Tuesday is a day that few of those lucky enough to be there, and crazy enough to brave the cold and rain, will ever forget.
Six photographers and four regular birders were on the ferry that morning. The photographers were targeting the Vivid Niltava and Hill Blue Flycatcher. The birders were just hoping to see anything while keeping as dry and warm as possible. As the ferry arrived, we split up as usual, me heading for my house to drop off food and clothing, the photographers heading for the sisters’ café and the birdwatchers going their own way. Fortunately, the rain held off for most of the next three hours.
As I slowly made my way back towards the ferry pier, it was obvious that a good fall of thrushes had occurred. There were thrushes flying over or in trees, Japanese, Grey-backed, Eyebrowed and Pale Thrush fairly easy to find with at least one Brown-headed and many noisy Blackbirds. In fact, birds were to be seen everywhere so it was 1.15pm before I climbed the steps to the sisters’ café. At the top, I could see the assembled group of photographers, including Aquagras (Daniel Yau) and Paul Kam.
They were all wildly excited at having had spectacular close views of the Vivid Niltava. After making suitable ahh and ooh noises at their photos, I finally asked whether they had seen anything else. Daniel replied – ‘well, we had this greenish-looking pigeon when we first arrived’. Emerald Dove I thought, good record, so I asked to see any photos. After a long wait stumbling through hundreds of Vivid Niltavas, he eventually found one of the ‘greenish-looking’ pigeon – a perfect photo of a real Green Pigeon! OMG! Definitely a first record for Po Toi, probably a fourth or fifth record for Hong Kong.
After looking at this and a few others, on the small screen, I assumed it was a White-bellied Green Pigeon. Apparently it was first found in the tree beside the football field. This is the first real tree for any migrant arriving at the South Peninsular making its way towards the main Po Toi area and I have often found newly arrived migrants sitting there having a rest before moving on. Later it had flown off towards the central area.
By this time it was only 20 minutes to the ferry departure so we made our way down the concrete steps. By luck, everyone from the ferry was assembled together. As we reached the bottom of the steps, Paul said – ‘it’s there – in the tree’. Rather stupidly, I said - ‘what is?’. ‘The Green Pigeon, you idiot’ should have been the answer but he more politely missed off the last two words. And it was, sitting hunched up in the bare tree at the bottom of the steps.
We all managed good views and a dozen or so photos before it took off and flew across to the trees just below the school and it was time for the others to run for the ferry, and for the rain to start again and not stop for the next 24 hours. My own photos are very poor, for some crazy reason I had decided to experiment with an old lens which really wasn’t working.
Fortunately the professionals are not so stupid and here are three which Paul has kindly loaned me and allowed me to reproduce here
As we can now all see, the long undertail coverts and underbelly pattern show the bird is, in fact, a Whistling Green Pigeon, as suggested by Koel Ko. Moreover, the large size of the bird and the narrowness of the white markings on the undertail coverts show this is the Ryukyu Islands subspecies, given as a separate species Ryukyu Green Pigeon in Birds of East Asia. It appears from the researches of various individuals into Taiwan birding websites as here
http://nc.kl.edu.tw/bbs/showthread.php?t=47215
that this species has turned up at Chigu, Tainan and Matsu just off the coast of Fujian within the last week, according to EXIF data on the photos. So it seems that the Po Toi bird is a genuine wild bird. I have often seen racing pigeons from Taiwan on Po Toi (they all have Taiwan rings) so it’s not an impossible journey.
It really doesn’t matter that it rained for most of the rest of the week, or even that most of the birds left on Tuesday night (obviously the cold and rain was too much for them also). We had seen the big one. Po Toi has this fantastic ability to attract the big ones – species that are unlikely to ever occur again in Hong Kong. This year so far, the Brown-backed Needletail and the Varied Tit come in that category for me (incidentally, the arrival of this pigeon on Po Toi has convinced me that the Varied Tit was a genuine wild bird).
Let’s hope the Whistling Green Pigeon has copied the behaviour of its earlier counterpart, the Orange-breasted Green Pigeon, and is hiding somewhere on Po Toi in a fruiting tree, only to re-appear at monthly intervals for the lucky ones.
All I can say is, thanks to AFCD, HKBWS and other environmental groups plus all those individuals for their support in keeping the developers off Po Toi. If they had allowed it to happen, the site where most of these birds have been seen would now be a construction site with tens of workers and heavy equipment. Let’s remember that and fight to keep Po Toi unspoilt for ever.
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Last edited by wgeoff at 30/11/2012 08:54 ]
