| Eight of us escaped to Pulau Langkawi during the long weekend of 19-21
Apr and thoroughly enjoyed the many surprises of this trip. After enough
rest follwing checking in, we decided to try to look for the Brown-winged
Kingfisher despite the hot and humid weather near the Berjaya Resort. What
a wonderful beginning. We indeed found our first target and specialty of
Langkawi island without much effort. Although it was rather far, the light
was good and all four digi/video-scopers were happily clicking off till
late in the evening when the birds (yes, indeed there was one pair) decided
they wanted to call it a day for us.
The same night, owling at Gunung Raya started off with disappointement
but ended not bad after all. The 13 km uphill journey produced absolutely
nothing - no owl, no squirrels. Just calls of the usual large-tailed nightjar.
On our descend, a Collared Scopsowl perched well in the open on a wire.
It did not fly away although our car went past under it, made an U-turn
further down, crawled up and parked across the road. Unfortunately, a small
truck passed by and we did not have much time with it. Further down, a
pair of Brown Hawkowl were not so cooperative but we still had some shots
at them.
The following morning, it was rather quite at Gunung Raya. The Blue-winged
Pittas were calling but I only managed to see one flew across the road.
Absolutely no chance to take a shot. However, we soon had a hard time with
a raptor perched high on the slopes. Was it Wallace's or Mountain HE? We
were not very sure but decided to move on after getting enough shots from
only one view of the bird. Several more hornbills along the track finished
off our round at G Raya. In the evening, we proceeded to Teluk Datai where
we saw a Colugo with one juvenile under its belly, and a Large Green Pigeon
perched on a dead tree for a long time. However, it was at least 500 m
away and light was bad. At night, we returned to Gunung Raya, found the
Brown Hawkowls again briefly but they flew off even before we could get
out of our car.
On the last morning, we wanted to get one more easy target, the Plain-backed
sparrow. However, there were not many of them around and no good shots
were obatined. The last surprise of the trip was several Slaty-breasted
Rails running along the canals near our place. I 'froze' for about an hour
in the hot, humid morning sun to wait for it to appear from it hide. I
thought I got some wonderful, sharp videos including the bird bathing,
only to find out later that the videos were spoilt by artefacts. In retrospect,
this was probably due to heating up of the camcorder under the hot sun.
The Steadyshot function of the camcorder thought that the camcorder was
shaking and shook my video to compensate for it!
Most pictures in this album were extracted from interlaced videos. A
few of 640x480 pixels were taken with the photo mode of my TRV900. |
