Cambodia offers different way to view water birds

RON MORRIS

Asian openbills

Posted: Friday, April 15, 2016 

By Ron Morris Special Correspondent

CAMBODIA — It was like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. The path went among massive trees and thick vines climbing out of centuries-old ruins of temples carved with Buddhas and dancing women. Hindu reliefs of dragons, gods and demons graced huge stones that were pieced together like enormous jigsaw puzzles. A flock of red-breasted parakeets screeched overhead, demanding to know why I dared intrude their space.

My first trip to Southeast Asia — like any part of the world that is so different from ours in landscape, people, culture and antiquities — was overwhelming to the senses.

I started in North Vietnam in the capital city of Hanoi and traveled south to Hue over the next two weeks touring several UNESCO World Heritage sites along the way.

Toward the end of the trip, I flew from Danang to Siem Reap in Cambodia to see Angkor Wat, the 12th-century complex of temples that is one of the world’s great archeological sites.

Believe it or not, I had been so busy touring magnificent places like this that I hadn’t had much time to take in the bird life. But I had set aside the last day for birding.

Tonle Sap is just an hour’s drive from Siem Reap. A UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, it’s the largest lake in Southeast Asia.

Fed by the Mekong River, it covers an area of 1,000 square miles in the dry season — but increases to a monumental 6,000 square miles in the rainy season.

My guide picked me up at 7 a.m. We drove through the outskirts of Siem Reap and promptly got lost on the dirt roads winding through the inevitable rice paddies of the countryside. I wasn’t inclined to criticize the guide’s competence, though. Road signs were nonexistent — and how we were supposed to find anything was beyond me.

After consulting some rice farmers, we were back on track and shortly came to a makeshift village alongside a canal where several boats waited to transport customers to the lake. Most of the clientele were residents of floating villages. The little towns are made up of small boats and shacks moored together and accommodate a hundred or so people. These villages base their livelihood on fishing and have existed on the lake for a thousand years.

Whiskered terns preceded our boat along the canal, swooping and diving for small fish at the surface. After 20 minutes of cruising along to the put-put of the tiny outboard motor, the canal opened onto the lake and then one of the floating villages, where we transferred to a smaller boat. The guide didn’t speak English, but he had a poster illustrated on both sides with some of the birds that we were likely to see. He gestured to the pictures whenever a bird came into view.

Half a mile beyond the village, the guide turned the boat from a broad channel to a narrower one. Gliding across thick mats of water hyacinths with the motor barely propelling us forward, we eased into a lagoon where dozens of birds stood along the edges.

A hundred Asian openbills, storks named for the gap between their upper and lower mandibles, stood ankle-deep in the water and roosted in treetops. Unlike many storks, herons and egrets that stalk fish by sight and spear them when they swim too close, openbills are tactile feeders. They sweep the tips of their bills just below the surface of the water or probe in the mud until they feel their prey, snapping the bill shut on the quarry. The shape of this bird’s bill is thought to be an adaptation, enabling easier manipulation of their main food source, a species of snail.

Other nearby trees served as roosts for large numbers of great cormorants and oriental darters, birds that swim on the surface of the lake and dive for fish. Darters are related to the anhinga of coastal Carolina and the U.S. Gulf Coast. Both species have a habit of swimming with the body underwater and just the head and long neck exposed above water. This practice gave rise to the nickname snake bird. Neither darters nor cormorants possess waterproof feathers, which would make diving for fish more difficult and are often seen drying in the sun with wings spread.

Herons and egrets are abundant along the lake: great egrets, little egrets, Chinese pond herons and gray herons — the latter similar to our great blue heron.

Dozens of spot-billed pelicans, larger than our brown pelican, along with all the other fish-eating birds attest to the abundance of fish the lake harbors.

After spending the morning watching birds, the guide revved the little motor and turned the boat toward open water. With the mid-day temperature rising to 100 degrees and the humidity approaching 100 percent, the wind rushing past felt good as we sped toward the floating village and on to Siem Reap — where gods and dragons dwell.

Winston-Salem Journal