Migrants & interesting residents - Hanoi

Hi fellow birders!

Back to birding  now and ready to embrace all those lovely migrants which are about to come my way. I visited some patches in the city on 1st and 2rd Sept, and it seems that migrants have indeed started to arrive : some Spangled Drongos, some unidentified Accipiter, good numbers of Arctic and Eastern Crowned Warblers, some Asian Paradise Flycatchers, 4-5 Yellow-rumped and 2 Asian Brown Flycatchers, Black-naped Monarchs, female-type of Eurasian or Oriental Cuckoo, 1 Asian Koel (certainly passage migrant - not resident at Hanoi), Burmese, Brown and Tiger Shrikes, 1 Forest Wagtail, 2 Black-naped Orioles, 2 Ashy Minivets.

Noteworthy resident species there include some Grey-throated Martins along the Red River and 2 Masked Laughingthrushes (seen together).

So this is it - passerine migration is truly underway :)

Sébastien 

Asian Brown Flycatcher Dark-sided Flycatcher

Tiger Shrike (juv.)
The peak autumn passage period of occurrence around Hanoi appeared to be during the last week of August and the first week of September.

 The same little fellow, apparently exhausted

Masked Laughingthrush - one of the 2 individuals regularly seen (together) for at least one year in different wooded-scubby city patches along a 1km stretch of the Red River. Whether these are genuine birds is debatable but I'm pretty sure these are not escapees (Masked Laughingthrush is NOT a cage bird - at least here, at Hanoi).

Grey-throated Martin