Central Thailand - November 2025 - Day 5 - Mr Bird's Hide, Kaeng Krachan

Today was all about Pheasants and Partridges, There are a number of bird hides on the outskirts of Kaeng Krachan NP which you can hire for a nominal cost. You won’t be alone, but certainly the hide we were in had plenty of space. This was Mr Bird’s hide, which had not been our original choice, but upon doing our eBird research it had seemed the better one to try as nearly all the target birds had been seen here in the preceding days whereas they hadn’t at the other hides, or not as many anyway. We felt it best to follow the crowd so to speak and so changed our booking. We were not sure if we could get there in our normal car, and the staff at Baan Maka were not sure either. But the rain had eased off and we decided to give it a go as this would provide more flexibility for when we wanted to leave. The Lodge can organise a 4x4 to take you up if needed, and in fact some other people did that and so we followed them, having arranged with the driver that if it got too rough we would abandon our car and jump in his. In the event we made it all the way in and out.

Once in the hide we sat down to wait. I hate hides. Uncomfortable, dark and above all boring. This was all three, but it did deliver the birds and there no other way to easily see the Pheasants and Partridges, nor the Laughingthrushes. Baan Maka had provided a picnic lunch with no fuss, it really is well set up for birders, and so in the end we stuck it out nearly all day, and only left when it started to rain and we were worried about making it out without access to a jeep.

Bar-backed Partridge

Kalij Pheasant

Ferruginous Partridge

Grey Peacock-Pheasant

Throughout the course of the day we saw multiple Kalij Pheasant,  Grey Peackock-Pheasant, Ferruginous Partridge, Bar-backed Partridge, all three Laughingthrushes, and quite a lot more besides, including a leggy Siberian Blue Robin just before we left, But most of the day was spent looking at Chickens, which much like Parakeets on garden feeders in London arrive at first light and spend the whole day chowing down to the exclusion of almost everything else. Want a clear shot of a Partridge? Nope, here’s a Chicken. What about that lovely Grey Peacock-Pheasant. Nope, Chicken background. These are of course properly wild Red Junglefowl, and actually if you didn’t know what a domestic Chicken was you would be pretty wowed by what is a splendid looking bird, but, yeah, it’s a Rooster.

My camera is no good in low light. The lens is slow and the APS-C sensor is not forgiving of high ISO settings. How I wished for my 1DX and f4 lens. I mean this Sony takes photos at crazily high ISOs that are on one level quite astonishing, but at the same time they are not good enough. Much as like the 1.5x sensor crop I think I need to go back to full-frame, the sensors are much better. I ended up setting the camera to a much lower ISO and tolerating instead much much slower shutter speeds. Luckily I had a tripod with me for the scope, and was able to take advantage of this for the camera. And fortunately the shy nature of these forest birds means that they have tendency to freeze and listen quite frequently. And so in contrast to many of the posts from this series I actually have a lot of photos to illustrate it with. 

Black-naped Monarch

White-crested Laughingthrush

Greater Flameback

Common Flameback

Taiga Flycatcher

Lesser Necklacked Laughingthrush

Greater Yellownape

Racket-tailed Treepie

Asian Emerald Dove

Whilst the Chickens were a constant presence, everything else came and went throughout the day, staying to feed for a while before melting back into the forest. Bar-backed Partridge only came once, at the very end of the day, and Scaly-breasted never came it all. Still, we had done rather well. In failing light, and with the weather becoming dicey, we made the move back to Baan Maka. The rain at the hide was only moderate and so we got out in one piece with the car intact, but once back at the Lodge it really set in and so put paid to our hope of an evening owl hunt.