Fun Fact: If you miss your international flight to Thailand by 24 hours because your spouse wrote the date wrong on his calendar six months ago and didn't double check it at any point during the preceding months leading up to your departure, my advice as the long-suffering wife of this person is to never mention it again. And by that I mean. Never. Mention. It. Again.
So, I won't do that but it did cause us to miss our tour of Bangkok and resulted in a total of about 4 hours of sleep before we had to rise and meet our birding group, gulp down some woefully inadequate cups of coffee and board our van for the commercial salt pans south of town. But wait you say, what about the reclining Buddha and the muddy, floating markets and the Chatuchak market filled with sweaty tourists wearing baggy, elephant pants? Pffft, this is a birding trip my friend get over it.
Pak Thale is not listed on any Thailand tourist map and unless you are a birder looking for a particularly rare shorebird, or in search of a 50lb bag of salt as your Thailand souvenir, you will likely never hear of it.
I don't know why this area wasn't pictured on the brochure for Thailand
The salt pans are tidally influenced. The ocean rolls in, is channeled through a maze of ponds, is allowed to evaporate and, over time, compacted by one of these bad boys
This is the eventual result. Well, actually the eventual result is a tiny packet of exotic sounding salt sold by the gram at your local Whole Foods for an obscene amount of money.
For the record, I did not scare the birds but I cannot say I stayed on the large bunds mostly because I don't know what a bund is, but also because I was so jet-lagged I was essentially asleep on my feet
Spoon-billed Sandpiper
This, my friend, is a big deal. This little, shovel-nosed beauty is what we were all after, but you cannot just walk up and see this guy. Oh no, first you must sort through hundreds of least sandpipers and little sandpipers and lesser sandpipers and intermediate sandpipers and lowly sandpipers and black-billed sandpipers and short-legged sandpipers and short-billed sandpipers and......well, you get the idea.
Unfortunately, the spoon-billed sandpiper only has about 199 other members of his species left on the planet, but maybe it's best that we don't tell him that.
One of us was pret damn pleased with himself over the spoonbill.
Don't get me wrong, I love seeing critically endangered species waaaay in the distance as much as the next guy but for my money you cannot go wrong with a nice mudskipper.
Mudskipper
That face, the green, neon spots, the eyeballs stuck on top of his head that move independently as he slaps himself along the shoreline with his pectorals and wiggles himself into a little hole in the mud when threatened. He's literally a fish out of water. He's evolution made manifest. I love him, but don't tell the ultra serious birders I'm with, I might be shunned.
By the end of our first full day of birding I was exhausted and tried to get Fred to keep me from falling asleep by reenacting the Titanic (Thai-tanic?) "flying" scene on this boat on the beach by our hotel but for some reason he declined.
The highlight of our second day, for me anyway and since I'm the one writing this that's all that matters, was our 20 minute boat trip out to a sand spit to look for some bird rarities. Well, that's what everyone else was doing anyway. I was shell collecting.
They put all the men on one boat and all the women on another
While Fred and our group were figuring the odds of seeing Malaysian and White-faced plovers, I was figuring the odds of getting my pockets full of gastropod and bivalve finds through customs.
Keep looking for plovers, I'm busy
I would happily have spent the whole day here but our ultimate destination after birding the wetland habitats near our hotel was Kaeng Krachen National Park, the largest national park in Thailand. But first, let's take a moment to think about the thousands of shore birds that visit the salt pans on a daily basis and add that little extra something to your fancy, expensive salt.
Painted Storks
Kaeng Krachen National Park
At the park entrance, we were loaded into the back of some pick-up trucks and hauled down bumpy, dirt roads deep into the forest where we saw exotic birds and wildlife and plenty of fresh elephant dung but, sadly, no elephant. The internet says there are 700 elephants in the park but it's a well known fact that the internet is a big, fat liar so I had to content myself with monkeys and birds instead.
Dusky Leaf Monkeys, that extra tail is a baby
It's a gibbon that his name is Euel
Best to shake the sheets out before crawling in bed
When we first saw the "Please drive slowly to avoid killing butterflies" sign I was thinking they were pretty sensitive about slamming into the random single butterfly
But, no, no, no, there are hundreds of these little jewels using the road as their personal salt lick
Offerings left by birders hoping for a siting of the rare Gallus gallus
Gallus gallus
I know what you're thinking, but you are wrong. That is not a rooster. That is THE rooster. The original one from which all descendants made the fateful decision to cross the road.
A nice cold Singha at the end of 3 full days of birding. Up before dawn every day, lunch in the field to maximize birding time, back at the hotel for dinner at dusk and then out in the field again for owls and nightjars. It's exhausting having this much fun.
Blue-throated Barbet
Olive-backed Sunbird
Long-tailed Broadbill
What can I say, the man loves signs
