Wednesday 9 November 2022
 |
| Common Rose Pachliopta aristolochiae - Baga Hill |
Day 4 continued ...
It always worth checking out your immediate surroundings, and in this case Baga Hill turned out to be a productive end to
an already productive day. (The day's bird count was to end up with 91 species seen). Walking out of the Marinha Dourada hotel, we crossed the Baga River bridge and turned up the hill past hotels and apartment blocks. When the buildings stopped we
were met with the depressing sight of forest clearance and new road construction (below); obviously more development on the way. This urban edge forest does not seem to be valued, yet (as we would see)
it is home to a good variety of birds and other wildlife.
 |
| Baga Hill - forest clearance |
 |
| Baga Hill - road construction |
A
few of the trackside shrubs were in flower, and sunbirds were busily buzzing
around in search of nectar, reminding me of Neotropical hummingbirds. Similarly iridescent – and similarly difficult to photograph. The first was new for us - Loten’s Sunbird, which is endemic to Southern India and
Sri Lanka, its distribution extending up the west coast to around Mumbai. Similar to Purple Sunbird (see below),
but with a larger and more decurved bill and, crucially for this ID, dusky
brown wings – shown nicely in the record photo below. There
is also a maroon stripe across the belly, not visible here. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, this
is a male. As it happens, a Purple
Sunbird turned up shortly afterwards, so I was able to take a comparison photo.
The differences in bill shape and wing colour are just about visible. Purple Sunbirds are found from the Gulf to
Vietnam – and were a lot more common than Loten’s on our trip.
 |
| Loten's Sunbird (record pic) - Baga Hill |
 |
| Purple Sunbird (record pic) - Baga Hill |
Also new for us here was a White-cheeked Barbet (below), which is endemic to south west India. Note the conspicuous white around the eye.
 |
| White-cheeked Barbet - Baga Hill |
A
lone Common Cuckoo was perching mid-way up a tree next to one of the recently
felled areas of forest, while a Greater Coucal skulked in a bush. An Asian Green Bee-eater was more accommodating (see photo at the start of this blog post). We reached the top of the track and explored
a short distance east before the route was blocked by a large
metal fence. More impending
development, I fear. Retracing our steps we headed west along the track that runs along the flat summit of this long, low hill. The route was was flanked by shrubs, with a number of grassy clearings.
 |
| Asian Bee-eater - Baga Hill |
 |
| Grey Pansy Junonia atlites - Baga Hill |
There were plenty of butterflies about. A greyish one with the orange and black eye-spots turned out to Grey Pansy Junonia atlites (above) which I’d seen near the hotel on our first day. The species
is widely distributed across Asia. The black and white one (below) is a Glassy Tiger Parantica aglea, one of the
danaid group of the Nymphalidae (which includes the Monarch butterfly). It is found in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, as well
as India. Most striking of the lot was a Common
Rose Pachliopta aristolochiae (image at the start of this blog post) which was nectaring further along the hilltop path.
This is a member of the Papilionidae and ranges across Asia from
Afghanistan to eastern China. Lovely
thing. (The Crimson Rose is a very
similar species, but has no white on the hindwing.)
 |
| Glassy Tiger Parantica aglia - Baga Hill |
It was quickly becoming obvious that India is a fabulous
country for butterflies. I’m struggling
to find an accurate species count for the country; a figure ‘around
1,500’ is quoted by some sources. To put that in context, a global total of between 15,000 and 21,000 has been suggested (Stork, 2018). Adrian Hoskins' beautifully illustrated Butterflies of the World mentions 17,500 species, but this figure is constantly changing as new species are described. So it’s possible that India hosts about a
tenth of the world's butterfly species. Goa's butterfly fauna did seem unusually diverse, but that may be because we visited in the immediate
post-monsoon period. The Butterflies of India website https://www.ifoundbutterflies.org/ is an excellent identification resource.
We walked along the track, straight into a bright, low sun. An Indian Robin (below) hopped out onto the path, a familiar bird of open and scrubby habitats on the
subcontinent - a poor record photo. Also here were Common
Iora, Oriental Magpie-Robin, Green Warbler, White-browed and Red-whiskered
Bulbuls, Ashy Prinia and Asian Paradise Flycatcher. A bit further on the track
started to descend, so we turned around and walked back the same way.
 |
| Indian Robin (record pic) - Baga Hill |
Passing a grassland area, we saw a small raptor perched on a metal structure. I took two photos before it flew.
Noticeably smaller than a Common Buzzard, it had us stumped; however, when
looking through my photos the following day Omkar immediately identified it as a
White-eyed Buzzard (below). This is a juvenile, which doesn’t have a
white eye and is poorly illustrated in my field guide, so we can (perhaps) be forgiven for not working it out by ourselves. The species is
widespread across the subcontinent and Myanmar. This felt like a bit of a
‘bonus bird’, but it shows the value of taking photos – even poor ones – as an
aid to identification; really useful when you haven’t got a guide to hand.
 |
| White-eyed Buzzard (juv) (record pic) - Baga Hill |
Rather
a better effort was this image of a Spotted Dove (below), illuminated by the late
afternoon sun. It’s a common bird in
most of the subcontinent (excluding Pakistan) and we had already come across one at Siolim Fields on day 1. The species has been split – so this is
strictly a
Western Spotted Dove. I’d
seen previously the eastern species in Australia (Port Douglas) where it has established a
feral population. The western ones look
very similar, the main difference being that their iris and eye-ring are both
red (in the eastern species the iris is yellow-orange and the eye-ring is grey
or blue-grey). It seems like an
easy tick, but as I’m following the HBW/Birdlife Checklist I'll take it!
 |
| Western Spotted Dove - Baga Hill |
A White-spotted Fantail (below) appeared on the track ahead,
where it remained for several minutes having a dust bath and pecking around for
food. We had seen one briefly that
morning from the Zuari River boat, but this was a much better view. White-spotted
Fantails, also known as Spot-breasted Fantails, are endemic to India, where
they occupy a restricted, generally southern, range. According to the HBW/Birdlife Checklist they
‘intergrade’ with the similar White-thoated Fantail which is found in NE India
and Bangladesh. To complicate matters
further there is also a White-browed Fantail which is found across most of
peninsular India as well as parts of SE Asia – and which we didn’t see. Even worse, all three species have some form
of white supercilium. But in this case
the diagnostic white spots are easily seen on the bird’s breast.
 |
| White-spotted Fantail - Baga Hill |
We
walked back down to the hotel and headed for an early evening meal at the hotel
restaurant. I was feeling a lot more perky and ordered a beer and an
excellent tandoori chicken. There was too much for me to finish, but great to be able to eat (and indeed drink beer) again. This was our last night down on the coast - tomorrow we were heading for the inland forests and mountains.
Hoskins A. (2015) Butterflies of the World. London: New Holland.
Stork, N.E. (2018) ‘How Many Species of Insects and Other Terrestrial Arthropods Are There on Earth?’ Annu. Rev. Entomol., 63, pp. 31–45.
