are very friendly, they hinted some places to go around for birdwatching.

Saw this cute little nuthatch near the army checkpoint.

Chestnut-vented Nuthatch

Yellow Vented Bulbul

It was no point to waste more time here, so came back to hotel packed the luggage & changed the lens to wide angle , took some landscape photos of Royal project & headed to our next stop at 100kms called Thaton.