Trip 9 - Nam Nao National Park & Needletails - October 18-21, 2019

This October trip was scheduled to be a 4 day vigil at Khao Dinsor in Chumphon raptor watching.  Two days before I was to travel down there, the weather forecast looked really bad with 5 days of easterly winds and heavy, heavy rain.  After consulting with Rick Heil, I changed plans and decided to Nam Nao National Park for 4 days.  Why not!

Nam Nao NP is really spectacular.  The traditional drive-your-car-around and stop and hike birding was not what I had hoped for.  It is more of hike your butt off birding (I love Kaeng Krachan NP!).  I soon realized I was woefully wrong.  Nam Nao NP is huge and is not confined to the paid entrance to the visitors center and sprawling camp grounds.  It is huge.  During our first day there, we stopped at sunrise view point and then birded the "park".  Around 10, it got dead so Na and I decided to drive to nearby waterfalls.  We left the paid area and drove to the waterfalls in the middle of the day.  We hiked in and much to our chagrin, they were dry.  We missed that giant sign in the parking lot that said "waterfalls dry".

However, on our way there, we had passed a helipad that had this small pond adjacent to it with some open areas and pines as well as elephant licks.  So we headed back there to try our luck for afternoon birding.  What a fortuitous choice.

Birding here was pretty easy.  A small field with scrub and pines in the back with a pond dotted with dead trees with lots of woodpecker activity.  What happened next, this was on the 18th, was one of the most amazing birding experiences in my 30+ years of birding.  Around 1630, seemingly coalescing out of nowhere from the sky above, a few needletails starting coming into view.  This didn't stop as more arrived.  The group of birds kept circling lower and lower towards the pond.  With each passing circle, the grouping soon turned into an echelon of tightly knotted Brown-backed Needletail.  Of course I was snapping away but these suckers were really moving.   White-throated Needletail are the fast flapping speed birds out there at 105 mph (170 kph) and these Brown-backs were surely nearing 90-100 mph.  Needless to say, getting photos of these birds in flight in fading light was a challenge.

Then the most amazing thing happened.  The birds started speeding by my head, about 10 feet above me, as they seemingly checked me out.  Without further ado, they started surface drinking and bathing then fffffffffffffttttt they would blast by me standing there on the pond's shore edge.  This first group of Brown-backed Needletail included 36 birds.  They finished their evening duties and rose up and sped off quickly to the south east.

This repeated again over the next hour with groups of  23, 12, 4, and 3 for an evening total of 78.

10:19/19:  Of course we did this on the evening of the 19th.  This time I was better prepared for photo ops.  The total county was 87 broken down into groups of 26, 17, 34, 4, 5, and 1.

Here is a shot of them bathing at the pond's surface:

 Shots of them flying around my head:

 Here I was able to capture a sequence of one bird drinking at the surface!

10/20/19:  The evening of the 20th produced similar results with 56 broken down into groups of 17, 11, 2, 20, 3, 2, and  1.

Today included two new surprises.  A lone White-throated Needletail,

An unidentified needletail (probably a Brown-backed):

A lone Bank Swallow (Sand Martin):.

and 4 Crested Tree-Swift.

And what a way to end an evening but with a super sunset and high flying Brown-backed Needletail.