Hong Kong, Shing Mun Nature Park: 22 January 2005.

From the entrance to Shing Mun Nature Park a country trail leads through mixed secondary forest along the edge of the Shing Mun Reservoir and into the beautiful Shing Mun Valley. The park covers a total of 1400 hectares. It extends from Lead Mine Pass in the north, to the Shing Mun catchwater road in the south, and from Tai Mo Shan in the west to Grassy Hill and Needle Hill in the east. At the north end of Smugglers’ Ridge are the remains of the Shing Mun Redoubt, some of which are still intact and can be explored.

Trails from the main entrance either go towards Tai Mo Shan and into Tai Po Kau, or loop back towards the Shing Mun Dam and Pineapple Dam.

From just below the main entrance to the park a regular minibus (Maxicab 82) runs back and forth between Shing Mun Reservoir and Shiu Woo Street, Tsuen Wan, where it’s easy catch the MTR back to Kowloon or Hong Kong Island.

Local time: GMT +8
Approx noon temp: 22C
Weather: Dry with relatively low humidity, dull in morning but brightening in afternoon.

Back in HK after less than a month - very unusual indeed.

After visiting Tai Po Kau (TPK) Forest Reserve on my trip to Hong Kong last month, Martin Williams (good friend and birdguide) suggested I go with him for a half-day out at Shing Mun - a relatively less-birded area of forest that is just over the hills from TPK. ‘It’s pretty good’, he said, with a slightly different avifauna…

Well, it would have been rude not to!

Shing Mun’s ‘main path’ is a concrete access road which follows the edge of the Shing Mun Reservoir - a huge hole in the ground which in less arid periods is filled with the water supply for much of Hong Kong. Well-signed, a loop walk here will take about three hours - depending on the birds of course.

Right from the off things got off to a good start, with a Daurian Redstart and a female Blue-winged Leafbird in the first 100 meters. With a more open and gentler walk than at TPK, we were soon getting distant views of Great Barbet - their oddly gull-like calls are easy to hear at Shing Mun (even above the tinny transistor radios many HK Chinese seem reluctant to leave home without glueing to their ears), good flight views of Chinese Blackbirds (Turdus (merula) mandarinus - a chunkier, shorter-tailed bird than the Blackbirds in Europe, and surely a good species) - and watching a small party of cracking Black-throated Laughingthrushes ghosting through the vegetation on the edge of the reservoir. I’d seen none of these five species at TPK (not that they’re not there, of course, just easier here perhaps) - just as Martin had suggested. Excellent…!

Female Blue-winged Leafbird

Shing Mun is a beautiful place, criss-crossed with streams and gentle paths, but to be honest birds didn’t exactly pour out of the trees: this has, though, been a very mild winter in HK and there have been very few records of normally common forest birds like thrushes and bluetails, and I’m certain in the right weather conditions it would be very much better. It took us about an hour to find a bird party - and whilst the Mesias and big numbers of Chestnut Bulbuls familiar from Tai Po Kau were missing, it was worth the wait. Good numbers of Pallas’s Warblers came through, both Scarlet Minivets and Rufous-capped Babblers were fairly visible, and two Streak-breasted Scimitar Babblers gave us some relatively excellent views as they picked their way under, over, and through a tangle of branches of leaves about thirty feet up.

The highlight was - as far as Martin knows - the first multiple recording in Hong Kong of what were until recently lumped together as “Golden-spectacled Warblers”: one the newly-split White-spectacled Warbler (HK’s second record) and the other less readily identifiable specifically. They remained in the area for about five minutes, before disappearing into the trees again.

The birding actually proved a lot tougher than either of us had expected, and by the time we’d walked through an undulating plantation of paperbark trees and got to the “feng shui” grove at the former Tai Wai Village (a patch of very old forest with 70 species of tree in it) a few hours later Martin had had enough - really struggling with a heavy winter cold and running out of time he assured me that the picnic-area here and the stream-side vegetation was usually pretty good and returned home whilst I stayed on for the afternoon.

And I’m very glad I did stay. Just minutes after Martin left I was treated to excellent views of a male Fork-tailed Sunbird (above) in a nearby tree. A few minutes later - and no sooner than I’d gone across a stream towards a large open picnic area just a few hundred metres away - I flushed up two White’s Thrushes, and then had excellent views of ten Olive-backed Pipits trundling purposefully over and under fallen branches and across the very short grass that had grown up where the reservoir water had retreated.

Olive-backed Pipit

Okay, probably not the stuff of dreams for HK’s resident hard-core birders, but pretty exciting for me I can tell you (and - to put things into perspective - what would HK’s finest give to find species like the Redwings and Fieldfares that are common near my own house right now?).

A little later, and having had several brief views of the White’s Thrushes (appearing out of what had to be holes in the ground right in front of me - damn, they’re hard to see), I flushed up a Grey-backed Thrush (the third of the day), before another bird party came through - this time less spectacular but giving good views of Velvet-fronted Nuthatch (below lower), Grey-chinned Minivets (male, below top), and (amongst others) more Black-throated Laughingthrushes…

 

As the light began to fade so did I. You probably get the picture: jet-lag, no food, hotel calling, long flight home…the usual self-inflicted problems us “Sleep can wait” birders face if we choose to head off into a beautiful forest in Hong Kong rather than staying in bed (as if we’d do that, eh?)…

Shing Mun - recommended? Of course, the place just feels like another world after the shallow-values, feeding-fenzy lifestyle I equate with HK Island and Kowloon. Better than TPK? Easier walking with a slightly different avifauna - probably not quite as good if you’re just after birds, but that’s not always what life’s all about, is it…

 
 
From top: Scarlet Minivet, Red-whiskered Bulbul, Scenic view, Macaque sp

Trip List:
(English and scientific names mainly from Field Guide to the Birds of South-east Asia, Robson 2000:)
Great Barbet Megalaima virens, 3; Spotted Dove Streptopelia chinensis, 3; Black Kite Milvus migrans; 10; Blue-winged Leafbird Chloropsis cochinchinensis, 1f; Large-billed Crow Corvus macrorhynchus, 1; Grey-chinned Minivet Pericrocotus solaris, 10+; Scarlet Minivet Pericrotus flammens, 10+; Scaly/White’s Thrush Zoothera dauma, 2; Grey-backed Thrush Turdus hortulorum, 3; Daurian Redstart Phoenicurus auroreus, 1; Velvet-fronted Nuthatch Sitta frontalis, 1; Great Tit Parus major, 4 - 5; Yellow-cheeked Tit Parus spilonotus, 1; Red-whiskered Bulbul Pycnonotus focosus, 3; Light-vented Bulbul Pycnonotus sinensis, 10; Chestnut Bulbul Hemixos castanonotus, 10; Common Tailorbird Orthotomus sutorius, 1; Asian Stubtail Urosphena squameiceps, 1; Pallas’s Leaf Warbler Phylloscopus proregulus, 10+; Yellow-browed Warbler P. inornatus, 3 - 4; White-spectacled Warbler Seicercus affinis, 1; (“Golden-spectacled Warbler” Seicercus sp; 1); Black-throated Laughingthrush Garrulax chinensis, 5 - 6; Streak-breasted Scimitar Babbler Pomatorhinus ruficollis, 2; Grey-cheeked Fulvetta lcippe morrisonia, 1; Oriental White-eye Zosterops palpebrosus, 10+; Rufous-capped Babbler Stachyris ruficeps, 10+; Fork-tailed Sunbird Aethopyga christinae, 1; Olive-backed Pipit Anthus hodgsoni, 10; Grey Wagtail Motacilla cinerea, 1.

All photographs copyright Charlie Moores