Leaving Tainan we probably don’t follow the most optimized way as our GPS starts to hallucinate and in the end tries to take us on some narrow dirt roads. We survive by stopping and checking the route before recalibrating and then finally arriving at the Pheasant-tailed Jacana Conservation Park. Or Ecological Park or whatever translation we can get Google. While the entrance is well marked there is no parking except on the shoulder of the narrow paved county road and we park there as other cars have done hoping that nobody will hit us during the visit.
The park starts quite unassuming in the direction we are going with two lakes in close succession that are quite empty and not even good jacana habitat. At least there are a few squirrels because the birds are lacking and we start feeling that maybe we made a mistake when doing the detour to the conservation park.
But then as we continue on the path we finally get to habitat that is much suitable to jacanas and other birds we were hoping to see. Even though we do not see anything exciting yet, just a few Little Grebes, this is much more what we expected and we go slowly and stealthily, who knows what is ahead.
What is ahead is a series of panels documenting the life of a jacana chick from conception to being able to fly. It is quite fun even though we would prefer to see a real one first. Maybe the blinds just ahead of us will provide a better opportunity to see them without scaring them?
We stay in the blind for some time scanning the wetlands with both binoculars and camera. And then the cry comes, there they are! The binoculars detected the well camouflaged birds and then the camera is also on them tracking these beautiful birds that we weren’t able to see the previous year in India.
And now it is like the gates of special birds has opened. Suddenly lifers and rare birds are everywhere, we see a Chinese Pond Heron, a lifer for us and then next to it an Oriental Pratincole, also a lifer. At this point we just sit down and enjoy the beautiful birds, it was in the end a great idea to make the detour :).
We continue on, on the trail, and we suddenly understand it is a loop when we hit the visitor center. We have just taken the wrong direction from the entrance. Instead of closing the loop we choose to return via the longer trail we have arrived at the visitor center and enjoy more views of the Pheasant-Tailed Jacanas, who knows when we will be able to see them again?
There are now also more common forest birds like Shamas and lizards out, it seems like everything tried to hide when we came in but now they decided we are not a threat and are enjoying the nice weather.
As we exit we decide to take a look at the surrounding fields and then notice they are full of birds. Most of them are Pacific Golden Plovers but a few are Pratincoles so we stay for a while exploring this section also before returning to the car. The car has survived ok so now it is time to enter the mountains and visit the last stop planned for today before our accomodation, the Eryanping Trail.
