The Accidental Birdwatcher: Seeking An Elusive Golden Bird

With the Rogas trees in bloom, I drove the kilometer from our farm land to a small Tampuan village on top of a nearby hill where a stand of trees can be found. My aim was simple: get some fresh pictures of the blooms and head back down. The picture at the head of this blog was taken last year and I wondered if I could take any to better it. Even before I started taking pictures I could see and hear numerous black birds fussing and feeding among the blossoms. I did not remember birds before, but the tree I had photographed last year was in the edge of the busy Provincial town (Ban Lung).

It was not clear that trying to take pictures of the birds made any sense because I had no long lens with me. Only when I put the shots I did take on my computer that night would I see that some of the bird shots came out all right. (Digital photography = take all the picture you like, you ain't wasting film!)

I did get the flower pictures I wanted, long isolated branches that lay flat against the sky, few leaves, dispersed limbs, each reasons why seeing the birds was at all possible! And why the pictures of branches might pose as art. :)

In the moment, I hoped that pictures taken at the highest resolution would crop down to something sharp enough to publish. But my aim had quickly expanded from getting fresh photos of these fat red flowers on the spare branching to catching a few pics of the black birds sporting and feeding in the upper limbs of this tall tree. Still, I could not be sure that I had held the camera still enough to get decent shots and had decided to head back to our land on the lake below when a flight of birds wheeling in took me by surprise.

Camera in hand I watched a group of green birds, in tight formation, circle the tree above me and then in disciplined pattern settle on an outer tree branch. I was caught so completely off-guard I did not think to get my camera up until the last second, to catch them as they arrowed in to grab at the branches with outstretched feet. As I saw them in the view-finder I realized they were parakeets! We encounter parakeets in singles or pairs hopping around in cages to our children's delight, but this was regimented, natural, social behavior. Simply stunning to take in, once my slow brain had caught up with what was going on!

But the black birds soon had the parakeets on the run, playing "King of the Tree" they did not allow these multi-colored birds to settle in at all. But I sure settled back, deciding I would not leave until I had some more pictures. I waited another half an hour, but the parakeets had been well and truly frightened away.

I thought: "Maybe I can come back tomorrow morning, if we are not too busy down the hill, and if the skies are as clear as they are today." I really liked how the open branching of the tree created flat compositions against the even blue of the morning sky. But on an emotional level, I was still in open-mouthed astonishment at those parakeets: flying in as tight a formation as military jets!

As I packed my camera away, I heard a sharp cry--a new sound--and I looked up in time to see a flash of pure gold arrowing away. I had no chance at all to capture this--either as a digital or mental image--but now I was hooked, and I would be back. It appeared that these Rogas flowers were attracting all sorts of birds and of all of them I wanted a still of that golden bird.

On three successive mornings I returned, and on the final day saw the golden bird again. A pair in fact. They were very skittish, very shy and almost always landed among masking foliage. But patience, quiet, and a decent position proved key. I did get some shots, though my Canon USM 24-105 lens, a nice amateur lens, was clearly not optimal for the job, but it was all I had. So forgive the lack of sharpness.

The photos in this post are dramatically cropped from much larger photos and shot from near the base of the tree where I lay on a bed of leaves, among cow droppings and investigated occassionally by Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs (one explanation why sounds from the base of the tree did not bother the birds too much).

The golden bird shots were my object and my prize, but they were not the only gift I received as I lay quietly under the tree. On that last morning I captured a small chipmunk-like rodent busy, busy, busy working those flowers, totally ignoring the black birds and being ignored in turn. One picture I have shows the it has three dark stripes that run along its back to its furry tail.

When I first saw it, I mistook it for a gecko. After taking numerous shots as it scurried from one blossom to another, I realized that it was a rodent, perhaps a field mouse. Only when I downloaded the pictures and zoomed in to look did I realize it was more like a small chipmunk than anything. It's prehensile tail wrapped around branches providing balance and the animal was fearless, leaping from one branch to another.

I also saw that there were two kinds of black birds, one with a relatively flat-ended tail feathers and one with a scissor-shaped tail. The former were very raucous, they reminded me of crows, but their cries were different, in fact it was the parakeets who sounded like minature crows! The scissor-tailed black birds didn't engage in the constant social play and mock attacks of the other black birds, but focused on feeding or just surveying the area.

I never got bird-watching before, the idea never sounded particularly attractive to me, now I can see why it is so popular.