Collared Falconet

Collared Falconet Microhierax caerulescens is a beautiful and tiny member of the family Falconidae comprising falcons and caracaras. We had incredible scope and binocular views of a party of ten of these birds in one tree in the early morning sunlight in the Dipterocarp woodland in the lower foothills of Doi Inthanon National Park. With an overall length of 16-18 cm., they are somewhere in size between a House Sparrow Passer domesticus and a Common Starling Sturnus vulgaris.

THey have a rather long, broad and square-ended tail and shortish, rounded wings. They usually perch in the open on dead branches of a forest tree, perhaps looking like a shrike and small parties often huddle together on a single branch as can be seen in some of the photos of these birds.

Collared Falconet is found in mainland south-east Asia: Himalayan foothills of north India (northern Uttar Pradesh north-west to Kumaun, and Sikkim, Bengal, mainly northern Assam) and of Nepal and Bhutan, and from Burma (central and east, south to Tenasserim), Thailand (north-west and west, but not peninsular, also in strip east of central plains), Laos (central and south), Cambodia (especially north), and Vietnam. Its natural habitat is temperate forests, often on the edges of broadleaf forest. It favours open deciduous forest, clearings and edges in evergreen forest, abandoned hill cultivation with some trees; often near water. It can be found mostly at 200–800 m altitude and fairly regularly up to 1,700 m.

The subspecies M. c. burmanicus is found in Thailand.

References: Wikipedia; Grimmett, R., Inskipp, C. and Inskipp, T. (1998) Birds of the Indian Subcontinent, page 545, Christopher Helm (Publishers) Ltd.