To be honest, I had never heard of Dehing Patkai before I booked, but with school holidays and the rest of the family heading out to Mumbai, I figured I could do a quick solo trip. I checked with the few wildlife trip organizers I knew and this one came up. I was happy to jump on to this. I was expecting a D850 I had purchased recently to arrive but it hadn't reached so I had to stick to my D7000. Since it was last minute planning, I missed the lens cover as well and all this came back to bite me pretty hard.
As I reached Guwahati and checked in the previous day to finish some work from home, my first sight was the hotel staff chasing away a massive spider out of the bathroom. Despite the intermittent rains, the weather was not harsh. As we started the drive out to Dehing Patkai on the first morning, the rains picked up. We stopped for breakfast and managed to see a watercock in the nearby fields. After checking into the hotel, we started birding in the Soraipung range. Consistent rains made things quite hard on the camera despite a lens cover lent to me by the organizer. Bad light and the nature of the terrain left us with fewer pictures than on a trip like this. However, we did see quite a few species over the 3 days and even came up on a herd of elephants as well during one of the sessions.
The area of course was phenomenal for the bird variety. Rains made photography difficult and with a refinery very close by occasional human disturbances were also expected but despite that there were many lifers for me in the trip. I finally saw a black baza, an oriental dwarf kingfisher and the chestnut winged cuckoo all that I have been trying to see in southern India but have not succeeded. The Austen Brown hornbill required a bit of a climb in pouring rain so I gave that a skip to not take any risks with a bunch of other trips coming up. Towards the end of the trip, we got to know an orange alert had been declared in Assam and as a response to that my camera died out. The hooded pitta had been teasing me with glimpses throughout the sessions and now the camera was almost dead it happily perched in front of me. I did manage to salvage some shots of it but there were plenty of other happier sightings. We wrapped up the last day with a few hoolock gibbons in the morning and a quick 2 hour session at Maguri Beel grasslands for a few babblers.
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