Birding in Khao Yai National Park

When we read in the Lonely Planet Guide that Khao Yai is one of the world's great national parks and that the Green Leaf Guesthouse organized highly recommended birding tours, we knew we wanted to go there. And we had a fabulous all-day birding tour--from 6am to 8pm! Our guide, who goes by "Birdman" was wonderful, extremely knowledgeable, great at spotting, and helping us spot.

Most of the day we drove from place to place, but we also took a 2-hour jungle trek, where the highlight was seeing a huge fig tree that had 3 kinds of hornbills in it, (Oriental pied, great, and brown), macauque monkeys, and an Asian black bear! Altogether we saw about 60 different species of birds (43 lifers!), plus barking deer, sambal deer, gibbon apes, flying squirrels, giant black squirrels, white squirrels, the giant forest scorpion, a Malay racer (snake), a water dragon (lizard, about 3 feet long), giant bees nests as big as a bathtub, and hundreds of leeches. Fortunately they weren't able to penetrate our leech socks, but our guide did get a couple biting him before he put his socks on. They are about an inch long and skinny till they latch on and fill up with blood, then are about 10 times bigger.

For more photos go to Birdman's website: www.greenleaftour.com and click on Gallery.
Great hornbill: