Borneo for Bird's Wildlife & Nature - Day 1 - 3rd June 2025

And so the next great adventure begun.  I had set out the previous day by train from Lowestoft and had a leisurely approach to Heathrow the following morning to catch our 14 hour flight to Kuala Lumpa.

Some time later we touched down in Malaysia but various cumulative short delays had resulted in our transfer to Kota Kinabalu on Borneo being in danger of leaving imminently so some frantic scuttling, a transit bus, more scampering followed by security and biometrics saw us joining a few others boarding a plane that should have left 15 minutes earlier. 

Two hours later and we were there (amazingly with our bags) and being collected by Lee and Nevin our guides and Sham our beaming driver before joining the KK traffic.  As usual we tried to glean as much as we could from the van as we crawled our way through town seeing Tree Sparrows, Asian Glossy Starlings, Zebra and Spotted Doves and newly colonising House Crows.

There was even time to stare out of the Hotel Shangri-La window and watch the Plume-toed Swiftlets (ex-Glossy Swiftlet complex) fluttering by before we reconvened and headed back through town to the Tanjung Aru beach park.

It was hot and the air was suffused with a strangely warm, floral and not unpleasantly fishy smell. We wandered the gardens where many of the birds encountered were new.  There were chunky Blue-naped Parrots and gaudy Long-tailed Parakeets while Brahminy Kite, White-breasted Waterhen, Green Imperial Pigeons, Greater Coucals, Oriental Magpie Robins, Common Ioras and Spotted Doves were all species that I had seen in Sri Lanka and brought about a brief feeling of familiarity.

Blue-naped Parrot

Blue-naped Parrot

Long-tailed Parakeet

Long-tailed Parakeet

Zebra Dove

Green Imperial Pigeon

Green Imperial Pigeon

Greater Coucal

Oriental Magpie Robin

A pair of Sunda Pygmy Woodpeckers favoured a dead tree and Yellow-vented Bulbuls and Rufous Tailed Tailorbird were found lower down where Chestnut Munias fed in the grass. There were three types of sunbird with chunky Brown-throated, Ornate and vibrant Crimson.  We got fabulous close views of the oily green Asian Glossy Starlings with their glowing red orbs and a White-breasted Woodswallow was my first of this family.  The more familiar shaped Pacific Swallows were feeding young on the wires.

Flame Tree - Delonix regia

Sunda Pygmy Woodpecker

Sunda Pygmy Woodpecker

Pacific Swallows

Asian Glossy Starling

Asian Glossy Starling

A couple of plump Green Pigeons became Pink-necked and a Pied Triller flew through the trees and required some bird book action to identify it.  We walked through to the beach passing Tree Sparrows and two large Water Monitors on the way – one of which was happily swallowing down the last bit of tail of a small family member.

Pink-necked Green Pigeon

Pink-necked Green Pigeons

Tree Sparrows

Water Monitor with lunch

Sea Mango - Cerbera odollam

There were signs up saying that there was the potential for death by ‘animals’ – turns out it was jellyfish but it did not seem to keep the locals out of the sea and a hopeful scan only produced a couple of very white medium sized Terns that I had an inkling may have been Black-naped but they were just too far.

Plume-toed Swiftlets chittered past at head level and wove in and out of the trees; their echo location skills coming to the fore and they were joined by several House Swifts and the Pacific Swallows.

Sham took us back through town via a brief roadside beach stop where the one wader present was thankfully the one we wanted with a fine collared male Malaysian Plover amongst the appalling plastic rubbish strewn across the beach.  In fact on some of the coastal inlets we started calling the floating rubbish as Bottle Ducks…

Three White-bellied Sea Eagles circled over the nearest offshore island and a Brahminy Kite was perched up in the Mangroves.  On again adding a couple of Eastern Cattle Egrets till we got to the Penam Pang rice paddies.  Several stops in the last hour of the day were very productive and started with the rather loud and shouty Striated Grassbird that was much larger than I thought it would be.  The brain makes assumptions where it sees a plate in a bird book with a familiar sized species on it – Cisticola in this case! Flocks of Chestnut Munias and pink billed Java Sparrows (a Munia too) blatantly ignored the flapping tapes, strings and distractions meant to keep them from the rice and there were Baya Weaver nests and the associated adults also out foraging.

Striated Grassbird

Java Sparrows

Chestnut Munias

Java Sparrows

Yellow-bellied Prinias, Long-tailed Shrikes (very sexy) and a Lesser Coucal were all found and the ‘problem with Swiftlets’ had its first opportunity to rear its head although it seemed that the bigger birds amongst the Plume-toed were Edible-nest although I was already confused by the paleness of some of them.  A pair of Pied Trillers flew over allowing everyone to see one this time.

 Long-tailed Shrike

Yellow-bellied Prinia

There were marshy birds too with small groups of mobile Wandering Whistling Ducks, Little, Great and Medium Egrets, snaky Purple Herons and several flight views of appropriately called Cinnamon Bitterns. White-breasted Waterhens were making a racket from the ditches and a fine male Watercock with his rubbery looking red horn sticking out of the top of his head peered at us through the Rice. We got very lucky with a Buff-banded Rail and saw a bird twice at close range in flight. 

Hubner's Wasp Moth - Amata huebneri - lots around the ditch edges

Orthetrum sabina - I think

Parapoynx diminutalis

Wandering Whistling Ducks

Pink-necked Green Pigeon

White-breasted Woodswallow

Swiftlets and Swallows

With time getting on and the sun setting we left our paddies overlooked by the jagged Kinabalu and walked back to the van where three Blue-throated Bee-eaters bounded over to round up what had felt like a day with far too many hours in it.

Kinabalu & Wandering Whistlers