A verditer for Valentine’s

14^th February

A Valentine’s Day stuffed full of love for Assam and her beautiful wildlife (cheesy I know but I couldn’t resist). Early this morning the hardiest birders in the group accompanied me on a short walk through a Mising tribal village, in search of birds. Little green bee-eaters gave their soft whip calls and zipped over stands of giant bamboo, a roller flapped its heavy turquoise wings over the rice paddies and new birds here included a posse of vociferous black bulbuls in a flowering silk cotton tree and two delightful flycatchers: verditer and little pied. Reinforced by breakfast and coffee the whole group headed once more into the village to meet the Mising people and gain insight to their pastoral lives. Our visit coincided with the start of the sowing of rice so, for the first time ever on our cruise, the graceful ladies of the village danced their sowing dance in the hope of a good crop. If you’ll allow me a second dreadful pun, we too had a good crop here, of wildlife. Asian palm swifts chittered at daredevil speed over our heads, hoary-bellied squirrels bounced and scurried along the branches of silk cotton trees in search of a sugar-hit from their newly-opened flowers, and a droop-winged greater spotted eagle circled indolently overhead

This afternoon we sailed downriver passing hundreds, if not thousands, of gadwall, and with them plenty of ruddy shelduck, greylags, bar-headed geese, mallard and great crested grebes. Small pratincoles flicked their sharp wings over a sandbar, great cormorants lined the beaches, black-shouldered kites haunted the villages, and long-legged buzzards watched the world go by from the beaches and from the tops of trees.

Reaching the northeast corner of Kaziranga National Park this evening, and mooring on the north shore of the river to the east of Dhansiri Mukh, we walked through tall grass and watched both eastern and white-tailed stonechats and a long-tailed shrike. A short-eared owl burst from the ground here and see-sawed away. We turned home at the insistence of two feisty feral water buffalos who stood their ground and flared their nostrils and made it quite clear that their patch was not open to birders. Discretion, when leading tours, is most assuredly the better part of valour.

	Mammals
20	hoary-bellied squirrel	Callosciurus pygerythrus
	Birds
244	black bulbul	Hypsipetes leucocephalus
245	verditer flycatcher	Eumyias thalassina
246	little pied flycatcher	Ficedula westermanni
247	long-tailed minivet	Pericrocotus ethologus
248	oriental white-eye	Zosterops palpebrosus
249	fulvous-breasted woodpecker	Dendrocopos macei
250	black-shouldered kite	Elanus caeruleus
251	white-tailed stonechat	Saxicola leucura
252	short-eared owl	Asio flammeus

2012 Totals

Mammals: 20

Birds: 252

Reptiles: 0

Amphibians: 0

Fish: 0