ERIC DIDN’T THINK HIS DAY OUT BIRDING COULD GET ANY BETTER UNTIL AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER.
The morning of 27 December 2014 was grey and overcast. I stood looking out over the skyline of Hong Kong, a far cry from the tranquil rolling hills of County Wicklow, Ireland, where I live. I was excited about the prospect of a day’s birding with naturalist Martin Williams, a Brit who has been working and guiding in this part of the world for several decades.
By 7am, we were on our way to our main destination for the day, Mai Po nature reserve, a huge wetland area, with hundreds of pools criss-crossed by countless paths and vast mudflats. It’s a birders’ paradise.
Passing through the huge wire fence that separates Hong Kong from China, we followed a boardwalk through the mangrove swamps to one of several hides. Thousands of waders fed in front of us, along with a roosting flock of over 200 Saunders’s gulls, a species I had longed to see for years.
Time passed quickly. Highlights were a feeding flock of black-faced spoonbills and an imperial eagle towards the end of the day, but soon it was time to leave before the reserve closed.
Along the border fence, we were stopped in our tracks by an enormous 4m-long Burmese python. Seeing such a huge, muscular snake was a real treat. It disappeared into the dense thicket, its progress followed by a cacophony of mobbing birds.
As we neared the visitor centre, we came across another flock of very agitated birds. They seemed to be mobbing something in the ditch below them, and believing it to be a snake again, we approached quietly and looked down into the ditch. But instead of another scaly serpent, a pair of amber eyes stared back up at us.
It was a small, very beautifully marked feline. With our hearts pounding we took in the pattern of broad black spots on the back and a long, thick, spotted tail, black stripes on the neck merging into white stripes on the cheeks and crown. This was no farmhouse moggy, but a leopard cat.
It was balancing on a narrow plank across a drainage channel and seemed unsure as to whether to go forward or turn around. Eventually it gingerly retraced its steps back to the bank, and with a final nonchalant glance back at us, melted into the thick undergrowth.
We looked at each other in silence and made it back to the centre just before it closed. When we told the warden about our sighting he clearly doubted our story or perhaps our felid identification skills. Martin had, thankfully, managed to capture convincing photographic evidence.
The whole encounter had lasted just 20 seconds, but the memory will last a lifetime. And for my wife Hazel – a reluctant birder, at the best of times – it was more than ample recompense for enduring a day of grey waders and winter-plumaged gulls.
“WE LOOKED DOWN INTO THE DITCH. BUT INSTEAD OF ANOTHER SCALY SERPENT, A PAIR OF AMBER EYES STARED BACK UP AT US.”