During this morning's run at Singapore Botanic Garden Gallop extension, I heard this uniquely beautiful bird song, I hear it many times before, but have never seen the birds. So I stopped running, and looked to the direction of the sound, I saw 3 or 4 birds in a tree. One of them, a bit smaller, was a yellow vented bulbul, the other three I could not tell. They were hopping from branch to branch. Two of them flew away shortly. It was hard to take picture, so I just aimed my phone camera (3x zoom) at the birds, and took a few pictures.
One bird was bigger, another was a bit smaller. I assume the bigger one was male, and the smaller one was female or a juvenile. The features of the birds I saw, brownish plumage, stripped chest, white throat, dull yellow head, and greenish tail.
Straw Headed Bulbul - male
Straw Headed Bulbul - female or juvenile
They turned out to be Straw-Headed Bulbul - initially IDed with Google Lens, and cross checked with eBird and Birds of Singapore.
Straw-headed bulbul, is a species of songbird in the bulbul family, critically endangered songbird prized for its melodious song, faces heavy trapping in Southeast Asia. While populations in neighboring regions have declined, Singapore remains a vital stronghold. Globally the population is ~ 1700, and Singapore has 1/3 of it. This explains why I heard Straw-Headed Bulbuls songs frequently.
The straw-headed bulbul is the 200th bird species of my recorded sightings. A mystery solved, a milestone reached on this Sunny morning.
Notes
1. Some of the other pleasing bird chirps at the Botanic Garden include - magpie robin, yellow vented bulbul, white crest laughingthrush. In fact it was the first time I saw the white crest laughingthrush at the Garden.
2. Sometimes I mixed up the chirps by white crested laughingthrush and that by Straw-headed Bulbul. That's I mistaken straw-headed bublbul's song as white crested laughingthrush's
