Danang Bird Club News

  Viewpoint overlooking Hai Van Pass. Photo credit: MS By Maurizio Saroli Between 13 August and 1 September 2025, I conducted a seven-day survey of the avifauna of Son Tra Nature Reserve, Danang. The aim was to document late-summer birdlife across a range of habitats—coastal margins, forest edges, scrubland and urban fringe—while navigating increasingly restricted access routes. The result was a modest but revealing portrait of movement, presence and absence in one of central Vietnam’s most ecologically complex landscapes. Access proved challenging. The northern road, blocked by military presence and alleged landslide risk, was impassable. Monkey Pass, the central route, was inconsistently open—guards at the port-side entrance enforced arbitrary restrictions, denying entry to foreigners before 7:30 AM, but allowing locals to pass through at the same time. The eastern road near the Intercontinental resort was  similarly obstructed, with a makeshift wooden barricade erected by h...

Whiskered Tern at New Embankment Wetlands, Danang By Maurizio Saroli In the world of birding, few tools have revolutionised citizen science like eBird. It’s a platform that democratises data, connects birders globally and builds a living map of avian movement. But for all its strengths, eBird is not infallible—especially when it comes to the moderation of rarities. The system, reliant on regional reviewers, can sometimes fall into the trap of gatekeeping based on static assumptions rather than dynamic observation. Their work is crucial, yet the process can sometimes default to skepticism when a sighting seems to challenge what is 'normal'. This is understandable—most flagged records do turn out to be misidentifications—but the risk is that valid outliers are filtered out simply because they defy expectations. Take the case of the Black-naped Tern Sterna sumatrana . A few weeks ago, I submitted a sighting of this coastal species on a river in central Vietnam. The response from t...

A new bird society has taken root in central Vietnam. The Danang Bird Club (DBC) is more than a gathering of birding enthusiasts; it is a collective dedicated to conservation, education and advocacy for the country’s birdlife. In a region where formal monitoring has been patchy and habitats are under pressure, the club seeks to fill a gap: to record, to inform, and to protect. Conservation as Core Purpose At its heart, DBC is a conservation organisation. Every sighting logged, every photograph archived, and every rare bird alert issued contributes to a growing body of evidence about the state of Vietnam’s avifauna. By collating records across provinces, the club is building a dataset that can highlight declines, track seasonal movements, and identify habitats of importance. This information is not an end in itself; it is intended to support conservation measures, whether by raising awareness among local communities or by informing policy discussions. Rare bird alerts are a particularly...