Day 316: Two Birds Are Better Than No Birds
With another slow day in the field, Noah trudges on.
Nov 12, 2015: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — They say showing up is half the battle, though sometimes it helps to be in the right place at the right time. Chun and I clocked a 14-hour day of birding and ended with just two new birds, a Copper-throated Sunbird and a flock of Daurian Starlings, by the time dusk fell this evening. Two birds is twice as nice as one (which is infinitely better than zero!), but it was an unexpectedly laborious day in the field.
All you can do is put in the effort and hope things will average out. We had a good plan to target a few uncommon species today and they just remained elusive. Chun and I spent the morning in a tract of mangroves at Taman Alam Nature Park (managed by the Malaysian Nature Society) outside of Kuala Selangor, hoping for a Blue-winged Pitta. We missed it, but ran into a lone Scottish man who wanted to find a Mangrove Blue-Flycatcher (which I saw in the Philippines)—he said he had been looking there for two days already! I don’t have two days to spend on one bird, and Chun and I moved on to other spots this afternoon outside of Kuala Lumpur.
At least we’ve been lucky with the weather. Thunderstorms rolled through today and, once again, we dodged almost every raindrop. Meanwhile, heavy rain triggered a large landslide yesterday on the Karak Highway, completely blocking the route that we passed a couple of days ago near the Berjaya Hills. Looks like we squeaked through there just in time!
New birds today: 2
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