On Sunday July 7th my wife and I headed off on a 4-day tour to Cambodia. The point of the trip was to visit Angkor Wat but we were on a tour - although it turned out that we were met by our own guide and driver and had some freedom. The descent into Siem Reap gave us a view of a huge area of lowland covered in rice paddies and hopes of finding water birds on the trip. That afternoon we were taken to some places of low interest to us and we found the town to be very low on bird life. Asian Palm Swifts at the airport, Streak-eared Bulbuls at a killing fields memorial site and Germain's Swiftlets from our hotel room were the only birds of note; in the morning we added Olive-backed Sunbird feeding on the flowers of a pomegranate tree.
On Monday July 8th we had a full day visiting the temples of Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm and Ankor Thom. Again we found the area to not be very birdy. We had our best luck at lunchtime when our restaurant was beside a small lake on which we first spied an Oriental Darter on the water and then saw several Little Cormorants and half a dozen Cotton Pygmy-Geese. The latter had been a bird I'd looked for in Cairns in 2009 and which had been on my Thailand wish-list in 2011. Coming out-of-the-blue this was my best bid of the Cambodia trip. In the afternoon we had a large group pf Red-breasted Parakeets flying around Angkor Thom and a pair of Greater Raquet-tailed Drongos when we stopped to take some photos.
We had an Asian House Gecko in our room, had seen a skink, a frog and Long-tailed Macaques during the day, but we were treated to a spectacle not on the usual tour itinerary - a large roosting colony of Greater Flying-foxes. We also got to see these dispersing at sunset; clearly there were several hundred of these mammals at the park just a few minutes walk from our hotel.
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