Think about a Great Hornbill; then put its four-foot length in the back of your mind for a while. Now let us introduce Thailand. A country the size of France, Thailand is located in the heart of Southeast Asia, with borders on Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Cambodia, and Malaysia; it is close enough to China and Vietnam to be within foraging range for large needletail swifts. While one or two of these neighboring countries might not be ideal places for tourists to visit yet, Thailand is. Its central, crossroads location is reflected in its bird life, which includes Indo-Chinese, Himalayan, and Sundaic elements, as well as many widespread species typical of the Oriental (Indo-Malayan) faunal region.
From a North American perspective, Thailand's bird families are a mixture of the familiar, the superficially familiar, and the wonderfully different and bizarre (you can let that Great Hornbill with its huge, casqued bill return to the front of your mind for a while). "Familiar" includes most waterbirds such as herons, waterfowl, and shorebirds, and a few landbirds such as woodpeckers, nuthatches, treecreepers, pipits, swallows, and thrushes, although most of the species are different (Common Greenshank for Greater Yellowlegs, Yellow Bittern for Least Bittern, etc.). "Superficially familiar" are numerous ecological counterparts, such as Old World flycatchers and Old World warblers for tyrant flycatchers and wood warblers. However, the Old World warblers are mostly dull and, well, rather like tyrant flycatchers in the challenges presented, while many of the flycatchers are more like wood warblers in color intensity, including the vivid niltavas and blue-flycatchers.
As for the "wonderfully different and bizarre," these are many: humongous hornbills with wingbeats that sound like an oncoming locomotive; barbets that should provide the basis for any soundtrack of exotic jungle sounds; the gaudy broadbills; aerodynamic treeswifts that perch on snags and wires; brilliant pittas that hide so well; strangely shaped and exotically colored woodpeckers; forest-loving kingfishers; and drongos with racket tails. Even the prosaic in Europe isn't prosaic if you haven’t been to Europe--Doi Inthanon is a fun place to see your lifer Eurasian Jay or Eurasian Hoopoe.
Just as many of us will be escaping a northern winter, most of the breeding species of Siberia and temperate China head south for warmer winters. On a couple of occasions during this tour, we will seek wintering waterbirds ranging from Chinese Pond-Heron to Broad-billed Sandpiper. On a daily basis we will see that Thailand's marshes, fields, woods, and forests are alive with northern passerines. Although they don't count for your North America list, one visit to Thailand in winter is like a lifetime on Attu and St. Lawrence (which don't have the Great Hornbills you are keeping in the back of your mind). We have a good chance of seeing such stars (and this is just a partial list) as Eastern Red-rumped Swallow, Olive-backed Pipit, Citrine and Gray wagtails, Siberian Rubythroat, Bluethroat, Siberian Blue Robin, Blue Rock-Thrush, Eyebrowed Thrush, Taiga Flycatcher, Brown Shrike, Little Bunting, and the host of migrant Old World warblers that will provide constant pleasure and challenge (some twenty species of migrant and resident Phylloscopus are known from Thailand). Occasional hard winters farther north push even more thrushes, buntings, and others into northern Thailand.
Thailand's wealth of bird life (just north of 1000 species) should be a bit daunting, but help exists: the recently published Birds of Thailand by Craig Robson is a useful, portable aid to identifying the country's birds, and an even more recently published field guide co-authored by our very own Uthai Treesucon is also now available. Either of these texts will serve nicely in the field, the former is more portable, the latter has more and better information; we recommend both!
The perfect itinerary is an impossibility, but we are pleased with this survey of Thailand, originally designed (and improved a little yearly) by Thai ornithologist and birder Uthai Treesucon, who will be co-leading the tour along with Field Guides's Jay VanderGaast. In a three-week period, we will visit central and northern Thailand, covering forests from near sea level to the top of Thailand's highest mountain, as well as a mixture of marshes and open areas. With three- or four-night stays at several prime birding locations, hotel changes and attendant repacking are reduced while we still manage to visit an impressive variety of Thailand's most important national parks and forest reserves.
Thailand is usually thought of as an excellent introduction to the pleasures of birding in Southeast Asia, and this is the general intent of our tour here. Each site that we plan to visit is rich in widespread tropical Asian birds, and we'll try to see as many of these as we can. But we also see a number of species that are rarely seen outside of Thailand. In each of the areas visited, there are usually a few special birds of restricted range in residence that may take some extra effort to see (Coral-billed Ground-Cuckoo at Khao Yai, Ratchet-tailed Treepie at Kaeng Krachan, Giant Nuthatch on Doi Lang, and Hodgson’s Frogmouth on Doi Ang Khang are good examples).
Thailand's winning combination of superb birding, delectable cuisine, and fascinating culture is hard to beat, and impossible to forget!
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Client comment
"This was an excellent tour experience. Guides Jay VanderGaast and Uthai Treesucon were great at finding birds, patient with us when we were slow to get on them, persistent, and always cheerful. They both had great attitudes and were easy-going yet managed us and the time well. The best features of the tour were all the birds and the amazing food provided in the field by Wat and his crew." A.G., THAILAND tour participant<