 Time to get our meeting started. I'm gonna do a quick introduction before turning it over to our guest speaker tonight. Hi to everyone, thanks for joining us. I'm Bill Graben from York County Audubon on behalf of our board. Delighted to present another program to you this month. I would like to start by recognizing and acknowledging a board member of ours who has been a board member for many, many years and has been our program manager for many, many years arranging for all these programs, including our Zoom programs over the last year and countless programs that we had at Wells Reserve before we converted to Zoom, hopefully not permanently. And that is Dave Doubleday. And Dave has done and continues to do a stupendous job lining up our programs and in everything else he does for York County and Maine Audubon. And we're so delighted to have him on our board. So just a little shout out to Dave. Thanks Dave for everything you do. Now tonight we've had these Zoom programs for the last year and now we're coming up to our traditional summer break which we will be taking this summer where we will not have programs for the next two months but then we'll rejoin you and hope you rejoin us for a September program. We have not yet determined the format or location. It may be Zoom, it may be in-person at the Wells Reserve or it may be some hybrid thereof but we will certainly let you know. You can check our Facebook page, our website for more information. Many of you are on our email list so you'll certainly get email updates about it with our monthly email. But we look forward to seeing you again then and wish you the very best for a lovely summer with one less Zoom program to Zoom into. There's no shortage of them out there at this point as we've all become extremely skilled and overly familiar with the Zoom universe. But on to tonight. Tonight we're delighted to have with us for our last program of this season, Howie Nielsen from Whitefield, Maine. Whitefield is next to Augusta, if you're not familiar with it. Howie has been a birder for many, many years and for over 10 years he's been traveling to Cambodia, been involved with bird surveys there, developing a network of bird guides and bird tours, studying the bird populations and we're very much looking forward to having him join us and present, give us a sense of what that is like and what it would be like to be there without having to fly 15 or more hours, however many it might be to get there. That's about right. A lot easier and less expensive to just go there by Zoom. So we will be having a Q and A session at the end of the program. So if during the program you have any questions, just hit the Q and A button at the bottom of your screen and type them in and we'll do our best to get some answers at the end of the program. But with that and without any further ado, like to turn it over to Howie and again, thank you Howie for being here and thanks everyone for joining us. Good evening, everybody. This has been fun for me starting to think about Cambodia again. So thanks for the opportunity to share this. I'm gonna go to the full screen here and we will get started. Here we go, all right. Is that bar in the way? No, you're looking good. All right, great. So my wife and I left Maine to go to Southeast Asia in January of 2006. And we quickly found ourselves being offered opportunities in Cambodia. We weren't planning on staying there but the opportunities were interesting enough that we said yes. And one thing led to another and we ended up spending essentially 10 years working about eight months a year in Cambodia. So Cambodia is located in Southeast Asia and this was a map that I loved as a child. I've got lots of maps and this was probably my favorite map because of all the islands, the diversity of habitats, the different exotic seas. I had this map on my bedroom wall. So as a child, I was somehow enamored with this. From a bird point of view, it's pretty interesting. You think of South America being the birding continent and it is because there's probably 3471 species more or less in South America. Southeast Asia has 2585, right? It's got, you know, 800, 900 less than South America. But if you look at the area of Southeast Asia, it's about one quarter the size of South America. So there's really a lot of bang through your buck in these areas. And a lot of it is because of the island diversity of Indonesia and the Philippines. They, you know, 650 species there with 200 endemics, Indonesia with 1600, 400, 15 endemics. So those islands produce a lot. So we're gonna focus more on this area here, which is the Indo Burmese biodiversity hotspot in red, which includes all of Southeast Asia and bits of coastal China and Northeast India. And that's where I spent, you know, the bulk of my 10 years. Cambodia is the lighter country here. It's about the size of Oklahoma, about 70,000 square miles where Maine is 38,000. So it's about, you know, it's a little less than twice the size of Maine. People know Cambodia because of the Angkorian culture that was there running from about 1,000 AD to 1,400. Angkor Wat brings in over 3 million tourists a year. And part of our project work was trying to grab some of that tourism and directed toward ecotourism, bird tourism. And my wife and I ended up working with projects. We also, people know about the Khmer Rouge and the horrors of the American war and the upset that occurred after that. As a result, there was a paucity of bird survey work. Probably a generation was lost when people were working in South America, writing books and discovering things. This Cambodia was really a place no one could go to. So probably defining character of Cambodia is the Mekong River. And you're seeing that blue line there. That is the Mekong that runs from China, Southwest China all the way through to Vietnam. And it's the third most biodiverse river in the world after the Amazon and the Congo. 1,900 species of fish breed and use the Mekong. So it's kind of the heart and soul of Cambodian culture. Again, think of Cambodia as kind of a bowl with some highlands that are on the edges. You can see down in the Southwest, the Cardamom Mountains. The highest mountain is Mount Oral, which is about the same height as Katahdin here in Maine. So not very tall. And then there's some highlands on the Vietnamese border. But the bulk of it is just flat lowlands in the basin. Again, another picture of that. The big blue area is Tong Le Sap Lake. Cambodians and Laotians are big, big fish eaters. Nobody eats more fish than the folks along this Mekong drainage. And the thing about Tong Le Sap Lake, which is just outside of Siem Reap, where Anchor Wat is, this huge lake is incredibly productive. During the rainy season, it increases surface area five fold. And it goes from one to two meters to more like eight meters deep. And the fish swim up into Tong Le Sap and it's a huge breeding area. And there's a million people that live on this lake. And this is just a picture of some of the floating houses and the people that live on the lake. Again, many, many people exploit the fishery here. Here is a picture of getting on toward dry season when the lake is shrinking. And you can see the bulk of fish. Now, I think it was 1994, they started doing flyovers and they realized that there were a lot of birds in this area. What we have here, again, the Tong Le Sap Lake and the dry season of the gray area around it is the flood plain, say in November when all the water comes down the Mekong to Phnom Penh and there's so much water it gets pushed back up into this lake, creating this huge, huge ecology. The flood plain is covered with flooded forest. And you can see this swamp forest here. This would be, again, probably November. If you go in April, you would see no water at all from this vantage point, it would just be all vegetation. So this is a unique, kind of a freshwater mangrove. So November is the start of the breeding season when all the water birds really start going and it's quite spectacular. It's as good as I've seen in the Everglades or the Pantanal, the Llanos of Venezuela and just huge numbers of birds. In November and December, you start getting the cormorants and the Oriental Darters. That's when nesting starts for them. And the Oriental Darters, it's the largest population, so largest colony in the world. Let's see if I can get rid of this little thing. Yeah. It's near threatened. And back in 2002, you can see the numbers on the screen. There were 241 nests in this colony in Prec 12. By 2013, it had grown to over 7,000 nests. Now, how that worked, Wildlife Conservation Society came in there and working with the Cambodian government got people to stop egg collecting, hunting the birds. And I think it was 2001 that they started arresting poachers. And as a result, there was an amazing rebound of the bird life. This is one of the more popular tourist destinations for bird tourism in Cambodia because of its proximity to the temple, the ease of getting there, but also the spectacular nature of these bird colonies. Spot-built pelicans are there in good numbers. The numbers of the pelicans fluctuate, but it's the only colony in Southeast Asia. They've been extirpated in Myanmar, they've been extirpated in Thailand as breeders. So this is the only colony that remains. 30% of the world population. So it's a wonderful place to go and watch pelicans here on the breeding ground. So as the water level lowers, fishing is easier and it's more productive for the pelicans. So you can see February through April as the water is dropping on the lake is when you end up with a lot of bird activity, including the storks. Painted stork is a common stork in Cambodia as well. Again, the largest colony is Southeast Asia and you can see the nests that have increased from 1,000 in 2004 to upwards of over 2012. My recent communication with people at Wildlife Conservation Society tell me that they don't have specific numbers because of COVID people have not been going out the last couple of years, but they feel that populations continue to be stable there in the colony. Milky storks are also found in the colony. It's the only freshwater milkies in the world. The rest of them are mangrove nesters in saltwater, primarily in Sumatra and Java and Indonesia. You can see the milky stork on the lower right, the all-white white cupboards and the paler bill. And that's always a good target for people that come to Cambodia. They wanna see that. One of the more amazing numbers are the Asian open bills. This is a snail eater. It's an obligate apple snail eater. You can see the bill is kind of, it doesn't quite come together and it's a tool that allows the bird to open the snails. Look at the numbers. There are 688 nests in 2004. By 2014, they had over 14,000 nests and they were estimating it was only half the birds that were actually breeding in Cambodia. So there's been a spectacular recover of these birds. There's also adjutant storks in Cambodia. The largest colony globally is Taulaisap Lake at Prec-12. It's the world's rarest stork, critically endangered 800 to 1,000 globally. It's a slow breeder. So you can see that, you know, even though there was 56 nests, it's been bumped up about four-fold now because of the conservation efforts. This is again, one of the target species when we go to Prec-12 with tourists, I train guides in Cambodia and this was always a big target for people. Here you see a lesser and a greater together. The lesser adjutant is also going down population-wise and there's significant numbers in Cambodia where we have upwards of 3,500 pairs. But the nests on Taulaisap are quite small. There's only maybe 400 or so. Here's a better view of the two adjutant storks, the lesser on the left and the greater on the right. They're both in their breeding finery where the colors get quite vivid. The interesting thing on the greater adjutant on the right is the vascularity of its bare skin. It gets so engorged with blood, it starts weeping blood and it turns into scabs. So right in front of its eye, all that darkness is really the scabby look of a breeding plumage greater adjutant. So kind of homely, but somehow it gets a job done. Another bird on Taulaisap, which is difficult to find, it's also on some of the more remote rivers in Cambodia is the masked thin foot. It's endangered global population, probably less than 2,500. Sundubans in Bangladesh is probably the stronghold for this bird, but they're declining rapidly. But we have seen them in Cambodia, but it's a bird that we cannot guarantee. On the lake, we get great headed fish eagles, a near threatened species that has its highest nesting density anywhere in the world on Taulaisap Lake. You can see that they had in 2014, there were 58 nests. Again, I don't know how those numbers change. My communication with people at WCS, they just say everything's kind of holding steady and that's all I could get out of them. So that would be good if that's the case. Here are a few more water birds that we end up seeing around the lake and in the Northern Plains, woolly stark on the lower left, black-headed ibis coming in for a landing and the black-necked stork. And these are kind of widespread, not necessarily only on the lake. So along around the lake, you have these seasonally flooded grasslands, that would be underwater during November, but then it recedes and it's super rich farmland. It's kind of the rice basket of Asia. There, as the Mekong goes down in toward Vietnam. And these seasonally flooded grasslands have become maybe the most endangered habitat in Cambodia because of its value as agricultural land. And this is an area that we find the Bengal flora camp. This is the world, I believe it's the world's rarest buster and we're not even sure how many there are. The range is 350 to 1,500 globally. There's some in Northeast India and Nepal and in Cambodia. In 2012, people doing work on the bird had 216 displaying males. And there's an interesting sexual ratio in busters where there's, it sounds like three males for every female. Six years later, only 104 males were located. And given the mathematics and the ratio with the sexual ratio with males to females, they estimate the total population in Cambodia now is down to about 138. So this may be a bird that's on its way out. Again, because the demand for agricultural lands. The only place that population is stable is a project that Wildlife Conservation Society has kind of southeast of Siam Ria. And that's where we would take tourists and clients that wanted to see this bird. We take it to that area. And the local villagers were given money whenever they would find a nest. And if that nest was successful and they fledged out, they would get additional funds. So it motivated people to look and begin protecting these birds. Where in the past, this is a turkey-sized bird. People wanna put them in the pot. So there was pressure that way. That has stopped, but the land conversion has not. Again, these are both males. The females are all sort of camouflage brown. In the grasslands as well are Cyrus cranes, the world's tallest cranes. And there's a breeding population in the northern grasslands, the northern plains of Cambodia. But in the 90s, the discovery was made of a wintering population of up to 400 that occur northeast or northwest of the lake. And you can go and watch the cranes. They're quite available. It's a nice trip to make. And again, they're breeding. The northern plains, the same type of program, if you get people to find the nests, they will get a reward for that. And if the birds fledge out an additional payout. So you can see that there found 57 nests most recently in the northern plains that got this protection from people. But even with that, you go into some of the villages and you'll find somebody has a pet Cyrus crane. So the interface between human activity and wildlife that's always a challenge to kind of keep the wildlife on the positive side. The grasslands around the lake are a wonderful place for migratory birds. This is just the sampling of some of the birds that show up in the wintertime. When we're out looking for the flora can, when we're out looking for cranes, you get things will start at the upper left. That's a blue throat, a pied harrier in the top middle. Greater spotted eagle. Below that is the Manchurian reed warbler, which is a critically endangered bird that has very limited wintering grounds. And it's, you know, around the lake is one of the places in the world. The yellow-breasted bunting, which populations are now collapsing because of the intense hunting and trapping pressure in China. It used to be one of the most abundant birds in Cambodia in the wintertime. And now it's hard to find it. And then the final one on the lower left is a red-throated pipit. So there's a nice diversity of birds to look at in winter. Wintertime is a nice time to visit Cambodia, our winter. To the north, there's a huge swath of flat country that's covered with deciduous diptycarp forests. Diptycarps are a huge, huge order of trees that are tropical, found, you know, in South America all around the world and 550 species globally. But there are only six deciduous diptycarps, trees that lose their leaves. And all of these are in this forest in Cambodia. So it's quite a unique ecology. And Wildlife Conservation Society is working there. And this little map here, I don't know how well you can see it, but there's like little boxes, three little boxes that kind of show you the remnant patches of dried deciduous forests that's remaining in Southeast Asia. And the largest amount is in Northern Cambodia. So on this map of Cambodia, these red areas are protected forest areas. Protection in Cambodia is a bit of a challenge. There's not a lot of resources for rangers. You know, people are poor there. So there tends to be a lot of illegal activity. And it's a challenge trying to hold on to some of these places. This is what it looks like in February in the dry season. You can see it's pretty bleak. You know, this could almost be Maine in the winter. But this is a nice time to go search for a couple of different bird species. What I'm showing here is a guest house that we built. They discovered a population of giant ibis in the vicinity of this village. And Wildlife Conservation Society tried to engage the local population by giving them money to build a guest house, run it, staff it, all profits go to the village. So they've taken ownership and pride in the fact that these ibises are in their neighborhood. And a DDF, the forest around it, has 300 species that have been found. So it's biologically, it's an interesting, it's a fun place to go. I was asked to be part of the team to locate this outside of the village. We ended up building four of these duplexes. They can sleep four people each. And then, you know, there's kind of a dining area. But to talk to the local people, we had to make sure that there were no ghosts or spirits in the site we chose. That was a critical issue to get local participation. There were other areas that they would not go to. And I thought that was pretty interesting. So the big ticket item there is the giant ibis. 115 pairs, they estimate 345 critically endangered. Only the northern plains occasionally they wander into Laos, but it's been extirpated from Vietnam. It's been extirpated from Thailand and Myanmar. So there's just a handful of these majestic ibis remaining, but they are pretty easy to find around this village that people do try to protect them. Again, nest protection. We pay people to find the nests and protect. Also in this area is another critically endangered ibis called the White Shouldered Ibis. There's a few more of them and there's a couple areas in the world. I think in Borneo, there's a small population, but the bulk of the population is in the northern plains of Cambodia. So again, this is one of the big highlights when people come to Cambodia and want to see bird life. This is one of the more popular destinations. So, we can pretty much depend on seeing both species when we go there. Just gives you an idea of what early morning on the plains. Camera trap here of an elders deer. This is endemic to the northern plains. This fellow looks like he's been in a wallow in a mud hole. This is another critically endangered species in this area. And it is another. Species that we have pretty good success finding. Elephants. There's a small population of elephants that wanders through the forest. We don't see them very often, but we do see them very often. We don't see them very often, but we do see signs. There's also some large bovids and large cattle. This is the biggest of them. The Gower. There's wild buffalo and Banting as well that wander these forests. Numbers have dwindled. Again, going back to the war. There were a lot of hungry people. There were a lot of weapons. The large mammals took a beating as a result. So it's hard to find these. The ones that remain are pretty shy. Another one of the highlights of the northern plains are populations of vultures that are critically endangered. And probably easier to see in Cambodia than they are anywhere in the world. They're standing tall as a slender billed vulture. White rumps. And then two red headed vultures. The populations of the vultures have collapsed in India because of the use of the dichlofenac. The cattle in India, they get mastitis. Unproductive. They need anti-inflammatories. They give them to the cattle. The cattle end up dying sometimes. And the tainted cattle with the dichlofenac are absolutely fatal to the vultures. So there's been like a 99% decline in white, white rum vultures in India. The problem in Cambodia is there's not enough big wildlife. So feeding, they struggle to find. So what WCS, WWF, probably Birdlife International, there's a consortium of groups that have created, I think four or five, six vulture restaurants across the northern plains where periodically cattle are sacrificed to feed it. And what we were doing is when tourists wanted to, to see the vulture activity, you know, they could buy a cow and we would dispatch it the day before we brought tourists into the area. We needed to do that to feed the vultures anyway. So, so this would be a way of, of getting people onto these birds. And again, here's a slender bill, which is fairly, in a fairly uncommon in Cambodia, white, the white rumps. And my favorite are the sort of gruesome looking red headaches. That is a large billed crow. Usually the vultures wait, they'll be up in the trees surrounding this vulture restaurant. And they require either a crow or a jackal to come in and feed on the carcass. And when they see that, they realize that this is probably safe. And then they descend on to the, onto the carcass. A couple other interesting birds in the northern plains are the, the endemic white rump falcon on the left. And colored falconettes are quite common, lovely, lovely little primarily insect eaters. And the 17 species of woodpeckers that are in the DDF. And what's nice about the dried deciduous forest, is get the forest, it's so open, that you can watch birds fly from tree to tree. And, you know, you don't lose them in the canopy, the way you do in rainforest. It's a great place for watching birds. And there's just the number of lovely woodpeckers. The little one on the core, upper left corner is a heart spotted woodpecker. Then you have red bellied, white bellied in the middle, black headed. And then a piculette, the Rufus piculette of the upper right. Those are just the sampling and some of the wonderful woodpeckers that are found in Cambodia. There's also some, you know, some just charismatic, wonderful characters that are fun to watch. There's always hoopos that are, you know, easy to find delightful, delightful creatures. And tree swifts. This is a crested tree swift. And the tree swifts are family birds that are only found in Asia. And very long tail, long wind, beautiful flying birds. And they're easy to see in the DDF. 10 species of night birds. Again, what we had, we have local guides in the village there. That always take anybody out. We bring tours, we bring guests there. We hire them. And one of the things that we had them do, you know, was track the ibises. So we could always knew where we could find what, what little pool or pond we might find ibis at where, where they'd been heard recently, but they got really good at that. So we started sending them out to look for other things. And they, you know, turned up a variety of owls. And so when we'd take people up there, you know, you'd get the first day would be focused on ibises. But then that evening in the next day, we'd always try to get a nice fat list of night birds. Spotted wood owl, beautiful owl on the left. Blithe's frog mouth. And Buffy fish owl. Some of the birds that are up in that DDF. So it's, again, it's a nice habitat to work in because it's so open. WCS asked me to do a, an exploratory search for white wing duck, critically endangered species that occurs in this northern forest. And here you see, you know, this is essentially my bed and camp. We were out for, I think a couple of weeks. And we were walking through in rivers, going to wet areas, trying to find a white wing ducks. And we were successful in finding some, including at this spot here. And this was part of the trip. I include this because it was, we were given a military policeman to accompany our trip. We had some local guides and then a, a ranger from WCS and myself. And we got to a camp. This is a dried, dry season palm here. So there's hardly any water left. The guy takes off his, his uniform hangs up as AK 47 on a tree. And, you know, just wraps himself in his little cotton crumb and goes out and starts shoveling water on the other side of this lake that he has made. And once he's got enough water out of there, he provides dinner for us. And he comes up with this playful, a little bits and pieces that ended up getting cooked for dinner. And, and it was actually quite good. And the white wing duck, we were successful finding it. And we ended up creating a camp in this locality that was quite productive for a number of species, including the giant, giant ibis and some of the Storks, but that we were successful showing people the duck. And you can see that limited numbers, probably less than a thousand adult birds. Assam in Northeast India has a small population. Cambodia. And then I think maybe a small population in Sumatra and Indonesia. But it's, it's endangered everywhere. One of the things that was kind of funny, we built this little camp with tables and a little outhouse. And during the rainy season, elephants came and just up toward it, toward the pieces. And the next season we had to rebuild it and we did it a bit more modestly, understanding the elephants kind of ruled the roost up there. And then we had a couple of other endangered species that's found in the Northern Plains is the green pea fall. And it's related to the peacock that everybody knows from, you know, zoos and, and, you know, from India, but this is the Southeast Asian species, which is, which is somewhat different. And here's a displaying male, which is amazing. And at dawn they have loud calls that carry across the plains. And it's generally pretty easy to track these down. They'll be up in trees, you know, roosting for the night and then they start calling. And the common pheasant in the area is the precursor to the ones we like to fry up and eat. This is the red jungle fall, which is fairly abundant through the forest habitats in Cambodia. This is right on the edge of one of the ponds with the white wing duck. They came out early morning poking around. Right on the edges, up along the Laotian, the Vietnamese and the Thai borders, you get into some highlands. And what's interesting about this is you have different forest types and they're typical. The biome is typical of Himalayan forest. There's a number of Himalayan species that kind of trickle into Southeast Asia along these highlands. So I've had the opportunity on a couple of survey trips to get into the Cardoma Mountains in the south. And also trips along the Laotian border, looking for what we could find. Things like laughing thrushes and babblers, which are, you know, abundant in places like Bhutan and Nepal, Northern India. Some of them, their relatives show up in Cambodia. This is a trip we took in 2015. And we probably had about 10 villagers from the province that carried food for us for two weeks. And we went up. That top mountain is called Haling Halang. It's right on the Laotian border. And we went up and climbed that mountain. And I ended up recording 10 species that had never been recorded in Cambodia. So that was, that was very fun for me. I totally enjoyed it. And this gives you a little idea of what the forest is like in the mountains. It's much more lush and much tighter, tougher to find birds. You hear them a lot more than you see them. And survey work always required. Doing a lot of taping and then weeks of trying to sort out what I had taped after the fact. Here's a couple of the, these birds, these are babbler family, the pygmy run babbler, white, brown, shrike babbler. Actually, I think the pygmy run babbler, the name has changed. I'm going to have to check that and forgot to look at that. But anyway, these are birds that you would find in Arunachal Pradesh and Northern India and Bhutan that they are found in the highlands in Cambodia, you know, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos as well. One of two endemics in Cambodia. Is this laughing thrush in the Southwest in the Cardamom Mountains called the Cambodian laughing thrush. And you have to make a trip to just a handful of peaks in the Southwest to find and it requires a bit of a hike in expedition with camping up top. It's not terribly difficult. You could get up there in a day if you're ambitious enough for young enough, maybe that's me two days to get up there. But I'm slow and soft these days. Here we have one of the sirenas flycatchers. Blue-throated flycatcher, typical of the highlands. Basically, it's more foothill ridgeline to ridgeline to ridgeline all heavily forest. So you can still get into some really beautiful, albeit disappearing landscapes over in Southeast Asia. Filled with tremendous biodiversity. Some of the forested areas contain the vulnerable great hornbill. Oriental pied hornbills, a number of hornbills, I think upwards of 10 species of hornbills in Southeast Asia. So they're always a treat to see kind of the old world two counts. People that come to Southeast Asia want to see pitas. Pitas are these gloriously plumaged forest floor dwellers. And they are furtive. They just kind of skulk around on the forest floor. And it's a challenge to find these four people, but they tend to be great targets. And it's always exciting to see the big one is the blue wing pitas. It's not bigger than the other ones, but the photograph is. And that's a migratory species that shows up in the wintertime from from China from the north. And then they're the upper right is a blue pit and then barbellied pit, which are both resident Cambodian species. And again, you have to kind of sit still and sit quiet. In the forest. And normally, you know, we, we use recordings to try to stimulate a response to, to finding these things. I'm not a big fan of playback, but. The chances of seeing a pitta. It's next to nothing without, without use of playback. You have to spend a lot of time in the forest. It is doable. So, you know, we have a couple of broad bills. Southeast Asia. There are there. I think a couple of species in Africa, but the bulk of the broad bills are in Southeast Asia. Two of the Cambodian birds here, the black black and red. And then the highland long tailed. You know, just spectacular birds. Very unique. In 2009. This is. There was concern about the potential for a pandemic. And we know a bit about pandemics these days. Well, in 2009. Everybody was worried about avian influenza. And there were seeing strains that they thought could become quite lethal to human populations. So I got involved in a project. And I was involved in a project. While I've conservation society. Society had a. Funding that we could get a bird bander. The fellow on the right, it's an Australian license bander. And then three of my, my guides, my students in Cambodia. And myself, we would go out in a variety of habitats. And we would set up misnets. And we would check the nets and bring birds back. Here. What their viral load was and what the genetics. Of the viruses that were. Were being collected. This is a little fringe called the white rum. Munea. And we'd. Patrol the nets and every 20 minutes or so, go check the nets and bring birds back. Here it was fun. Some of the really spectacular things that we pull out of the net. caught numerous times. So that was really fun. And then, you know, handling these birds was a remarkable experience for me. This is a greater painted snipe. There are three species of painted snipe in the world. And this is the old world. There's one in South America and there's one in Australia. This is the one that extends into Africa. And, you know, to pull these things out of the net was always a prize. This is me with a white-throated kingfisher that's, you know, in recovery after going through the trauma of getting handled. We tried to be as gentle as possible and I'm not sure if we ever had any fatalities. It was pretty good. The kingfishers are a remarkable group that well represented in Cambodia. The big picture of the black and white one is a pied kingfisher, a banded kingfisher in the upper right. You can see his crest is elevated. He's been handled. He's been caught in that and he's unhappy. So he's showing it. And then the little fellow on the right is a black-backed pygmy kingfisher. The biggest one is the stork build on the upper left. You can see how small the pygmy is in my hand. A tiny fellow with a big bill. And then the migratory black-capped kingfisher. I always loved this photograph when I would teach my students about how wings were put together. You can see the different groupings. You can see the difference between the primary black and white primaries, the blue secondaries. The primary coverts are blue. The secondary coverts are black. The scapulars. It was nice to help them understand bird anatomy, the feather anatomy. Another one of our captives, this is just the common kingfisher. But nothing too common about him. Beautiful ruddy kingfisher. And again, this was a test question. I would have the various feather tracks pointed out on this ruddy kingfisher and the kids that had to tell me what they were. And the white throwed it again. So we'd set up these stations. We'd go out and usually camp for three, four days at a site before we moved on. And this is the banding station. I was taking a break at the time and serenading, I guess. What we would do, we would capture the birds and take data on them. You know, time of capture, measurements, way. And we'd photograph the birds. You know, various morphometrics, you know, wing, legs, bill. It was taken on all the birds and recorded. This is a female red jungle fowl. And here we have one of the sand plovers. I think this is a lesser sand plover. And again, you know, here we are measuring bills. Sometimes if we had a vet with us, we would do blood sampling. But we were always doing swabs of the elementary canal, both down the throat and up the cloaca, and putting those samples into dry ice. And they would get shipped to the University of California, Davis, where they would sequence the DNA of the viruses that were pulled out of these birds. And what was interesting, we were finding none of the variants of the avian influenza that people were worried about. Where they were coming from were the duck and chicken farms that were heavily, you know, the birds were kept in very close quarters, primarily in Vietnam and China. And that's the breeding ground for the genetic diversity that was occurring. We can think about the current pandemic and allowing continued replication of the viruses just going to keep different variants that may become more threatening. And that's an issue. And again, back 10 years ago, we were seeing that the problem was in these bird farms where just too many animals from too small a space. So this is kind of an iconic photograph. What we would do with all our birds is take photographs. And back on the 28th of January, in 2009, at Crane Check, this bird, band number 198, I couldn't identify. And that was sort of my job. I was supposed to be able to, you know, I looked at this and was like, I haven't seen anything like it. And I knew it was a tailor bird, a small little insectivorous, passerine, perching bird, songbird. But it was marked unlike anything I had ever seen. And we took all the data and sent it to some ornithologists. And it turned out, you know, this was a bird unknown to science or thotomous tailor bird. And a few, when was it? A few, it was in 2011, actually, I was with some friends up on the Mekong River, and we discovered this bird again. And it turned out there was a small population in the riverine scrub along the Mekong River. And some of my colleagues at the Wildlife Conservation Society, I went home for the summer, but they pursued this bird. And they ended up capturing four, five, six, I think five birds. And they sent them to the British Museum and to the University of Louisiana, where they did the sequencing on the DNA. And they realized that this was a unique bird to science. So it was pretty interesting kind of seeing the politics of, you know, how a new bird is described and who gets credit for it and all. They wanted to keep it hush, hush. They didn't want folks from Vietnam to get wind of it, because they wanted to keep it. They ended up calling it orthotomous Choctamook. Choctamook is a Khmer word, and it essentially means the confluence of rivers. And the area around Phnom Penh, four rivers come together, Mekong and Pasacht, when they stop, they all come together there. So they used that word in trying to get a sense of ownership and pride in Cambodia that this is something very special and unique, and we need to protect the heritage, the natural heritage. So I thought that was a good idea. I had another nice opportunity, I think this, I want to say this is probably about 2012 or 13. And that boat on the left, I was able to get some funds from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in England. And we went down on the Gulf of Thailand. There's a Ramsar site, a protected wetland called Kokapik. It's an island off the coast. And I propose that we go out for 10 days on this boat and survey the water birds, the shorebirds, looking for spoonbill, sandpiper populations. They didn't understand where they spent winter. They knew that there was some in Bangladesh and Myanmar and certainly in Thailand. But the numbers, they felt like there had to be other locations. So I got this boat, a young captain and his wife, photographer, friend of mine, a local Cambodian kid, and an Australian that knew how to organize this boat. And we threw a couple of kayaks on board. And this is the space we lived in for 10 days. Here you can see me with Sang Lim, my Khmer photographer. And we would paddle out every morning before the winds would pick up. And we'd cruise the mudflats on the edges, trying to see birds. And there were birds. It was abundant wintering, waders were in the area. It was quite spectacular. This is one of Sang Lim's photographs. These are primarily sand plovers. If you look at the bird up, kind of the solo bird up at the top center, that's a little different. It has a kind of thinner down curve bill. That's a curlew sandpiper. And if you go about three birds below him, you can see a bird with a turned up bill. That's a taric sandpiper. So there was a nice diversity of species that we were able to count. And we had some other issues at times where we get stuck during the tides. All good fun. We spent time surveying the mangroves on the island as well, which provided different bird species like this little spider hunter related to the sun birds of Asia and Africa. But yeah, both species of greater and lesser sand plovers. Thousands. It was nice to see a large population of bar-tailed godwits, winter at this site. I tried getting out and stalking the birds on foot. And it was, you know, 90 degrees and muddy and no, it was a bad idea. Didn't do it. Eurasian curlews were there in small numbers. A variety of turns. There's three species of turns sitting here. You all maybe know Caspian turn, the big red-billed turn in the center. And then there's greater crested turns with the kind of yellowish bill on the right and lesser crested turns with the orangier thinner bills to the left. So we had nice, nice looks at a variety of turns while we were there. Endangered shorebird called Nordmans green shank, an estimated global population of 1,000 birds. We were able to see, you know, a couple dozen at this site. So that was exciting. I was pleased to be able to find that. And the first day we got there, I was able to find this bird. I'm not sure if this is Minor Singlim's photograph, but we were so excited that, you know, the reason we came to this place was to find Spoonie. And this was the first known Cambodian record of the Spoonbilled Sampire. This is not my photograph or his, but, you know, it's an iconic little waiter with its spatula bill. It's a Siberian nester that's critically endangered. So, you know, we were excited, you know, the first afternoon finding the bird and we roared off the boat with our kayaks the next morning and the subsequent, you know, nine days never saw another Spoonbill the first day and that was it. But it was an amazing adventure to see the number of waiters that we had. Switch gears here a little bit. Another survey project I got involved in was a river survey where we went on one of the tributaries of the Mekong River called the Sesan River, which has been terribly damaged by Chinese dams. The flow has really changed the ecology of that river and the more dams get built, the more damage is being done to the flow of the Mekong River. There's a number of unique species. This is the way we traveled. We had two boats like this and we camp along the river and just try to find the variety of birds that require sandy banks such as the Great Thick Knee, the small Pratt and Cole, which we saw quite a few Pratt and Cole's, a few Great Thick Knees, River Lapwings, turns, they all nest dry seas in low water on the sand islands on the little banks. And the problem with the dams now is that you have a wet season and a dry season every day or every time they need increased electrical generation. So in the dry season, if they release water, the birds' nests get knocked out unless they've really luckily positioned them away from the water surges. So all of these birds are endangered and we're losing them. The bird we went to look for is the black-bellied churn. We failed to turn it up. The last breeding in 2002, survey in 2008, failed to find it. And our survey, I think in 2013, 12 or 13, we also failed to find it. There are still small populations found in India and I think maybe a few in Thailand, but the Cambodian population has been extirpated by human activity. And dam building now is probably the biggest threat. And it also is a threat to Funleesop Lake. The Mekong River is the home to a population of Irrawaddy dolphins and they are dwindling as well. So dam building, I'm afraid, will probably eliminate this species. There are other areas in Southeast Asia where it's found. So if it's lost from Cambodia, it's not a complete loss, but every time it's another brick in the wall, I guess. Along the river is a very specialized wag tail called the Mekong wag tail. And it's found in Laos and in Cambodia, kind of this middle section of the Mekong River. Well, that's always a target for people when they go. When we did our trip up to the Laosian border, one of our priorities was to bring camera traps to get a sense of, you know, what was living in these very remote mountains. Very few people got into them. So the wildlife, different organizations were encouraging us to go find out. So we ended up going, this is a grassland called a veal. This is veal poem, going up toward Laos in northeastern Cambodia. Really exquisite area. We'd be hiking for days without seeing people, which is amazing when you think about how populated the region is. Again, this is that same photograph of Haleng Halam from veal poem. And it took us, I think it took us at least two, possibly three days to get up to the top from here. This is a photograph from inside the forest. This we're walking, you know, up into the mountains. Really spectacular strangling fig trees, the strangler figs here. They don't even have the trees that they strangled anymore. They killed those and they're just the figs left. Lots of violence. Really interesting, interesting forest to spend time in. This was camp as we were getting up toward Haleng Halam. Local villagers, very adept at living in the woods. They would find things to eat under rocks and rotten logs and it would be interesting to see some of the things that they'd bring back. We generally subsisted on instant noodles, but so camera trapping. This is one of the one of the pheasants. This is called gray peacock pheasant that we camera trapped. This is a picture, this is a stock picture somebody took of a displaying gray peacock. You can just see how magnificent this member of the pheasant family is. But hard to find, hard to see these birds. They're difficult. A reed hornbill caught in a dry stream bed, one of the camera traps. Here's another stock photograph. The male is on the left and a highly sexually dimorphic female is on the right. They are fairly common in the woodlands in Cambodia. Here is a red munchak or barking deer. Sounds like a log dog barking in the forest. Rarely see them, but on camera traps they're fairly common. Here's a gaur. Again, finding a gaur, walking into a gaur in the forest, is not impossible. They are so wary. Only the wary have survived. But the camera traps, again, were able to see that there's still a population that exists in these mountains. This is an Asiatic wild dog called a dole, D-H-O-L-E. And again, you sometimes see them fleetingly. And this is a nice camera shot of it. And here's one of the muckaks. There's four species of muckak in Cambodia. This is the stump-tailed or bear muckak. And it's one that escaped me in 10 years, so I never got to see it. So it was surprising to see it on the footage that we got back. It was always fun to unwind the cameras and see what would be there. This is a langur. It's called the black shanked duke. And it's just the charismatic. Beautiful, beautiful animal. Fairly common to find these. It's a nice animal to look for, and we're generally successful locating. This is a poor photograph of an Asian golden cat, a close-up of it. Here's a camera trap, a marbled cat. And my favorite is the clouded leopard. There's also a few common leopard in Cambodia, but the clouded leopard is unique to Southeast Asia. There's another nice photograph of it. Absolutely beautiful, beautiful animal. Of course, I've never seen it in a while. I'm happy to know they still exist when we open the camera traps and find footage like this. Unfortunately, this is some of the other footage we find in the camera traps. What feels like in the back of beyond, but then we get our camera traps back after a few weeks. And you can see that there's hunters going through the area. And when I did work in Laos, there would be guys that were hunting game, and they would go across into Vietnam and bring the game, sell the bushmeat in Vietnam, and then they'd come back with all sorts of Chinese plastic goods to bring back to these little mountain villages. It was just sad to see that happen. One of the birds that we found on that trip up to the Laotian border was the coral-billed cemeter babbler. Again, one of these Himalayan species that had never been recorded in Cambodia. We were able to get kind of a poor photograph there on the left. That's a stock photograph on the right, but it was pretty exciting finding things like this. Pale blue flycatcher was another new bird to Cambodia. This was my photograph from our trip. And this is a white-tailed flycatcher. We were found roosting at night right in the campsite kind of farm. And this is leaving the park in northeast Cambodia. We were coming into a little village that, you know, it's just pioneers going in, raising the forest, cutting, burning, settling. And we managed to stumble into a local family gathering, I guess. And here you have a fermented rice wine that everybody was inviting us to try, which we did, and it definitely was wine. Some of the scenes from the remote parts of Cambodia. Little kid going up to gather fruit in the trees and getting closer to civilization. You can see the house there is a formal staircase in the river. So I, for the most part, was volunteering and then after a while employed by the Sam Viesnes Center, which is a Cambodian NGO that was created by the Wildlife Conservation Society. WCS, its headquarters is in New York at the Bronx Zoo. They run the Bronx Zoo and they have projects, conservation projects in, I think, 32 countries around the world. And they tend to be scientifically driven. They hire a lot of PhDs to do work. WCS, you can see the patch on my hat and you can see my morning coffee in the beer can. And I think this was from the trip we took on the Saison River. And here I am, life in the woods. Anyway, gives you a little idea of what we can find in Cambodia, including some of the Fabulous and Corian stuff. It's hopefully things will open up. When I, recent communications with people at WCS in Cambodia, they are getting Sinovac, the Chinese vaccine and they expect the country to be vaccinated by the end of the year and opening up again. So my wife and I are hoping that maybe this winter we can get back in there. We have not been there since 2017, so we would like to do that. Anyway, that's my little song and dance. Thank you, Howie. That was great. Yeah, it's fun to relive it. I must say that I miss it. Okay, so what do I need to do to drop out of here? You can stop the screen share. Okay. Righty. And that was a fabulous presentation. Such incredible, I had no idea the extent of the diversity there of birds and mammals. And you alluded to the fish, 1900 species in the Mekong River. You didn't show it, oh, you showed us a couple of fish, but it's just incredible. We have a few questions that we'd like to get to quickly. First, I just want to mention that while we're not having any programs over the summer, we are having a couple of workshops on birding by ear and talking with birds both presented by Dan Gardoki, who's an exceptional bird, tremendous knowledge of bird communication. And for more information about that, check our website and sign up if you're interested. I would encourage that. One of the things that I really stressed when I was training Cambodian students was learning to bird by ear. It was just critical. And I think they ended up getting so much more enjoyment being guides, having that skill set. Yes, absolutely. So I'd encourage people to take that workshop. Yep. We're also lead some bird walks at the Wells Reserve at Lott Home over the summer on Saturday. Every other Saturday morning, the next one is this coming Saturday. Again, check our website for details. But it's this coming Saturday and then every other Saturday thereafter. And one plug I want to make, our standard public service announcement is to please keep cats, keep house cats indoors, encourage anyone who might not be aware of the damage they do to do the same. But now onto some quick questions. You mentioned about the cranes, the world's tallest crane. Can you give us, do you have a specific measurement by any chance or estimate of their height? Gosh. You know, I would say they're probably in the five foot range. Yeah. And the giant ibis, how does that compare in size to the ibis as we see here? I would say they're close to double that size. Wow. Yeah. I mean, they really are remarkably large. The white shoulder is more like what we'd see in a glossy ibis. But the giant ibis is, 50, 75% bigger. Yeah. There's one question here that I can't say I fully understand, but I'll repeat it for you, see if you can make, it means more to you. How common is the red-eyed sclera in Southeast Asian birds? Is it a protection against sun glare off the water? Is this, any comments on that? Wow. That's beyond my knowledge base. You know, I would think if you would see that you could see the similar thing in most seabirds or tropical water birds. I don't know. I really don't know. That's something that would be interesting to look into. And then their questioner then added, by sclera, I mean lens. How common is the red-eye pupil or lens in Southeast Asian birds? Do many species have our red-eyed? They're definitely some. I would have to go back and look at that. I can't comment on that. Do people speak Cambodian there? What is the language that is? The dominant group there is Khmer. There's a number of ethnicities, like in the mountains, we were hiking with Brao people, but the dominant culture is Khmer, and the language that they use is Khmer. And how much Khmer do you speak? There was barely, barely passable. All the students that I worked with, if they were going to be guides, needed to be able to speak English. Some spoke German, some spoke Japanese, but they all had multiple language skills that almost all of them picked up on the streets of Siem Reap where all these tourists would come in. We hired a number of temple guides that were interested in developing new skills and becoming bird guides. And it was pretty impressive. So I always had these young kids that were interested in taking care of papa because they'd make sure that everything was organized and I had my handlers. If people were interested in someday doing a birding tour in Cambodia, do you have an organization you'd recommend that they could look at a website or anything like that? The Sam Viesna Center that I was showing right at the end. Sam Viesna was actually the person that discovered the winter and cranes and was involved with discovery and cataloging the big bird colony on the lake back in the 90s. And while he was working on the cranes, he contracted malaria and he was given counterfeit malarial medication and he ended up dying, not properly treated. And Wildlife Conservation Society essentially helped create the Sam Viesna Center as possibly a way of supporting his wife and children. And so they donated a house to her and that house became the office for the Sam Viesna Center. All the major bird tour companies, whether it's wings or Victor Emmanuel Field Guides, they hire the Cambodian guides that I trained. So when they go to Cambodia, they orchestrate with the local guides. I would say it's nice to just go and contact them directly and they can organize the trip for you and save money doing it that way. Well, thank you so much for joining us this evening. It was a true pleasure to see all those incredible species and incredible photographs and look forward to seeing you around the state of Maine sometime. Yeah, I'll make a point of getting in touch next time I'm in York. Okay, sounds great. Thank you very much. Thank you to everyone for joining us. See you in September, if not sooner, and have a wonderful summer. Yeah, third week in September on Monhegan. Good night, everyone. Good night.