Enjoyed a full day around the lake heading out at 5.30am after coffee & cookies - and what a day this proved to be! Heading down just a few minutes to the lake shore, we spent a couple of hours sifting through the multitude of birds seeing all the same species as yesterday.
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| Greylag Goose was very common |
After breakfast we birded the river seeing many more Caspian Terns & Pallas’s Gulls before we spotted a very distant Pallas’s Fish Eagle, so drove around to get a better view, crossing the river twice in order to get decent scope views of what proved to be a pair.
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| Whooper Swan |
After lunch we had a rest, although Keith and I walked down to the marsh where we added Little Tern, Ruddy Turnstone, Curlew Sandpiper and Eurasian Skylark to the list. Many shorebirds were passing through and we saw 25+ Greater Sandplovers, 20+ Broad-billed Sandpipers, numerous Kentish Plovers, 80+ Little Stints, with a huge flock of White-winged Terns, a couple Gull-billed Terns and Black Terns amongst many other species.
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| White-winged Tern |
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| Whiskered Tern |
The late afternoon session saw us driving to a different marshy area of the lake where a Common Kingfisher was a surprise find. And after birding the lake area quite hard our reward was in the form of a superb rare drake Baer’s Pochard in company with 5 Ferruginous Ducks. This species hadn’t previously been seen here and by uploading the observation onto eBird, other birders and tour groups were able to twitch it.
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| The best I could do of Baer's Pochard - phonescoped |
The sheer number of birds in this area is quite phenomenal and makes this one of the top sites for birding in Mongolia, although photographic opportunities are not great as most species are a little distant.
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