Before leaving Taichung we want to visit the park we are seeing from our hotel room, it might have some interesting birds. Unfortunately just as we return from breakfast it starts to rain, quite seriously really. But looking at the weather map it seems it will pass soon so we wait for half hour and it really does stop so on we go.
We follow the lake shore looking for birds but there are none that special yet besides some domestic mallards. We also keep an eye out for a trashcan as we have a soda can with us to throw, while toilets are everywhere trash cans are very rare in Taiwan which leads to some trash on the streets in our opinion.
We start seeing a few, quite wet, birds most of them being quite common like Light-vented Bulbul and Swinhoe’s White Eye.
But then we see one of the two new birds we were hoping to see here, the Brown Shrike. While it is supposed to be common we didn’t see any in Taipei so we were a bit afraid if we will be able to see it at all. However the Gray Treepie the other supposedly common species in the cities continues to elude us even though we look very carefully for it throughout the park.
We see the supposedly much rarer Malayan Night Heron though, I think we were lied to as it is a very common species throughout the Taiwan parks.
There are not a lot of water birds besides the mallards we saw earlier, only one Little Egret is watching over a small side pond. In fact that side pond is really scenic with a few Water Lillies flowering on the surface.
The major surprise in the park is a huge statue of a goat, no idea why it is here but it is large and very nicely done and we enjoy it for a while before returning back to the hotel. And then it is time to leave Taichung driving further south towards Kenting with a couple stops on the way.
