 Eastern Imperial Eagle One of the rewards of being a birding guide is that each day is different. On January 27th I’d taken out a couple from Australia. As the high tide was at Mai Po in the morning, I’d picked them up from Kam Sheung Road station and we’d headed for the wetland reserve with a brief stop at Kam Tin River en route. The day was clear and very warm and we had a fairly leisurely time. We walked out to Deep Bay for the tide, then back onto the reserve and around the scrape, finishing at Long Valley in the afternoon. Because of the time of the tide, we didn’t do any forest birding but still came up with a total of 88 species, including Black-faced Spoonbill, Saunders’s Gull, Eastern Imperial and Greater Spotted Eagles, and the wintering Siberian Crane on the scrape. At Long Valley, the highlights were Greater Painted-snipe and Eastern Water Rail.
From Tai Po Kau, we drove to Long Valley, arriving in the middle of the day. Fortunately, the area was quiet - the first day of CNY is one where people are preoccupied with family celebrations and the countryside is far less busy that it usually is at the weekend or on public holidays. Here, the weather turned cloudy and rainy. As on the previous day, I found Greater Painted-snipe and Eastern Water Rail in the same places, and the usual open country birds – Sooty-headed Bulbul, Red-throated Pipit, and Eastern Yellow Wagtail - were more in evidence than they had been yesterday. Which left the remainder of the afternoon. I had been considering going to San Tin, but decided to opt for Mai Po access road and the Kam Tin River along Pok Wai South Road. The access road and the area between the Mai Po office and the AFCD reception usually hold a number of common species and my hope was that we might pick up a flyover Black-faced Spoonbill. Luckily, that proved to be the case and my clients managed to connect with Mai Po’s flagship bird. We were also fortunate to see a small party of Chinese Grosbeaks feeding on Chinaberry berries near the AFCD office.  Spotted Redshank And so to Kam Tin River before I dropped my clients off at Kam Sheung Road station. This is not an area I know very well, but I had visited on the previous day with my Australian clients on the way to Mai Po. That had been on a rising tide where the riverside mud was being covered by the tide. Now I was aiming for the falling tide and calculated that there would be some exposed mud at the time of our visit. This turned out to be the case and from the road beside the river, we were fortunate enough to see a single Black-faced Spoonbill and four Grey-headed Lapwings. Other water birds were in evidence, including ducks and tringa sandpipers – Marsh Sandpiper, Spotted Redshank and Common Greenshank. A nearby flowering Red Cotton Tree held at least three White-shouldered Starlings – a bird which is regular in the northwest New Territories in summer but very scarce in winter.
We finished the day with a total of 102 species. Note that all photographs are from my archives as I don’t carry my camera when guiding. All images are © David Diskin.
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Long Valley has long been one of my favourite birding sites in Hong Kong. I’ve been birding there since the 1990s and have enduring memories of a time when the rivers were natural banked and flooding was frequent. In particular, I recall October 3 1995 when Typhoon Sibyl hit the territory and the northern part of the valley was transformed into a lake. Three hundred White-winged Terns were flying over the flooded fields with a single Bridled Tern amongst them. With the channelling of the rivers, flooding is a thing of the past. There have been other changes; most notably, the working relationship between conservation groups and the farmers has helped to enhance the ecology of the area. In particular, the rice-growing projects have brought in more seed-eating birds, notably buntings, to the fields. Since the harvest in late November/early December, the fields have been relatively quiet. However, I visited the area during the last two hours of daylight on January 18 and saw some good birds: White’s Thrush; a Black-winged Kite preening on one of the wires and later hovering in search of food over the fields; Eastern Buzzard and Peregrine Falcon; four Little Buntings; Eastern Water Rail and – best of all - a male Siberian Rubythroat.  Male Siberian Rubythroat There is something enigmatic about Siberian Rubythroat. It is, in fact, a common winter visitor and passage migrant, but because of its skulking nature and its preference for little-visited areas of grassland-shrubland, it is a bird I seldom see. Therefore, I decided to return on the following day to try and photograph the bird and also the Eastern Water Rail which I had seen very near the rubythroat site. The rubythroat showed well briefly just after dawn, but the rail was nowhere to be seen. While I was there, I also spent some time taking pictures of some of the other birds in the valley – the first time I’d actually taken bird photographs for several months. Some of these images are shown below, although I confess the Eastern Water Rail was taken in the area in January 2015.  Eastern Water Rail Eastern Water Rail is a scarce winter visitor to Hong Kong. It occurs more or less annually at Long Valley. You have to look hard and be patient to see the rubythroat and rail at Long Valley in winter. The water birds shown below, however, can usually be seen quite easily by the casual observer walking through the fields.  Chinese Pond Heron  Eastern Cattle Egret  Common Snipe  Pied Avocet  Black-winged Stilt Finally, a couple of more species that I managed to photograph today. The Crested Myna is a common resident species that will be familiar to many people living in Hong Kong. The small, attractive Zitting Cisticola is more local; it is mainly a passage migrant and winter visitor to grassy and reed marsh areas. Long Valley is a good place to look for it but it is far less numerous than it used to be in the 1990s.  Crested Mynas  Zitting Cisticola In my capacity as a bird guide, I was out in the field on December 2nd, 2016 with Mark Hodgson from Wisconsin, USA . Mark recently sent me a couple of photographs of greenshanks he took on the outing asking for confirmation of the ID: Nordmann’s Greenshank and Common Greenshank. With Mark’s permission, I’ve put the images on this page as they show clearly the features for separating Nordmann’s from Common in non-breeding plumage, even though the bill of the Nordmann’s (and the Common) is not visible.
Non-breeding Nordmann’s is generally paler than Common. It has a thin grey line in the centre of the scapulars, coverts & tertials and thin white fringes to these feathers but no other markings, so it is rather plain in appearance. Common is usually darker and is much more patterned with lots of dark notching on the feathers. There are sometimes paler Common Greenshank around, and they can initially suggest Nordmann’s, but they always show vestiges of the darker notching when looked at closely. The head patterning is also different, being paler and mottled on Nordmann’s, darker and streaked on Common. Nordmann’s Greenshank is one of Mai Po’s special birds. It is a limited-range wader, breeding in a relatively small area of eastern Russia ( Sakhalin Island and the adjacent mainland) and wintering locally in coastal areas of north-east India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, south to Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo. With an estimated global population of c.1300 birds, it is classified as Endangered by the IUCN. In Hong Kong it is a regular spring passage migrant with a high count of 58 on April 13, 1993. It is rare in autumn and winter. The bird in the photograph has been present at Mai Po from November 2016 and can usually be observed from the southern hide on a 2.0-metre tide. Also on December 2, 2016 Mark and I were fortunate enough to see a recently-arrived adult Siberian Crane accompanied by a juvenile out on the mud flats in front of the southern hide. We first saw them from the northern hide and walked back to the southern hide to observe them more closely. Unfortunately, the birds flew off onto the reserve just after we arrived at the hide but Mark managed to take a few quick shots before they disappeared. I’ve included one of those shots here.  Siberian Cranes An adult has remained in the area since then and can currently be seen on pond 16/17. This may be the same individual as the bird on December 2nd, but as two adults were seen by an observer on December 17th , this may be a different individual. Since the first record on December 2nd, several of my clients have seen the Siberian Crane. All images are © Mark Hodgson. Many thanks to Mark for allowing me to post them here. |
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