The Potawangka Road is one of the easily accessible birding sites close to Labuanbajo. It offers some roadside birding with chances of good (or very good) species like Flores Green Pigeon, Flores Crow and Wallace's Hanging-parrot, so we tried our luck here. We reached the site by bemo (50.000 one way per person). The best way if you ask me. Just tell the bemo driver to drop you at the Potawangka Road (but mostly they don't know this name, so ask for the road leading to Terang) and walk 2 km on the road. There the road enters scrubby forest, that gets better and better the further you walk.
We arrived quite late (8:30) at the road and kept birding just along the road, for no path looked very promising. Not surprisingly we did not encounter any of the goodies mentioned above, but we had a good time anyways with some Lesser Sunda specialties like (Lesser) Wallacaen Drongo (common here), Yellow-spectacled White-eye (common here as well), Flame-breasted Sunbird (very, very common here), Black-fronted and Golden-rumped Flowerpecker, Ararufa Fantail, Russet-capped Tesia and Black-faced Munia. A juvenile Variable Goshawk was much appreciated as well. We birded along this road until 11:30. After this it was way too hot to continue and the bird activity had dropped a lot too.
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| Male Flame-breasted Sunbird (Cinnyris solaris) |
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| (Lesser) Wallacaen Drongo (Dicrurus (densus) bimaensis) |
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| Yellow-spectacled White-eye (Zosterops wallacei) |
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| Juvenile Variable Goshawk (Accipiter hiogaster) |
I do not really recommend this site to anyone, unless you have some spare time or you missed some specializes and want to give them another try. Simay (2009) describes the road as very deteriorated, but it appears that the road has been fixed and there is quite a lot of traffic here now, so unless you find yourself a good looking track leading in better forest, it is not particularly pleasant birding here. On the other hand the new road might enable you to get further up the Potawangka road by bemo or ojek, making better quality forest easier accessible...
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