When the Forest Changes with Elevation: A Birding Day in the Da Lat Highlands

A Quiet Morning in the Pines

The first morning didn’t give the group much. Our guide had them up to the birding hotspot of Dalat , breath fogging in air that felt more like a temperate mountain town than tropical Vietnam. The forest around the Highlands is almost entirely pine — tall, resin-scented, with long sightlines between the trunks that make you feel like you should be seeing more than you are. They picked up a roving band of white-faced Eurasian Jays working through the canopy, a few Vietnamese Greenfinch flitting along the treeline, and somewhere above them a Red Crossbill that they only ever heard. Pleasant birding. Not what the client had flown here for.

That’s the part our guide tries to prepare people for before they arrive: the Da Lat Plateau’s most famous birds — Grey-crowned Crocias, Vietnamese Cutia, Collared Laughingthrush — don’t live in the pine. They need the broadleaf, the tangled mixed forest with a real understorey, and pure pine stands like the HQ area simply don’t hold them. You can have a genuinely good three hours of birding here and still walk away without a single plateau endemic. That’s not bad luck. That’s just what pine forest is.

Moving Toward the Lake

So they didn’t linger. By mid-afternoon the group had relocated toward Tuyen Lam Lake, where pine gives way to patches of remnant broadleaf forest along parts of the shoreline — smaller, scrappier forest than what you’d picture from photos of Bidoup’s interior, but exactly the kind of edge habitat where mixed flocks like to work. It’s one of a handful of go-to sites our guides rotate through on the plateau, alongside Mount Lang Bian and Ta Nung Valley — each with its own species mix, covered in more detail in our guide to birding the Da Lat Plateau.

Standing Still in the Rain

The second morning started worse, if anything. Drizzle, low grey cloud sitting right on the ridgeline, the kind of light that flattens everything and makes a bird in the canopy look like a shadow moving against a shadow. The client, a patient birder who’d clearly done this before, asked whether they should push somewhere drier. Our guide said no — not yet. Mixed flocks on the plateau don’t stop moving for weather like this; they just get quieter, and quieter means you stop trying to see and start trying to listen.

They stood at the edge of a stand of old pine bordering the broadleaf, maybe fifty metres back, and waited. Ten minutes of almost nothing. Then a soft, dry piping note, easy to miss if you weren’t already listening for something. Our guide knew it before seeing it — the contact call of Vietnamese Cutia, a bird that behaves more like a nuthatch than a songbird, working head-down along trunks and thick branches rather than through foliage. They stayed still. Within a few minutes a small party of them was clambering along a leaning trunk not thirty feet away, backlit and grey against the drizzle but unmistakable.

That was the bird the client had come for, and the group could easily have missed it by treating the rain as a reason to move on rather than a reason to slow down.

An Unassuming Arrival

The Crocias came almost by accident, twenty minutes later, folded into a larger feeding flock working through the same patch of forest — White-cheeked Laughingthrush doing most of the noise-making, with the Crocias quietly present among them, grey-crowned and easy to overlook if you were only scanning for something dramatic. It’s a bird that was considered lost to science for decades before it turned up again on this plateau, and there’s something fitting about how undramatically it actually shows itself: not a spectacular flash of colour, just a bird calmly doing bird things in company, waiting for you to notice it was there all along.

Our guide didn’t try any playback for either species. Both are already under some pressure here — the Cutia isn’t easy to find even for people who know exactly where to stand, and drawing birds in with recorded calls on a plateau this small, this heavily birded, isn’t a trade worth making for one good photo. Patience cost them nothing except time they had anyway.

What This Means for Your Trip

If there’s one thing our guides want travellers to take from a day like this, it’s that elevation birding on the Da Lat Plateau isn’t really about which trail you walk — it’s about matching the habitat to the bird and being willing to stand still in weather that looks unpromising. A pine morning at the HQ and a drizzly afternoon at Tuyen Lam can produce completely different days from the same trip, and neither one is the “wrong” one. It’s also worth knowing before you book: this isn’t a place for a rushed half-day stop between other activities. The birds that make the plateau worth visiting reward the people willing to give it real time, layer up against the cold mornings, and accept that some of the best moments arrive by ear before they ever arrive by eye.

Planning a highland trip of your own? Our Da Lat Plateau Birding, Herping and Wildlife Tours are built around this kind of pacing, or we can shape a fully tailor-made journey around your target list and dates — send us an inquiry and we’ll walk you through what’s realistic.

Continue exploring: Da Lat Destination · Birding in the Da Lat Plateau · Dalat Plateau Endemic & Highlight Birds · Seasonal Wildlife Guide · More Field Notes

Related tours: South & Central Vietnam Birding (8D) · Vietnam Birding Grand Tour (25D)