What, no crows?

 Like... ummm...

A little scary, yes? Don't worry, it's just this:

Artwork around the corner from my house.

 As far as I can tell, there are no crows in Chiang Mai. There are crows in Thailand, a few species in fact, but evidently they have not taken over the urban environment the way Pacific NW crows have. No giant murders roosting in the downtown buildings and streaming across the sky at dawn and evening... 

I don't have any pictures of Chiang Mai birds (birds are hard to photograph!) but I did a little exploring with the help of the Merlin Bird ID app. One of Merlin's nice features is it can identify birds by sound. Sadly, the database is not very complete: it said it could only sound ID about 30% of the birds in the Chiang Mai area.

Anyway. Boring birds first: rock dove (pigeon), common myna, red jungle fowl. No, seriously. People all over Chaing Mai keep chickens in (and out of) their yards, and a lot of them look just like this: 

(image from Wikipedia)

Very close to wild type.

Spotted dove: this is a SE Asian endemic, very common in the city, and seems to coexist easily with the pigeons. This was the first bird I got by sound ID, the very first morning in the city. Picture from Wikipedia.

 

 Red-whiskered bulbul

 

 Also ID'd this one by sound: it seems to be quite common. I did get a good look at one but this image is also from Wikipedia.

Common kingfisher. I actually ID'd this one by sight. Can't mistake that flash of brilliant blue. Wikipedia image

 

Oriental magpie-robin (this is a very strange name for a bird, in many ways): also ID'd by sound but I did get to see one. Wikipedia image.

Miscellaneous swifts and swallows, all along the river: couldn't get a good enough look to tell what kind, and sound ID was not helpful.

And this:

 

This purports to be an Asian Koel. These birds are apparently everywhere in Chiang Mai: any place, any daylight hour, you're likely to hear them. But they're fiendishly hard to see! Merlin and other sources describe them as preferring the interiors of large trees with thick foliage - you don't see them sitting out on telephone wires, or anything like this.

This led me to declare, about three weeks in, that there is actually No Such Bird. I complained about a recurring auditory hallucination and muttered darkly "Birds aren't real..."

We did finally see one on our last full day in the city. 

Back in Portland, I saw an old friend today whom I'm really going to miss...

This fella lives at 18th and Alberta and has watched over the neighborhood for many years.

Take care, buddy...