Mainly birding in Hong Kong with a few pictures thrown in.
Blogger has put these in reverse order and I’m demonstrating my maturity by not being fagged to try to reverse them back...
Anyhow, a close-ish Black-winged Kite fly-by gave a short thrill.
The flowerbeds and planters of Telford Gardens have been host to an exotic variety of migrant birds through October 2020. Consider: -
Middendorff’s Grasshopper Warbler
Lanceolated Warbler
Pallas’s Grasshopper Warbler
Pale-footed Bush Warbler
All these birds have been very viewable due to the limited size of the flower beds they are stopping-over in.
Rare birds have been found and Telford Gardens before Braving the Concrete Jungle (in early 2017).
This Middendorff’s Grasshopper Warbler was only the third HK bird to be detected other than by the bird ringers in their Mai Po reedbed nets.
So it drew a sizeable (socially distanced ?) crowd of admirers, including yours truly.
Captain Wong (Wong Lun-cheung), who found many of these rarities, has lived at this estate in east Kowloon for a decade and back in the summer (of 2020) wrote up an account of this phenomenon for the HKBWS’s quarterly bulletin number 256.
The birds get so used to people they can be photographed with mobile phones, which certainly democratises the recording process; -
Telford Gardens Estate Management has been both informative with the signboards, and responsive to control the human movement around the flowerbeds.
So it’s a “win” for the birds, and a “win” for the humans, too.
Elsewhere, a view of Collared Scops Owl, seen on our nightbird survey on 22nd October.
And, on 26th October, a sunny morning at Mai Po’s boardwalk hide, with a falling tide. Wigeon are among the first duck to arrive for the winter.
"Also seens" were Pacific Golden Plover, “atrifrons” Lesser Sand Plover, and Osprey.
Dunlin are also winter visitors…
Cool weather now, but strangely, there’s a big Typhoon in the Philippines, heading for the South China Sea.
Yes, I know that’s nonsense, but here we are. And there’s plenty of nonsense already on the internet !
Throughout this month there have been southbound Whiskered Terns over the fishponds near HK’s boundary with Shenzhen.
And the odd White-winged Tern (left on the last photo).
At Mai Po Nature Reserve, the resident birds (and non-birds) have been showing well..
...and the winter visitors have started to arrive..
Two Taiga Bean Geese have been a highlight of the autumn/winter so far...
The “end of the Fence”
At the start of the day...
There have been a lot of migrating Egrets around in the past couple of weeks, but for some real “Viz Mig” Jemi and I went to Mai Po late yesterday afternoon.Almost seven hundred Egrets of various kinds flew up from parts of Mai Po and nearby and headed off south and southwest, towards the setting sun.
