After a fun week in Malaysia in early June, I headed to Jakarta the evening of June 9 for the Indonesia part of my work trip. I spent the first couple days of that on a field visit in rural West Java, visiting childcare centers and talking with local government officials and feminist activists in the montane communities of Cianjur. That was fun, and it was also cool to be back on the slopes of Gunung Gede, where I had done my first-ever Java birding almost 5 years ago. Unfortunately there wasn't much time for birding amidst all the interviews and visits, so I wasn't able to add much to my year list except for the common endemics like Cave Swiftlet and Olive-backed Tailorbird. The views, on the other hand, were immaculate.
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| Scenes from farming villages on the slopes of Gunung Gede |
I had just the next weekend in Indonesia before I had to head back to the US. It took me a while to get my act together enough to start thinking about where I might try to get out and go birding. I was exhausted after lots of travel and hard work, but it seemed like a waste to come all the way to Jakarta and then not do any birding besides maybe looking for weird escapees downtown. Between all the weekend trips I did last year I'm coming dangerously close to cleaning up on the gettable Javan endemics (catfishing magpies aside), and most of what's left are the properly tough ones. After some thinking, I decided to go for one that's been a target of mine ever since I missed it on Gunung Gede all those years ago: Javan Woodcock.
Woodcocks are a bit of a strange group of birds- they're closely related to snipes and a bit less so to sandpipers and all other shorebirds, but they're entirely forest-dwelling and will only show up on the shore if they're seriously lost. Two species are widespread and migratory (the familiar American Woodcock and Eurasian Woodcock), while the rest are highly localized and mysterious tropical island endemics in East Asia, from southern Japan to the Philippines, Indonesia and New Guinea. Seeing Bukidnon Woodcock last year was one of many highlights of that particular birding trip, and it made me even more determined to round out the genus.
Of the remaining woodcocks, Amami and Moluccan Woodcocks aren't particularly difficult to see if you get to their remote habitats, as is New Guinea Woodcock if you can make your way up to the very high mountains it calls home. Sulawesi Woodcock on the other hand is an absolute ghost, with four eBird records, no recordings of its call, and no photos of it in the wild aside from a single camera trap picture. Javan Woodcock isn't quite as ghostly as that, but it's close; it's found in mossy montane forests of Sumatra and western Java, and while it's found in some of Java's most well-known birding spots like Gunung Gede there are fewer than 60 eBird records, and so far as I know only about a dozen or so people have ever managed to photograph it. While it has a reputation of being one of Java's most difficult birds, I had heard through the grapevine that some of the Java-based birders had discovered a semi-reliable spot for it. That seemed like a good place to be for that weekend.
After some asking around, I ended up getting in touch with Adunbahrum, one of the local guides in West Java and the go-to guy for birding around Gunung Gede and the surrounding area. My Bahasa Indonesia is still fairly basic but it's finally to the point where I was able to chat about trip logistics. We arranged to have me picked up in Jakarta the evening of Friday June 14, after which we would drive out to the mountains, camp overnight, and look for the woodcock Saturday morning and evening. It was a bit of a crazy plan, particularly after yet another week of long work meetings and overtime, but I'll be damned if I wasn't going to try for that woodcock.
Once I was finally done with work I met with Adun and our guides, and we made the drive out to Gunung Salak, the volcano in western Java that seems to be the best known woodcock spot these days. Anyone who has been to Jakarta will know what I mean when I say that trying to get out of town on a Friday evening is a terrible idea. The drive from downtown Jakarta to Cidahu would be only a couple hours without traffic, but instead we spent most of that evening caught in macet (the catchy and very regularly used Indonesian term for gridlock). We left at 6:30 in the evening, and we didn't get to the trailhead until almost midnight.
From the trailhead we still had to hike a couple of hours to get to the campsite, but by then I was fully committed, and a night hike was way more fun than sitting in traffic. Even better, I had my thermal scope with me and both Adun and I were more than happy to look for mammals and other things during our night hike. Our first good sighting was almost as soon as we started out, when a Javan Leopard Cat walked across the trail in front of us! It was a foggy night and I had a number of near misses, with things appearing on my thermal but invisible in the fog once I turned on my flashlight. Leopard cat aside, I also found a little group of huddled-up Sooty-headed Bulbuls, and a few adorable bats (I think Brown Tube-nosed Bats resting in a rolled up banana leaf, while Adun pointed out a little Hasselt's Toad on the path. Near the campsite there was some sort of rat hanging out by a tree stump, though I haven't IDed it yet. A Javan Frogmouth called distantly but we never saw it.
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| Brown Tube-nosed Bat (Murina suilla), I think |
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| Some sort of ground-dwelling rat- hopefully an interesting native species rather than one of the invasive ones |
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| Hasselt's Toad- not sure who Hasselt was but he's well-represented in Javan nighttime fauna |
It wasn't until almost 1AM that we got to the campsite, and the guides quickly set up the tents while I set up my moth light, as Adun had been nice enough to bring a white sheet for me. I settled in for a nice, long, 3 hours of sleep before waking up once again at 4 in the morning. The moth light turned out to be a success, with a few dozen moths showing up including some extremely colorful and strange-looking ones. Unfortunately not too many people do mothing in Java (or if they do they don't post it much to iNaturalist), so IDing what I had was a challenge as it so often is in Indonesia and the Philippines.
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| Cleora sabulata, I think |
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| Sacada sp. |
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| Locharna limbata |
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| Barsine orientalis, I think |
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| Tridrepana flava |
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| Some kind of little leafhopper |
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| Timandra punctinervis, I think |
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| Some kind of huge cicada |
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| Some kind of prominent moth (Notodontidae sp., I think) |
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| Allodonta sp., I think |
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| Spilosoma sp. |
Just before 5 AM the sky began to lighten, which was the sign that woodcock o'clock was fast approaching. Adun led us up an obscure side trail to the clearing that he had discovered where the woodcock often displayed. We waited for a solid half hour there with no sign of the woodcock, and soon it started to rain. I began to worry that I might get woodcock-blocked, especially once the sky started turning pink.
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| The woodcock clearing |
Suddenly, around 5:30 AM I spotted a winged shadow passing over us- Javan Woodcock! We started frantically looking for it, and it made a couple of passes over us but never landed. Just as I started to think I would have to satisfy myself with subpar views, we turned around and saw that it was perched on a branch just above our heads! I was able to get a few record shots before it disappeared once more, returning to its crepuscular habits.
After that, there was much rejoicing- Adun informed me that he could count on one hand the number of clients who had managed to see the woodcock at that spot. I had thought that it was fairly reliable, but apparently even there it was off and on- fitting well with its reputation as one of the most elusive birds in Java.
With the woodcock on lock the rest of the day was sort of a bonus. I had birded enough at high elevation in Java that there weren't all that many target birds for me on Gunung Salak, which lacked the good-quality mountain forest on Gunung Gede or Gunung Ciremai, and wasn't low enough to have the lowland endemic birds I hadn't seen yet like White-chested Babbler or the mysterious Zebra Woodpecker. Still, we were already up there on the mountain so it would have been silly not to have a nice morning of birding.
We were totally socked in with fog as the sun rose, which sort of made it hard to motivate ourselves to start hiking when we wouldn't really be able to see anything. Horsfield's Babblers and Pygmy Cupwings were singing with the sunrise but never really came into view, and even the birds I could see were so obscured that looking at them wasn't terribly satisfying. Back at the campsite we had a leisurely breakfast, and to my surprise I spotted a Banded Broadbill moving through in the fog, which I was able to get some record shots of. Visibility was still awful but a photo lifer is a photo lifer.
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| Banded Broadbill- the Javan birds will likely be split from the ones in Sumatra, Borneo, and mainland Southeast Asia |
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| Coelogyne miniata, an endangered endemic orchid |
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| The campsite at sunrise |
Finally the fog lifted a bit, and we started hiking along Gunung Salak. The trail took us through some degraded mid-montane forest, with thick undergrowth and trees that were low enough that they had probably been logged at some point in the past, but still high enough that visibility was difficult. The birding was surprisingly underwhelming: we had some flyovers from Black-banded Barbets, lots of Crescent-chested Babblers and White-bibbed Babblers moved through the undergrowth, refusing to be photographed, and there were some heard-only birds like Banded Kingfisher. We tried for Orange-breasted Trogon, one of the few possible lifers for me in that area, but there were none heard or seen. I'd forgotten just how silent and depressing Java's forests can be- the mark of the devastating caged bird trade as well as general environmental degradation and climate change pushing mountain birds further uphill.
As the morning went on the day got warmer, and the hikers on the path increased. It's genuinely encouraging to see how many Indonesians are getting into hiking, since appreciating natural areas and scenery is the first step toward advocating for policies that preserve them. I was also happy to see a slightly better gender balance than on Ciremai where hikers were almost entirely male- hopefully a sign of positive changes although it may have also just been a reflection of being closer to Jakarta. One thing I miss from the Philippines is hiking and birding being fairly gender-neutral hobbies, rather than absurdly male-centric like they are in other spots, including the US and Europe.
Surprisingly enough the birding improved as the day went on. In a little clearing we saw a Black-thighed Falconet, and further up there was a little group of adorable Sunda Warblers, probably my favorite Phylloscopus. The insect life was also top notch, with a few more good butterfly and moth lifers for me. We even saw the tracks of a huge feline in the trail that Adun said were from a Javan Leopard, the scarce endemic subspecies of Leopard.
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| Sunda Warbler |
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| Black-thighed Falconet |
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| Black-striped Squirrel |
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| Common Three-ring (Ypthima pandocus) |
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| Bright Red Velvet Bob (Koruthaialos sindu) |
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| Silky Owl (Taenaris horsfieldii) |
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| Restricted Demon (Notocrypta curvifasciata) on an impatiens |
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| Mycalesis sudra |
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| Callidula jucunda |
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| Cylindera versicolor, a gorgeous tiger beetle |
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| Medinilla speciosa |
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| Javan Leopard tracks- even though we think of Leopards as being animals of the Serengeti, they're actually found naturally from South Africa north to Morocco and east to Java and southern Siberia. |
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| Scenes along the trail |
After about 2 kilometers of hiking, we arrived at the terminus of the trail- Kawah Ratu ("Queen Crater"), a huge, smoking fumarole on the flanks of Mount Salak. It was a bit surreal seeing the forest open up into a scarred valley of pumice and sulfur, and the persistent fog just made it seem even more otherworldly. Most of the hikers made their way down into the valley, but I didn't particularly feel like clambering over unstable rocks and inhaling sulfurous gases so I was okay turning around there.
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| The fumaroles at Kawah Ratu |
As we started back I saw a huge raptor flying overhead, which turned out to be a
Javan Hawk-Eagle! It perched in a distant tree for a bit, and it was only when I looked at my pictures that I realized that it had caught some kind of squirrel or other tree-dwelling mammal. Further down the trail we came across a little flock of
Pygmy Bushtits that I was finally able to photograph, and later we got great looks at a male
White-flanked Sunbird and a few skulking
Javan Tesias and
Mountain Tailorbirds.
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| Javan Hawk-Eagle with some sort of mammal for lunch |
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| Pygmy Bushtit- oddly similar to the related American Bushtit, despite being separated by an entire ocean and completely different habitats |
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| White-flanked Sunbird |
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| Mountain Tailorbird |
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| Sundanese Gossamerwing (Euphaea variegata) |
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| Argiope reinwardti |
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| This appears to be Annandalea haematoptera, a type of Gaudy Grasshopper- and as far as I can tell the only picture ever taken in the wild! |
The original plan had been to stay the entire day up Gunung Salak for another try at the woodcock in the evening. However, I'd already seen the woodcock and was feeling more like making it back to Jakarta in time to get some more work done on Sunday. Instead we had a leisurely lunch at the campsite and then headed back down to the car. A Blood-breasted Flowerpecker was hanging out in some mistletoe in the campsite, and I was able to get my first-ever photos of yet another species that had somehow eluded my camera before then. To my surprise, an Orange-breasted Trogon flew across the campsite, only my second proper lifer of the trip.
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| Blood-breasted Flowerpecker |
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| Javan Flying Dragon (Draco volans) |
The walk back down to the car was hot and quiet once again, although we did have a quick look at a Sunda Forktail. Adun confirmed what I'd already suspected: bird populations in Java are almost universally in a grim state, and he'd seen a precipitous crash in numbers and diversity even over the past 20 years that he'd been birding and doing fieldwork. His takeaway was sobering: "It's good you're seeing all the birds in Java now. In another 20 years they'll mostly all be gone."
On the drive down the mountain I saw another Javan Hawk-Eagle perched next to the road, but annoyingly enough it flew off before I could get a picture. The drive back to Jakarta was once again spent sitting in an interminable macet, and was only slightly faster than the drive there. We'd left by the early afternoon, but we didn't get to my hotel until evening. Nonetheless it had been an incredibly successful 24 hours of birding: spectacular views of one of the most difficult-to-see Javan endemics, plus a few other nice photo lifers and a chance to catch up with some birds I hadn't seen in months or years. Java is a... complicated place birding-wise, but I suspect I'll always be coming back to try and see as much as I can while it's still around. As always, I'm crossing my fingers that birding will have its breakthrough moment in the country, and that the seemingly inexorable tide of biodiversity loss can be reversed.
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