Benny and I took a late morning drive from our hotel in Bang Pli down to the seaside resort of Bang Poo in Samut Prakhan province, Bangkok’s equivalent to Essex, being the east side of greater Bangkok; it is by no means as vast. We didn’t see anything other than what we would expect to see: water birds: cormorants, little grebes, open-bill storks, the egrets, lots of hirundines and lots of whiskered terns. It was impractical to spend much time on the pier as we got there at 12 noon and it was roasting hot as one would expect: a few Brown-headed Gulls, but not much else.
With a car and GPS visiting birders could really have a lot of fun basing themselves in a hotel similar to where we parked for a couple of nights, close to the airport. We stayed at Sanam Wan Hotel in the Bang Pli area, to the south of the airport. Really friendly, family run hotel, a kind of “pension”. We had two rooms due to our configuratiom, a connecting twin and a double which cost 650 THB and 750THB respectively; the hotel suited all our needs, with a small swimming pool with a kids area, very child friendly indeed, clean and comfortable, ( really firm beds), edible food and situated in a real community with easy access to supermarkets and everything else.
We used the Maps programme on my wife’s tablet and it really worked perfectly: “Bang Poo Recreation”, “Sanan Wan Palace” and “Sri Nakhon Khuen Khan Park” are all place marked on the Maps and we used the route finder with audio – so get yourself a local 3G sim card for your phone or tablet, hire a car and off you go! Add in places like Phutthamonthon Park, Suan Rot Fai ( probably best reached by public transport), Kok Kham and a few other excellent locations in and around Bangkok, and it should be possible to see a lot of different species. My only gripe this time was that the tolls on expressways have increased!
But Bangkok and the surrounding area has some great birds!
Dodgy Birds 