I first came to Thailand in order to watch birds more than seventeen years ago, in December 1978, with a friend called Paul Dukes. At that time, we only knew of one group of “hardcoreEBritish birdwatchers who had preceded us to Thailand. They'd got here two years earlier, in 1976. After covering Khao Yai, Doi Inthanon and other sites in the north, they'd driven by hire-car down the peninsula looking for forest. Even at that time, there was scarcely any accessible lowland forest left in the south so they'd just kept driving and driving, until at last they found some. Thus it was that the Ban Nai Chong forest, along the main highway about 20 km north of town of Krabi, came to appear on the list of key sites known to British birders, and was duly hit by every car-load of bearded, binocular wielding scruffs who subsequently ventured in to the peninsula.

In January 1979 Ban Nai Chong gave me my first proper taste of forest birding in southern Thailand. With towering dipterocarps and dense tangles of rattans and other undergrowth lining both sides of the highway, it was a complete and utter contrast to the bird-barren wasteland of rubber plantations I'd seen everywhere else. The birds were plentiful, and I thought I'd done pretty well, seeing Black-throated Babblers, Fluffy-backed Tit-Babblers, Dark-throated Orioles and Orange-headed Thrush, among other. In those days, I had no idea that Orange-headed Thrush was, in fact, a relatively common winter visitor. Not that it would have mattered: even today, I still get huge enjoyment from every Orange-headed Thrush I see. But I would have kicked myself had I known of all the other birds that were at Nai Chong, but which I and all the other early visitors missed due to our relative inexperience: Diard's and Scarlet-breasted Trogons, Malaysian Rail-babbler, Large Wren-Babbler, four species of broadbill, Banded PittaEThe list goes on.

I gradually saw all these species, and many others, as I made repeated visits to Ban Nai Chong during 1981-1983. I came to realize, though, just how limited the area of forest was Eno more then 2 sq km at most, though it was bordered by forested limestone outcrops which added to its diversity somewhat. In spite of its small size, and because of its richness (and the lack of lowland forest elsewhere), I listed Ban Nai Chong as a key site for forest bird conservation in a review document I was commissioned to produce for ICBP in 1984/85.

In those days , I was still searching hard for Gurney's Pitta and, in the excitement over its eventual discovery at Khao Nor Chuchi, I didn't get black to Ban Nai Chong until August 1986. When I did, I was horrified by what I saw: while a facade of tall trees and forest was still present along the road. Sometime, during the period 1983-1986, much of the forest in which I had done my first southern Thai birding had been hollowed out by huge new clearings. I have photographs of Uthai Treesucon and I standing among newly felled trees dating from that time, so most of the clearance had been carried out in 1986 rather than any earlier. Enquiries at the Krabi Provincial Forest Office didn't help: I remember the province forest officer telling me that there was very little that his men could do since “the encroachment took place at night!E(A pretty limp excuse since the areas being cleared were not in the remote backwoods but right along the side of the main highway!)

I have since , learnt, of course, that this piece of forest was not destroyed by encroaching villagers, but by government officials themselves, as part of some misguided policy coinciding with the mid-1980s coffee boom. Government departments have budgets to use up, but no government official dare risk trying to implement projects in areas of national reserve forest which have already been stripped of trees, since these will have been occupied by villagers or by rich businessmen. The solution is to find a nice piece of forest and implement your schemes there instead: the wildlife can't complain. Cut down the trees, build some official accommodation, stick in a road, and there's your nice big budget all used up. Then, with luck, you can ask for a bigger budget next year.

The biggest clearing at Ban Nai Chong is today occupied by a station of the Department of Agricultural Extension. And, in a cruel irony, another is occupied by “Krabi Forest Protection Station No.8E It is difficult to comprehand why forest should have to be destroyed for the purpose of forest protection.

I was so embittered and angry by the rape of my Ban Nai Chong birding place, that it was almost another decade before I could bring myself to go back there.

Since those days , Krabi has become the major hub for birdwatching activity in the south. Most visitors, besides visiting Krabi mangroves and Khao Nor Chuchi, the two pre-eminent sites, have also put in a little time at Ban Nai Chong, continuing to record a good variety of birds there in spite of the clearance. I made a roadside stop there myself a couple of years back, and was very please and surprised to see my first little Green Pigeons in Thailand. And, now that my project has an office in Krabi town, it has become much easier for me to visit Nai Chong than it was when my only base was another 40 km further south, at Khao Nor Chuchi.

Nai Chong is a refreshingly easy place in which to watch birds, especially in comparison with Khao Nor Chuchi. Khao Nor Chuchi has probably more species of birds than any other site in the entire peninsula, but there is no getting away from the fact that it is just one damn hard place in which to see anything, especially at the height of the dry season. I don't fully understand the reasons for this, but I suspect that it has to do with the very high level of human disturbance. While the core areas at Khao Nor Chuchi have never been systematically logged, they have undoubtedly been subject to heavy use by local people over many years. Large trees have been cut and sawed into planks for house construction, while there is a high level of hunting and collection of forest products. Khao Nor Chuchi was also formerly a major supply center for the cagebird trade. Even today it is not unusual to find lines of snares set on the forest floor, while gunshots are heard most nights.

Khao Nor Chuchi is a larger piece of forest and, what's more, is relatively well-watered, whereas Ban Nai Chong is a much smaller, more isolated fragment with, so far as I know, no surface water. Yet the Nai Chong forest is truly primary, with many more big trees than at Khao Nor Chuchi and perhaps because of this it is really hooching with birds. The main problem with Nai Chong the traffic noise, since it's so close to the main highway. For this reason, it's not a good place to go if you want to make tape-recordings. But when you're looking at a rail-babbler at a range of a few feet, the purplish-blue patches on the sides of its neck puffing out with every whistle, you don't hear a single vehicle, believe me!

It recently occurred to me that no body had ever worked Nai Chong for nightbirds, so Yotin and I went out there at four a.m. one morning. We see Javan Frogmouth quite frequently at Khao Nor Chuchi, since this species seems to get by in secondary forest, but we'd never managed to Find Gould's which seems to be more linked with primary. We'd been at Nai Chong less than an hour when we heard the distinctive oooh-wheow and, with a little persistence, got the views of Gould's Frogmouth for which we'd been hoping. It sat only 2 m off the ground, showing the diagnostic row of pearly-white spots across the greater coverts. As we waited for daylight, we sat under a big riang tree, collecting its fallen seed pods to provide beans for a future curry, and gleefully reflected on our success with “Mrs. GouldE A pre-dawn chorus of Malacopteron babblers, Grey-throated Babbler and Brown-cheeked Fulvetta ushered in a new birding day, while the calls of White-handed Gibbon floated down to us from the towering crags above.

Philip D. Round
August 1996