Birding Bali Barat National Park

 Bali Barat, or West Bali National Park, is in the northwestern corner of Bali, 4 hours drive through mountains and rice terraces from the madding crowd of tourists that cluster around the beaches in the south. This park was set aside as the last habitat for the Bali starling or mynah, which is found only on Bali. These beautiful birds became critically endangered due to persistent poaching for the caged bird trade, and there are now over 1,000 individuals in captive breeding programs around the world.

Fewer than 100 Bali mynahs remain in the wild, all of which gather to breed here in the park. We were lucky to see a flock of 12 birds flying from tree to tree as we stood on a hillside looking out over the forest canopy on our first morning. The next day, we found four pairs, garrulous and stunning in their startlingly white suits and brilliant blue spectacles.

Christmas birding in and around Hangzhou, China

Big sky country

Birds of Okinawa

Like many islands, Okinawa is full of endemics (species found nowhere else). We were lucky enough to have superb views to both male and female Okinawa woodpeckers as well as a family of Ryukyu robins complete with demanding fledgelings. The Ryukyu scops owl calls almost incessantly in the evenings when we were looking for elusive rhino beetles (Trypoxylus dichotomus). And of course the flightless Okinawa rail, with it's lipstick red bill and legs was a real highlight. Well worth sleeping in the car for a few hours in between nocturnal beetling and dawn, to see the rails when they were most active and busy feeding along route 2, which runs through the Yanbaru forest in the north of Okinawa. There are very sweet signs in Japanese and other languages all along the road, possibly marking the spots of previous rail roadkills. We were also most impressed by the conservation efforts to save the rails, which include a rather successful anti-mongoose fence across the island of Okinawa.

Dartmoor ponies

Provence

View from Les Baux de Provence

Gordes

Rousillon

Birds and mammals of Montana

Gyrfalcon at Deer Lodge

  

Red-shafted flickrs

American three-toed woodpecker seen on Lolo

Male spruce grouse on Lolo

Panama & Costa Rica with Lindblad and the Harvard Natural History Museum

 

Birding SE Arizona

 

Zambian birds

The miombo rock thrush is a particularly engaging little bird, with its tastefully muted plumage. It is named for the increasingly threatened miombo woodland that covers much of south-central Africa, from Angola to Tanzania. Like many other species in the region, this rock thrush is a miombo specialist, so deforestation is a significant conservation threat. In Zambia, where I spent much of February and March, miombo is cut down for firewood, and to make way for tobacco, a highly lucrative crop that has to be dried, a process requiring fuel in the form of more decapitated miombo trees.

Assorted sketches of some of the avian highlights, including the Chaplain's Barbet (Lybius chaplini ), found only in Zambia.