March 7, 2023, Morning
We were to do the Central Range safari in Kaziranga National Park this morning. However since the park gates only opened at 7:30 a.m. and the Central Range happens to be very close to Kohora town, we had about an hour’s worth of sunlight to bird the region surrounding the park. Our guide had picked an area close to the Hati Mandir (हाथी मंदिर) for our pre-safari birding. The main target here was the Blue-naped Pitta. This area has dense tall vegetation in hilly habitat, so it is an excellent opportunity to look for species which would otherwise be very hard to find inside Kaziranga National Park. If you search on eBird you will find a few such areas outside Kaziranga.
Route
The blue trail at the bottom (T section) is where we birded. There is an inclined road going down towards the Hati Mandir on the east, and a bridge that crosses a stream. A small tea stall is nearby, serving lemon grass tea and some biscuits / rajgira ladoos from glass mason jars. We initially spent a little time close to the road looking for Blue-naped Pitta, and then our guide took us on a steep and mildly treacherous climb on a trail that goes up a hill nearby. There’s loose gravel in some spots, making the climb a bit tricky. The view from the top portion of the hill is decent, but nothing spectacular. We returned the same way we came.
Bird and Other Wildlife Sightings
Most of the interesting stuff we saw was right by the road side. Our guide used playback to attract a Blue-naped Pitta which was known to be in the area. It was responding from deep inside the forest, but did not show. We decided to try later and ventured into a clearing (see photos). After some good looks at White-throated Bulbuls here, we began up the trail where we encountered Blue-throated Barbets and Cinereous Tit (very far away in the tree tops). While up there I recorded a very melodious song of a Puff-throated Babbler (see below). On returning down to the road, we got our best sightings of the day.
Using playback again, the Blue-naped Pitta was now nearer to the road. It showed briefly, and while our guide saw it well, I only managed a roughly 2 second view deep in shadows, but with the unmistakable head pattern clearly showing. This view is all I got of Blue-naped Pitta in the whole tour, narrowly missing it on other occasions in the same neighborhood. Other highlights were an equally brief look at a Green Magpie, which was unexpectedly found while looking for some other bird. I don’t have photos of either of these two spectacular species. Greater Necklaced Laughingthrush remained shy and far away, but was briefly visible in the clearings, though taking photos of it at this distance was hard. I did get a distant shot while it stopped in a clear window among the branches and leaves. A few other birds seen here were Black-hooded Oriole, Black-crested Bulbul and Chestnut-bellied Nuthatch, which our guide kept misidentifying as Velvet-fronted Nuthatch. This last bit is interesting, because later in the tour, a different guide in Manas National Park would make the same mistake. Photography wise, I wasn’t lucky to get close to any single bird, so most of my images here are quite heavily cropped.
Here is the complete eBird checklist.
Audio Recordings
Puff-throated Babbler alluded to above. At first I was skeptical of the ID of this call, then I saw the bird and also cross-checked on Xeno-Canto and it is indeed Puff-throated Babbler.
Photos and Media
