Today we check out of our luxurious hotel and take the train ride in reverse to the airport. But we are not leaving of course, just renting a car to explore outside of Taipei. Unfortunately as we leave the hotel in starts to rain, heavy rain really, so we sneak through passages we scouted the days prior to the station instead of going above ground as usual. The rain abates as we reach the airport but it is still sprinkling and the weather forecast is still very discouraging, rain all day.
Well it is not like we can change our plans randomly. So after getting the car we drive to Xucuogang Wetland and pray that it doesn’t rain heavily and we can at least look for birds from the car. And the gods hear our prayers, it is not raining when we reach the wetland parking lot so on we go to explore, who knows how long the reprieve will last.
There is a nice panel showing all the water birds you can see here but of course we see first a land bird, the ubiquitous light-vented bulbul. Still we are looking forward to see if we can see even some of the specialties here like the rare Chinese Egret.
We should not have worried. In the first area we are looking in we already see a Chinese Egret even sitting next to a Little Egret for easy comparison. And also to our surprise by now we are the only people here, there was a whole bus when we arrived but they were just leaving at that point.
The only people on land though, there are two fisherpeople in the marshland and they are actually doing us a solid as they are driving all shorebirds towards us. So we wait while enjoying the beautiful views of the shoreline, we didn’t expect that many beaches even though they don’t seem popular.
We walk a bit along the seawall looking for birds but there aren’t a lot of them except a group of sandpipers flying by over the ocean. So we decide to return back to the wetlands to see what shorebirds the fisherpeople pushed towards the road.
The wetland area is not that large, at least the part that is easily accesible. We just follow the very narrow road we arrived on and search for birds on both sides of the road.
And there are quite a few interesting birds for us, including the Terek Sandpiper which seems to be a common one here. The Red-necked Stint is the most beautiful one though in our opinion. There are also Great Knots and Siberian Sand Plovers and a lot of other shorebirds that we cannot even identify at first glance.
There are also quite a few crabs, maybe this is what the fisherpeople were looking for? We take a few photos of them and just enjoy watching them scurry around.
And then it starts raining again so we retreat to the car enjoying one more look of the Chinese Egret and some shorebirds. It is in fact only a short bout of rain and it won’t bother us again today but we had no way of knowing yet as we make our way to the nearby Caota Sand Dunes Geopark, our next goal.
