Borneo Birds

Common Coot by Ck Leong

Last month while birding in Nepal, the Common Coot Fulica atra was a common bird in ponds and rivers.  At the Phewa Lake in Porkara, congregations in the hundreds were sighted daily.  This morning at a little swamp south of Kota Kinabalu, I was looking at the same bird.  It was only after a while that it occurred to me that the Common Coot was a rare vagrant in Borneo.  What extraordinary luck!  I had stopped there to take some pictures of the Wandering Whistling Duck, a common species here.  There was only 1 Coot that I saw and it was an immature with the frontal shield yet to be fully developed.