A few of you might have noticed I've not been active around Studland & the Isle of Purbeck recently. This is because I've spent the best part of seven weeks zig-zagging across mainly Eastern Indonesia with two back to back tours with Bird Tour Asia (BTA) to the Banda Sea & the Moluccas, followed by a few days catching up with birds missed on my extensive travels around Indonesia back in 1991. The attached map is a schematic map of the islands visited, but I've not tried to locate the exact birding spots visited on the islands.
Using a four year old Clements taxonomy, I saw 102 Ticks, but that total will rise significantly when I get around to switching to the latest IOC taxonomy. There are still many additional proposed splits which we saw, which will I expect to increase the totals further in the future.
I visited in 1991 with my old travel buddy, Keith Turner, whilst we were on an extended round the world trip. We managed to go birding on thirteen of the biggest islands, plus an additional five islands in West Papua, over about three & a half months. This has now risen to thirty five islands. But with 17,000 or so islands, there are still many islands left.
There are too many highlights to list here, but the Banda Sea trip cleaned up very well on potential endemics. Plus we saw about nine or ten species of Cetaceans. A couple of scuba dives were fun, with one producing a Green Turtle. We also had an Olive Ridley Turtle from the dive boat on one of the sea crossings. The overall trip highlight for the mainly Ozzie-based birders on the trip was a vagrant Sabine's Gull which put in an appearance for about ten minutes. I was less inclined to vote for that as the best bird of the trip & would have preferred to have seen the Abbots Booby seen on the previous Banda Sea cruise. C'est le vie: another excuse to visit to the Australian Christmas Island at some point in the future.
The Moluccas trip again was very successful, albeit there were a few very difficult endemics missed along the way. Again Cetaceans featured on some of the daytime ferry crossings including several Blue Whales & a Dwarf Sperm Whale (one of my favourite Whales). The ultimate wildlife highlight was a lek of well over fifty bright golden-yellow Tree Frogs on Obi, which are still to be identified & something not seen on any of the BTA tours in the past. The near mythical Obi Woodcock which was lost to science when the Helm Waders guide was originally published, now has a realistic chance of being seen & was one of the endemics we saw.
After the second tour ended, I had a morning's birding on Sulawesi trying a site we didn't know about in 1991: which was very enjoyable. It was good to see a number of the Indonesian endemics again. Perhaps the nicest looking forest I visited on the trip, albeit it was already very fragmented.
This was followed by a day's birding around the Bali Barat reserve (which was closed in 1991 due to the precarious state of the Bali Myna population at the time). Fortunately, there has been a successful breeding & reintroduction program which has resulted in about four hundred birds in the wild now. I changed the plan of the second day's birding around Bedugal on Bali to allow me to visit a forest area in East Java instead, where it is now possible to see White-faced Partridge & Pink-headed Fruit Dove. The former is a very difficult bird, that has only recently become easier to see at that site.
I got to drive in Bali again. Driving in Indonesia is not for the timid, with motorbikes being almost as many as cyclists in a Dutch city. There seem to be few rules on the road & those that exist were being generally ignored. I'm not sure I would want to drive in one of the big Javan cities, but driving on Bali & Eastern Java was fun. Despite the chaos on the roads, surprisingly I didn't see any road accidents in over three days.
Finally, it was good to see good numbers of some of my favourite families with seven Pittas seen (five Ticks), as well as, good numbers of Owls & Kingfishers.
Ironically, after several weeks of eating generally cold food in often basic local cafes (the Indonesian cooking style is to generally cook food & leave it cold till it's eaten later), I ended up getting one of my worst cases of food poisoning from either a McDonald's ice cream on the last afternoon in Bali or from one of the flight meals on the plane back from Bali. My money is on the ice cream. It's now day eight of the food poisoning incident & while I can feel a number of signs of improvement in the last day, I am still far from confident when it will finally clear up.
I very will start putting some updates on the Blog in the next few weeks.