Spotted Doves and a Crested Serpent Eagle

I've been feeling like our birding this year in Chiang Mai is a little slow. But probably if I look back, it took us a while to figure things out then too. As you can see, we still have a pretty good view for birding. We're next to the rooms we had last year, but this time we face west instead of North. And we don't have this giant fruit tree just off our balcony, so we won't have birds quite as close as last year.
Here's the view from our apartment. Those giant leaves in front are teak. You can see the spotted dove on the top of the tree there. (Insert at lower left is from last year so you can see what that bird is.) The doves like to sit up on the top of those trees. They did that last year too. But this bird, once in a while would jump up and fly almost straight up and then loop back down and land back on his perch. He did that this morning twice while I was watching. The second time, while he was gone, another dove landed there, but when he came back the other flew off so he could resettle.

This picture I got Wednesday on the way to work. I was on the bike and saw this raptor not far off. I stopped, pulled out my camera and got off this shot before it flew off. Dogs nearby were beginning to bark at me stopped in their territory looking at the sky. I've cropped this so you see the bird close up. It gets a bit blurry, but I lucked out getting the wing spread up like that as well as the tail. The only thing I could find in my bird book that came close - because of the white bars in the tail and wing was a crested serpent eagle, but I didn't know if those were enough to identify it. But that night we had dinner with the other AJWS volunteers and G has been here a couple months and connected with the bird watching community. I sent him the picture and he identified it also as a crested serpent eagle (without my telling him what I thought.) He passed the picture on to local bird expert Tony Ball who concurred. So, that's an identified bird I wouldn't otherwise have taken credit for.


These two I caught taking a picture of the orange flowers on this tree. I knew they were there, but didn't realize I'd caught them revealing those white wing patches. I'm guessing they are white vented mynas, but I'm not positive.

I also saw a scarlet backed flower pecker this morning. It's a small bird that flits around, basically black and white, with an outrageous bright scarlet (when you see it you think that's what scarlet is) splash painted down it's back and a bit on its rump. No picture though. My picture from last year isn't too clear and doesn't see it from the back.

We hiked up -from our place - to Doi Suthep today. I'll try to get some pictures up soon. I've got to get rid of stuff from my computer. The memory is so full it won't download all the pictures.