Babble, babble, babblers.

Last week we booked with Ian Dugdale and Games Petsri to guide Eunice and I around Hala Bala in the deep south of Thailand, bordering Malaysia.  It is a unique wildlife area of rich forest which has been undisturbed and, as a result, is full of towering trees and luxuriant tree ferns. It is the home of much wildlife that can only be found in the forests of this part of Thailand.  It is also the home of considerable insurgancy campaign which has caused the death of over 2000 people over the past few years resulting in the area being sparcely visited by tourists including birdwatchers and naturalists.  During Ramadan this year a truce has been declared which seems to have resulted in a lower level of activity on both sides.  Ian certainly felt there was a significant reduction in the number of road blocks we had to pass through and we experienced no problems during our stay of six days.  The accommodation expected at the HQ was not available so it was fairly basic with squat toilets and a lilo but this did nothing to detract from the outstanding birdwatching experience.  The food was copious, extremely tasty and predominately fishy.

The area lived up to all expectations and Ian and Games were outstanding in facilitating our stay both in its organisation and the their knowledge of where and how to find birds.  It  was a fest of babblers, woodpeckers and hornbills with a supporting cast of three species of trogon and owls.

I was going to add some pictures but the instructions for writing this blog are mostly in Thai which is extremely frustrating to a techie like me and so I will have to continue on a new posting which I will call Babblers part two.