Far out in the East: Week 2 Days 7 - 8

The journey had taken us North of the country to Malaysias national park...... Taman Negara. Since the original planning of the trip this was the bit I had really been looking forward to..... birding around parts of the worlds oldest rain-forest or is that jungle? anyway anticipation was high.

The first full days in the forest

I only had two expectations, one was to see the target bird..... Great Argus, the second was to enjoy countless new species of bird, mammal and insect in the wonderful rain forest environment.

The camp grounds provided the easiest birding: A handy fruiting tree close to the chalet provided some early morning entertainment..... although most of the action happened way up in the tree canopy some species gave good views

Asian Fairy Bluebird

while this pair of Chestnut Breasted Malkoha actually came lower down to check me out

Unsurprisingly we did well for woodpecker species, this Banded Woodpecker was one of a dozen or so seen on the trip



Not all the action happened under the canopy, this Brown Barbet had spotted a fruiting bush along one of the trails

The dappled light and dense vegatation always made photography hardwork, however the wonderful Black & Red Broadbill became quite a regular, we even had a sighting in the garden of our chalet

beakless..... and the only sighting I managed of this Banded Kingfisher

another species that popped up now and again were the Red Rumped Trogans

Plenty of other species were seen, but all too often gone in the blink of an eye, Great Iora, Eastern Crowned Warblers, White Rumped Sharma, a single Banded Pitta that took 3 of us 15 minutes to see while the fourth guy tried valiantly to point it out to us...... eventualy on hands and knees we spotted it through incredibly dense vegatation.... phew!!

Inbetween all this of course we were concious of the wereabouts of the Great Argus.... we past its favoured locations while walking a number of trails..... we even made 2 journies especially to see this species, sadely both days turned up nothing...... no problem we shall try again tomorrow.

of course it didnt stop us picking up more species, Raffles Malkoha, Asian Paradise Flycathers... including the incredible white morph, Black Thighed Falconette, Yellow & Black Broadbill, Striped Tit Babbler, Black naped Monarch, Olive backed Woodpeckers, Greater Coucal and plenty of Bulbul species.

Ashy Minivet

Chestnut winged Babbler