Blue-winged Pitta in the city

Hot on the heals of last weeks House Sparrow, Phnom Penh out did itself this morning with a selection of unexpected colourful birds. Less than a minute after leaving my house on street 19 (at 05:45) a Blue-winged Pitta flew over the road! Unfortunately it pitched down behind the high palace walls, never to be seen again.

I continued to Wat Phnom where a flock of 11 Blossom-headed Parakeets were feeding high in a tree whilst a Little Green Bee-eater hawked insects from its perch 30 meters above the ground. Neither are birds I expected to see in the city center. To prove that it wasn't just a day for brightly coloured birds, four Brown Shrikes were also hanging about.

On my way back home I found another Little Green Bee-eater perched in a tree on street 240.

Simon

22nd September 2012

Dear All, on Jun 15, 2012, during a search for Gaur tracks in Western Siem Pang, Stung Treng Province in NE Cambodia, we (Mem Mai and Thomas Kuenzel) found a nest with 5 eggs which we tentatively identified as being from Blue-winged Pitta (Pitta moluccensis). We found the nest well camouflaged on the ground only because a bird suddenly left the ground a few meter in front of us. The relatively dark forest habitat were we flashed the bird did not allow for identification – from what we saw from the bird flying away low over the forest floor we were even not sure if it was a Pitta or not.

But we heard BWPitta calling in that part of the forest – DDF with bamboo parts along small streams.

After a short search we got aware about a relatively large dome-shaped grass formation  – and this was indeed a nest with difficult to see side entrance and with 5 eggs. Never before we saw Pitta eggs and were surprised about their relatively large size, but found later in Robson 2008 given sizes of 24-28.9 and 20-22.9 mm, and that the species is „fairly common to common breeding visitor“ in Cambodia beside nearly all over SE Asia.

According to Frédéric Goes (Birds of Cambodia - an annotated checklist) this would be  the first documented BWPitta nest in Cambodia, provided egg ID is confirmed.

We would like to ask if anybody is experienced enough with eggs to identify them. Photo will be sent to anybody who is interested in and who gives us an email address – for some technical reasons I am not able to add the photo here.

Thanks, and best regards, Thomas (thomaskuenzel2@yahoo.de) and Mai, both BirdLife Cambodia Programme, WSP PPF.