It was a Friday afternoon in late October with beautiful clear blue skies and I was itching to get outside, so my brother and I decided to try birding Ramna park for the first time.
Ramna park is a large park in the university area of the city that I’d heard had decent birding: including Plum-headed Parakeets which are fairly rare in Dhaka.
We got there around 4 in the afternoon and I was immediately enjoying the area with its beautiful huge trees, but the next 45 minutes were frustratingly slow birding as we saw more people than birds! We had seen just over 20 species, all of which I can get from our rooftop, and I was thinking it was not worth the trouble to have come.
Feeling a bit discouraged, Nic and I plopped down on a bench beside a small canal to rest a bit and almost immediately we started seeing interesting birds. First were an Orange-headed Thrush and Rufous Woodpecker. Although these are resident species they’re not super common and always fun to see.
Then some movement caught my eye. Something was hopping around in some dead leaves across the canal a bit to our left. I thought it/they were probably just Asian Pied Starlings or Common Mynas, but something felt a bit off so I decided to check them out.
So I walked a little closer and looked through my binoculars and immediately knew this was something interesting! I briskly walked back to the bench and grabbed my camera so I could get a few shots. After snapping a few shots and looking at them I realized the birds were thrushes and not the resident species (Orange-headed)!
Nic and I quickly walked a ways around to the other side of the canal to get a bit closer and I soon figured out that there were two different species of thrush! A rare Tickell’s Thrush and a much rarer Eyebrowed Thrush!
We enjoyed watching these two for a bit over half an hour as they foraged in the leaf litter before dusk. Several times I nearly got a decent photo of both in focus in one frame but every time one or the other would fly off so I only got a few bad photos of both in one frame…
As it neared dark we headed out and started back home on our cycles with my phone merrily buzzing away with notifications as messages came in from the various people I had sent back of cam shots to 😂
eBird checklist: https://ebird.org/checklist/S75624505
The next morning I went back and met up with Sayam Chowdhury, Sakib Ahmed, Zaber Ansary, and Elias Thomas. We were hoping to find both thrushes but only the Tickell’s was still around but that was a lifer for everyone besides me so still a success! That afternoon Nic and I went yet again and met up with Zaber again, but also Ikbal Babu, Syed Shahnoor Inam, Mahabur Rahman Munna, Shafaet Alam Abir, and Shahad Ahmad Raju (hopefully I’m not forgetting anyone 😬). We got the Tickell’s thrush again and it continued for over a week, allowing many people to enjoy seeing it, but the Eyebrowed Thrush was a one day wonder that only Nic and I were lucky enough to see.
BirdingBDandBeyond 