16FEB17: Thailand Day 1 -Bang Chak Fields

We made it to the Bang Chak field area around 4 pm.  The vast area is a collection of rice paddies that are in different states of the production cycle, wet, half grown, full grown, emergent, bare dry soil. It is within these paddies and along the roadside vegetation that we birded.  Our objective for this area was looking for "waterbirds, raptors, pipits, Bluethroats, weavers, etc."  So a couple of things went down here.  First, it was a wetland.  Rick had mentioned he had seen Pheasant-tailed Jacana here before - that's all I needed to hear.  Second were the swifts.  

Let's start with the swifts.  As I posted to my Facebook page, one of the bigger challenges for me in Thailand were identifying the swifts. Location and altitude play a part in ID but calls and plumage as well.  Here all these swifts are feeding and swirling around at 40 mph near dusk. Rick turns to me and calmly says "get dorsal shots". Over the course of the trip, I accumulated 1000s of in-flight swift photos for identification (and the challenge!).  The swifts in these fields were Germain's Swiftlets.  

Germain's Swiftlet - dorsal view

Germain's Swiftlet - ventral view

The other part of all this were the wetlands.  Rick and Bob were off sorting out weavers and I hung out by some prime looking wetlands.  As we were all doing our thing, the sun set in spectacular fashion over the rice fields.

Bang Chak Fields Sunset

Now it was pretty dim out - probably 20 minutes past sunset.  We were then treated to a pair of Bronze-winged Jacanas.  High ISO photo below.

Bronze-winged Jacana

What a fitting end to a perfect day of birding in Thailand!!!!