Chongse Village
We returned to Gyirong Town for lunch. Sale Town was closed, but according to the police at the checkpoint, the road would be accessible tomorrow. Mr. Shi suggested we head towards Chongse Village in the afternoon to explore some trails.
On the way to Chongse, we heard a woodpecker calling from the roadside. As we stopped to investigate, Shuangqi noticed a Scaly-bellied Woodpecker! Following his finger, we saw a female woodpecker flying towards the other side of the road. It then perched on a dirt slope before being startled again by the passing vehicles.
We traced its flight to the spruce trees along the roadside. But as soon as we spotted it, the woodpecker flew back to the dirt slope. Every time we tried to approach it, it moved across the road, and this back-and-forth continued several times. Finally, it stopped at a branch of the spruce. This time, it remained still when we moved close. Surprisingly, even when we got close enough to take pictures for a few minutes, the Scaly-bellied Woodpecker only adjusted its posture slightly, climbing a bit higher on the trunk. When we eventually left, it was still in the same spot. It was more tame than expected, and the moveless behavior recalls an insect. That is pretty different from other Picus woodpeckers I had seen by then. We had more Scaly-bellied Woodpeckers later, including both sexes in the forests aat the elevation of about 2,700 m.
We wandered around Chongse Village for quite a while but couldn’t shake a sense of frustration. Among all the brushes, we found only Rufous Sibias and Variegated Laughingthrushes. Yellow-billed Blue-Magpies were also common here. The rosefinches we were looking for never appear. There were also mixed-feeding flocks of Phylloscopus, as we saw in Jifu in the morning, and bush warblers, although we still could not identify them. The rest were the most common birds, like the Gray Bushchats and Yellow-breasted Greenfinches.
We even spotted a pipit. Mr. Shi mentioned that a Tree Pipit had been recorded here. We made an audio recording and confirmed that the pipit we encountered was an Olive-backed Pipit. The Tree Pipit was probably a misidentification since this place is not close to the classical region. As we climbed further up, with Mr. Shi’s help, we followed the songs and located two Spotted Laughingthrushes—the day’s highlight.
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