Bengal Floricans

The temperature is a little north of 85 degrees and the sun is just starting to clear the early morning Cambodian haze and we know the humidity that comes every day in this place is coming as soon as the sun really clears the horizon properly. We are in the middle of nowhere (seriously...nowhere) walking in a dried-up rice paddy that seems to go on forever. It's dried-up because it's the dry season and if it weren't there's no way we would be where we are. Dry means dry in Cambodia. That concept is reinforced with every step as the leftover rice stalks or whatever it is we are stepping on try to scratch our legs above the ankles. Thank Buddha I wore my boots out here.

We are here to watch birds and this is supposed to be fun. We're on vacation after all. We are specifically searching for something that looks like a large-ish chicken called a Bengal florican. It's not really a chicken; it's actually a bustard. And despite the fact that there seems to be about no cover to hide them, we can't find a single one of these things. What are we doing miles from civilization and a good distance from our car tramping over the dried earth and finding nothing in the middle of southeast Asia?

So, yeah...we are birdwatchers. There's no doubt about it now. This seed was planted in Tanzania's Lake Manyara National Park way back in 2018 and nudged along a bit during our trip to New Zealand about a year later. Then the COVID-19 global pandemic struck and we started watching what was going on bird-wise in our own back yard. Surprise, surprise, we found more than just the two or three brown species of birds that we thought were out there. We've been hooked ever since. We've been taking one or two trips every month since last summer to local spots around our house. Seemed logical we'd see what was out there in Cambodia, right?

Still...those Bengal floricans. Where were those things? It's getting hot out here.

Dirt track near dry rice fields, Cambodia. 6:09 a.m. also known as "breakfast time".

It's day two of our Cambodia journey. We have just three nights and two full days in country with a bit of a day on either side so day two is really day last. We have planned to pack a lot into those two full days. That's not unusual for us. On Cambodia day one, we got picked up at our hotel at 4:30 a.m. to make a long overdue pilgrimage to Angkor Wat at sunrise and beyond. On Cambodia day two we went birdwatching. Pickup time for day two? You guessed it: 4:30 a.m. It's hot in Cambodia. Like really hot and very humid. Starting early is a good idea. 

We made it to our hotel lobby a couple of minutes before pickup time. Hang, our guide for the day, is already there. He's way upbeat. That's good, I guess. We are still so jet lagged that we don't know if we feel tired or not at 4:30 a.m. We pile into his car with the driver, make a stop to pick up breakfast to go and we are off heading east for parts unknown. We honestly have only the foggiest idea where we are going. East, Hang says. If you feel good about getting picked up in the middle of the night by a stranger in Cambodia and loaded into a car (we did!), east is about all we need to know.

The ride to wherever we ended up (and I am in no way confident I could tell you exactly where we were that morning) took about an hour and a half. To pass the time, Hang told us about what we would see, filled us in on any questions we had about life in Cambodia and told us corny jokes. I am not equipped with a memory bank of jokes. I've tried to remember some from our travels. Hang crushed me with his joke portfolio. 

Q: What did the fish say when he swam into a wall? A: "Dam!"

Q: What do you call a fake noodle? A: Im-pasta.

I know...they are terrible. And that's all I remembered. There were a lot more. By the way, a photograph of a sign with a Bengal florican picture on it is below. That's what we were looking for. Not a chicken; it's a bustard. And yes, the picture below is in color. I guess the Cambodian sun fades signs eventually. Or quickly maybe.

There are not many Bengal floricans in this world. The species is listed as critically endangered because as of 2017, it was estimated that there were fewer than 1,000 of these birds alive in the world. If you want to try to find one in the wild, you'll have to do it in one of two parts of the world: an area in northeast India and Nepal stretching into Bangladesh or a spot in Cambodia possibly stretching into Vietnam. I know, those areas sound huge and if there are only 1,000 (maximum) spread out over those giant areas, finding one on a February morning in a rice paddy in rural Cambodia (which is not a small place) sounds like quite a chore. 

So why are these bustards so rare? Well, like most species that are in decline, habitat destruction seems to be a big reason. Floricans occupy a space on the planet which humans would rather use to cultivate rice. But here, it appears that the florican could co-exist with man as long as man would just leave them alone. Which, of course, we don't. People in Cambodia need to eat and in some parts of Cambodia, there's just not a lot of food. And Bengal floricans have been traditionally very easy to catch and kill and eat. They draw attention to themselves during mating season and they nest on the ground.

There may be some hope. There is a program set up in Cambodia to reward farmers for finding and protecting florican nests. Find a nest, report it, have it verified and then keep protecting it while the nest is active gets you money. The earlier you find it and the longer it is an active nest under your protection, the more money you get. People are essentially being paid to resist eating something that they have found. Hang didn't really tell us or speculate on how the program was affecting the population but there is some information out there on the internet (dangerous to rely on this stuff, I know) that suggests the current numbers are more robust than the 2017 numbers. Still, even if the number is double (and I am completely making that up), the totals are still very small.

Finding a Bengal florican in a rice paddy would be difficult. There just aren't a lot of them anywhere.

Our team of bird-spotters that morning ultimately swelled to six: the two of us, Hang, our driver and two dudes on motos (that's Cambodian-English for motorcycle) who joined us about the time we parked the car on the dirt track we'd been driving along after leaving the main road. Now legitimately, there was a lot of bird activity in the spot we stopped. Not Bengal florican activity but tons of small birds flittering about and refusing to stay still long enough for me to get a good photograph.

Of course, that's what I'm after, right? I do want to see birds but I also want some souvenirs, which means crystal-clear pictures of colorful little creatures that we can't see at home. I am not a binoculars user. I can't work them with my glasses on and my eyes are so bad that I can't get binoculars adjusted to allow me to see. So my binoculars are the 83x zoom camera we've been dragging all over the world with us since 2017. It allows me to see things at a distance and if I'm quick enough, I can snap a fuzzy or gorgeous picture in the moment. Hopefully gorgeous.

That first hour looking for Bengal floricans got me the two pictures above. Literally, those are the only two worth showing anyone and I have no idea what the little bird is. It's not even clear enough for me to get Merlin to say what it is. Obviously the other is a pile of pelicans on a telephone line, which is something I couldn't even have imagined ever happening until I saw it in real life. 

These pictures in no way reflect what was going on around us. Harriers. Egrets. Storks. Cuckoos. Bee-eaters. All there. They just wouldn't sit still or were so far away that the haze coming off the Earth didn't make for anything like a quality sighting or picture (and those two are of course the same). And of course, no Bengal floricans. None. Not a one.

Time to move. Off the road (meaning the dirt track) and into the rice paddies. 

It worked. Sort of. We ended up positioned at the edge of a paddy near a couple of bushes and a sort of overnight shelter on stilts. I'd call it a blind but I'm not sure that's what it was. I think it was probably built to house rice field workers, not to watch birds. But we got more results here. Pied bushchat (above). Black drongo (above above). Brown shrike. House sparrow (not exciting but seriously). Pied starling (below). Black-collared starling (below below). All sitting on poles that man had installed at some point or on top of one of the two bushes or even on some leftover rice stalks. 

But still...no Bengal floricans. This likely wasn't our day to see these birds. All the same, we started walking into those dried rice paddies. 85 plus degrees. Haze clearing. Humidity coming. Those stalks scratching over the tops of our boots.

And then...one of our spotters swore he saw a Bengal florican somewhere in the paddy. He'd seen it through his binoculars and pointed us to more or less where it was. Let's fan out and walk in a straight line to flush it out. This sounded like some results. I ran point. I was told that it was right in front of me and all I had to do was walk to where Hang was pointing. I followed instructions.

All four of us walked step after step more or less in line, scanning in the brush that we passed as we came to it. There was no way. No way was there a couple of feet high bird out in this place and I swear that we walked further than Hang told us to. No Bengal florican. Not here. Not today.

And right after I was about to give up, there was a flutter and a rustle. Not from in front of us. Not from along side us. From BEHIND us. Bengal florican aloft and flying away from us. 10 or 15 feet off the surface. Camera up. No time to focus. Just point and shoot and hope before it lands. Boom! Bengal florican photograph. Seen it!

I know. It's not a great photograph. It's hazy. You can barely see the bird but it's clearly there, although it's not clearly a Bengal florican closeup but what other species would it be. Was this worth it? Are we satisfied with this? Not remotely. But you know what the best part was? 

We saw where it landed.

I kept my eyes on that spot and walked towards it with so much purpose. No way was I going to miss it like before. And I got there with no bird fleeing to somewhere that I couldn't reach or anything like that. But I'm telling you, this thing disappeared. I didn't get close enough to one of these things to know really how big they are, but based on the photograph above, we are clearly talking about a bird that's about two feet or so high and about the same length back to front. But it was absolutely nowhere to be found. And there just wasn't that much cover. But it was gone. Disappeared into thin air.

We quit. We signed up for a morning of birdwatching and we needed to get back to Siem Reap. We had a planned stop to see some spotted owlets in a tree where they hang out but that would be it. One Bengal florican, some starlings and an assortment of other small birds, including some distant looks at bee-eaters. And if you know anything about me, you know I love the bee-eaters from a couple of trips to Africa.

Look, there are no guarantees with nature. We know this. We know we are at the mercy of whatever Mother Nature wants to allow us to see.

The rest of our morning was incredible. We were NOT done.

The owlets were awesome. We expected one. We got two. They were extremely active. They fought. Or from our perspective they at least quarreled. They were loud. And they seemed to keep looking down at us like we were bothering them, which we probably were. But it made for some great photographs. This was almost like a staged encounter and that's totally OK. I can totally get the concept of seeing birds where they usually hang out. Not sure I'd ever seen an owlet before so this was special.

Also, our Bengal florican encounters were not at an end. Our spotters had found a pair right before the spot where the owlets hang out and we moved back into the rice paddies, although we had to move a herd of cows a bit out of the way to get there.

I'm not going to blow-by-blow our second trip into the paddies. It wasn't a whole lot different from the first encounter with these birds except: (1) we didn't walk past any floricans this time and (2) there were two and not one. 

So the proof of our second encounter is below and it's actually the best of three pictures I took of one bird (I completely missed the other). Three pictures. Got that? I don't know that this necessarily fulfilled us florican-wise on this day trip but I think there are two things to keep in mind as I think back on this day. With nature there is no guarantee (I know I already said that but it bears repeating). We've been out there looking for wildlife all over the planet and have had amazing encounters and have been disappointed. Expect the latter and hope for the former. 

And if there are just 1,000 of these birds on the planet, we just saw 0.3 percent of the entire remaining population in one half day trip from Siem Reap with not much effort. Think about that. We may have seen 3 of the remaining 1,000 of an entire species anywhere. In a rice paddy which we didn't even cover anywhere near comprehensively in about four hours. How lucky are we to have had these results?

Now, if the picture above and a couple of photos of spotted owlets seems a bit underwhelming to have me label the rest of our birdwatching experience "incredible", you would be correct. 

To me, a great birding experience comes with a couple of signature encounters. They might not be what you came for and they might not even have to be a brand new species. But if there's a connection made with a species that is unlike any other past trip you been on and had with that type of bird, then it can be amazing. It might be something small, it might be something transformational. You know it when you find it.

Checking out the spotted owlets and finally, finally finding a Bengal florican or two were definitely two looks at birds we have never had before, but the quality and intimacy of the florican sightings left a lot to be desired. So we needed something more to put this day over the top. 

Enter the bee-eaters.

I saw my first bee-eater in Lake Manyara National Park in 2018. I realize I already talked about that trip as sort of the genesis as my serious interest in birdwatching. We followed up that introduction with two different species of these birds on a day cruise along the Kazinga Channel that connects Lakes Edward and George in Uganda. That was just last year, less than 12 months ago. Bee-eaters fast became one of my favorite kinds of birds. They are so colorful and well put-together; never a feather out of place. They are not toucans or hornbills but they might be on par with kingfishers and eagles and things like that.

When we moved off the dirt track and onto to the rice paddies for the first time we saw one green bee-eater from a distance and managed to get just-at-the-camera's-range picture which I have found to usually yield a little bit fuzzy and slightly unsatisfying results (I'm not posting that one). But at least we got one. Then on our way over to see the owls (and before our detour to find the two additional floricans), we found a couple of blue-tailed bee-eaters just sitting on a small plant near the ground and managed to get the pictures below.

This is a gorgeous look. They stood still. They posed. I love how colorful these birds are. I love their black beaks that continue going onto their heads as black masks of sorts. And I love the red eye that's visible in the last of the three pictures. Very cool sighting. These couple of minutes with these two birds definitely made this trip worthwhile. On top of seeing in person what has to be one of the rarest birds in the world. 

This whole trip took about eight hours. 4:30 a.m. to about half after noon. With 90 minutes to two hours for each leg of the trip, that got us about 5-1/2 hours in the field looking for birds and getting these 13 pictures of what we found. Totally worth it. Our ride for the day was set up through the Sam Veasna Conservation Tours which runs birding tours to various points in and around Siem Reap. I'd have nothing but good things to say about our day with Hang and the rest of the guys who helped us along that day and I'd do something else with this company if I ever found myself back in Cambodia any time in the future, as remote as that seems right now. 

I know that 4:30 a.m. pickup time sounds rough. But when you only have two days to spend in a country, there's one big advantage to starting that early: you get to do other stuff later in the day. As long as you can find a way to stay out of the Cambodian afternoon heat.