Birding in Somaliland: A Somalia Trip Report

Birdwatchers come in all shapes and sizes, from grannies who venture no further than the bay window view of their garden feeder to list-crazed maniacs who will risk bullets, kidnappings and divorce in their quest for new species.

In February, in northern Vietnam, I met one of the latter, a florid brit named Hugh Buck. He is third on the list of world listers, having seen upwards of 8500 species of birds out of a recognized world total of between 10 and 11,000. A staggering percentage, but he seemed intent on seeing the rest.

One evening in Cuc Phuong National Park, as the mosquitos buzzed in our ears, we shared a revolting bottle of Vietnamese plum wine. Hugh explained that he was leading a tour showcasing Vietnam's rarest species, largely in order to defray the ever-mounting “cost-per-bird” of his own list. Cost-per-bird is an unofficial mental calculation of how much the desperate birder is spending per new species added. If one flies to South-east Asia for the first time and ticks off hundreds of “lifers,” the CPB is comparatively low, but Buck was looking for just a small handful of birds he hadn't already seen in Vietnam, or elsewhere: Blue-naped pitta, chestnut-eared laughingthrush, a night-heron so rare and obscure that I can't remember its name.

“Our last trip,” he announced, “was to Somaliland.”

I had never heard of such a country, but the name alone was redolent of adventure. Technically speaking, it is part of Somalia, that ultimate failed state, a region of maximum concern to the world's anti-terror analysts, a lawless desert wasteland of trigger-happy warlords and Indian Ocean pirates. Hardly anyone's idea of a vacation paradise.

But the horn of Africa is home to many endemics. Buck told me that a couple of years earlier he had led one of the first tours to the region in years, adding numerous local and isolated species to his list in the process. What are a few landmines and the risk of years stuck in a pirate's holding cell compared with the chance to see the Warsangli linnet?

I'm willing to go to a lot of places, but I had never considered a birding excursion in Somalia. “It sounds pretty crazy, to me,” I said.

A few weeks later, back in New York, I got a call for a sound recording job. “We'll be filming in Somaliland, are you okay with that? Don't worry, though, we're getting kidnap insurance.”

I emailed Hugh: “By a strange coincidence....”

Never mind that the breakaway, independent north has not been recognized by a single other government: the people who live there will give you dirty looks if you suggest that they are residents of Somalia. They have their own currency, the Somaliland shilling, unexchangeable, except perhaps in neighboring Djibouti; their own license plates, with which you are unable to cross any borders; their own leaders and security apparatus. In Hargeisa, the self-proclaimed capital, there are Somalilander traffic police who stop you and ask you who you are and where you are going, all without attempting to extort any money.

There is exactly one nature-tour operator in Somaliland, and Hugh was glad to put me in touch with him. From a business point of view, the good news is that Abdi Jama has a monopoly. The bad news for him is his country's gigantic image problem, but I am glad to be able to report that you will not be defying death by going on safari in Somaliland. Abdi Jama is a splendid fellow and a first-rate outfitter, and has a personal story so fascinating that while he is telling it you may even let a few birds slide unidentified past the windows of his Toyota Landcruiser ragtop.

Hargeisa is usually reached by air from Nairobi, Addis or Djibouti. Our happy film crew flew up from Nairobi on Jetlink. Once lodged at the Ambassador Hotel, on a slope above the city quite near the airport, I called Abdi. He promptly drove over in his splendid vehicle and had dinner with me at the Ambassador, and asked whether his car would be sufficient, or if I would prefer that he rent something with air-conditioning. I announced that I wouldn't dream of going in anything other than his olive bomber, with its tattered canvas roof. “It drips when it rains,” Abdi warned. Given Somalia's terrible drought, and the horrifying famine currently being suffered in the south, rain seemed sadly unlikely. We planned a very short safari, with departure scheduled for the moment the film shoot was complete.

Don't be in a hurry to leave Hargeisa. A few days before the completion of filming the Jetlink return flight to Nairobi was cancelled without explanation, and the production went into a full-on scramble to change a dozen Hargeisa-Nairobi-Dubai-NY tickets. For a few minutes, I gloated. I was booked on the next flight out, allowing for a three day trip with Abdi. But soon we learned that in the few days since our arrival in Hargeisa Jetlink had entirely eliminated all service from Nairobi. Suddenly a very short safari was to be even shorter. The only flight available was on East African Airways, a day earlier than I had planned to leave. 

The result was that the three days I had planned to spend with Abdi were divided up into a day off from work spent birding in and around Hargeisa, and a two-day, two-night trip into the bush, after we had completed filming. I've also included here a very few species which I saw only to the south of Hargeisa, around Baligubadle, on the Ethiopian border, and on a half-day trip to the excellent rock art site at Las Gaal (see map, below). These were seen in some brief moments (lunch break, primarily) snatched away from the busy filming schedule. 

In two days, on dirt roads, it is impossible to reach many of the habitats which hold some of Somalia's most exciting species, but Abdi showed me some fabulous birds, and you will search for a very long time anywhere in the world before you will find anyone as knowledgeable, interesting, outspoken and informed as Mr. Jama with whom to share your time.

A typical village main street in rural Somaliland. Women are wrapped and often veiled in the Islamic way; the country essentially follows Shariah law. In contrast to countries I've visited in the Gulf, however, women here wear all sorts of bright and spectacular color combinations. Goats are a staple of the diet and the economy. Birds are eaten not at all, which accounts for the comparative abundance of large game species like bustards, of which we quite easily saw three species.

Deforestation is not just a problem in moist tropical jungles like the Brazilian rainforest. Here bags of charcoal for sale sit along the paved main road east of Hargeisa. My preconceptions of Somaliland included vast tracks of dry desert and thorn scrub, but the country was once thick with a vast acacia forest, the largest on the continent. These woodlands have been savaged by charcoal cutters and clearance for pasture. Everywhere we went Abdi despaired that just in the few months since his last travels that way the forests had been visibly denuded. Evidence of fresh cutting of trees and the black scars of the charcoal pits was everywhere.

The recreational use of khat seems to be almost universal among adult Somalilander men, and khat stands like the one above, often showing an asparagus-like bundle of leaves floating in a pastoral landscape, line the main streets of Hargeisa. The drug is said to have mild amphetamine-like effects. It is common to see men standing on street-corners fondling bundles of leaves and discussing the merits of various shipments and strains, as if the stuff were fine french wine, or coffee beans. It diverts huge percentages of the average household daily income. Alcohol is illegal in Somaliland, whereas khat is not, underlining the fact that just about every culture needs to have access to its daily intoxicant. Abdi has no time for it. He bemoans its negative influence on productivity and the Somaliland family, so I abandoned my plans to buy some and chew it while we were on Safari. I did have some once, back in 1992, with some Yemenis who ran my corner bodega on the lower east side, but I don't remember noting much of an effect other than my gums turning green.

The giant leopard tortoise is abundant across the dry, rocky landscape.

The truly awful offal dump outside Hargeisa, a Dante's inferno of dumped, stinking blood, cartilage and bone, worth a visit if you want to see hundreds of hooded vultures, marabou storks, and jackals. As I held my nose and coughed back the acrid ammoniac fumes, Abdi tried to claim that a visit to this place has wonderful immune-system enhancing homeopathic effects on the human organism. I was highly skeptical. What is certain is that this is the only place we saw Rüppell's griffon vulture, now exceedingly rare across much of Africa because of furadan poisoning.

Abdi Jama. Reach him at abdi [DOT] jama [AT] ymail [DOT] com for all of your Somaliland adventure travel needs.

More like a small automobile than a bird, the kori bustard, although by no means a Somali endemic, was a trip highlight. It is said to be the heaviest flying bird. We saw several, stalking the plains, including an enraged male, its feathers bristling as it marched away from an unsuccessful confrontation with a rival.

Nothing wrong with the car, we're just cooling the engine at a lunch stop. Abdi's team includes a young cousin who took care of setting up tents and cooking meals while Abdi and I were birding, and an armed security guard. Having a guy with a loaded AK-47 stretched out on the luggage behind me as we bounced along the rutted desert roads took some getting used to, but the Somaliland government requires all foreigners to have such an escort along when traveling east of Hargeisa. Ultimately I felt this poor guy had the most boring job imaginable, as everywhere the people were friendly and curious; there wasn't a moment on the trip when I felt remotely threatened.

A beautiful, archetypal acacia vista. Unfortunately, there should be a lot more acacias.

The tiny, beautiful village mosque on the Tuuyo plains.

The Tuuyo plains hold some of the best endemics within close reach of Hargeisa. As Abdi put it during our planning meeting: "larks, larks and larks...." Lesser hoopoe lark is common here, as is Somali lark and Desert cisticola. 

Our camp near the Tuuyo plains. Heuglin's courser and Buff-crested bustard called incessantly at dusk, providing the soundtrack for the evening meal. Abdi likes to sleep on a platform on top of the truck, which was his home in Botswana and Tanzania for six years.

 

 

A juvenile darter in a tree on the edge of Baligubadle village. There is no open water or darter habitat for perhaps two hundred miles, so this bird is probably a confused victim of its own post-breeding dispersal urge, when young leave the nest to go out and find their own way in the world. I've included this here because Abdi suspects this is a new record for Somaliland. 

Somalia was engulfed in civil war for much of the 1980s, with the result that there are still many minefields, junked tanks and artillery scattered across the landscape. Painted rocks indicate the possible presence of mines. It makes for worrisome birding, although at every turn herds of camel and goats are grazing the parched earth, and I think you would have to have very bad luck to detonate anything. Nonetheless, it would be the last bit of bad luck you would ever have. If Abdi suggests you shouldn't walk there, take his advice.

Khat is not permitted in the departure lounge of the airport, just so you know.

Here's a snapshot from Google Earth of my Somaliland travels with and without Abdi. The jaunt south from Hargeisa ending in the triangle on the Ethiopian border was for our film shoot in Baligubadle. The figure-8 loop to the east plots the two-day safari with Abdi. Click on the map to see a larger version. If you want more specific GPS data leave a comment with your contact details.

SPECIES LIST   Most birding was on April 30th, May 3 and 4, 2011
darter (Baligubadle only, as noted above)
hamerkop (One only, a couple hours east of Hargeisa on our first day out)
abdim’s stork (A dozen or so at the Hargeisa offal dump)
marabou stork (Hundreds at the Hargeisa offal dump, often overhead in Hargeisa)
sacred ibis (Offal dump)
egyptian goose
hooded vulture (Hundreds at the Hargeisa offal dump, often overhead in Hargeisa)
rüppell’s griffon (One at the Hargeisa offal dump)
eastern chanting goshawk (the common raptor of rural Somaliland)
gabar goshawk (One, Baligubadle)
crested francolin (Numerous near Hargeisa)
yellow necked spurfowl / yellow necked francolin (Near the main wadi in Hargeisa)
kori bustard (Noted on the map, also seen at Quoryaale Plains)
little brown bustard (widespread east of Hargeisa)
buff crested bustard (perhaps the commonest bustard, widespread)
spotted thick knee (on day off spent near Hargeisa)
cream colored courser (or "Somali courser")
double banded courser
three banded courser / heuglin’s courser (one very vocal pair at our Tuuyo plains camp)
crowned lapwing / crowned plover
common ringed plover (one, obviously migrating, on stony desert, was a Somaliland first for Abdi)
chestnut bellied sandgrouse (common, i.e. at Tuuyo plains)
speckled pigeon (common around Hargeisa)
african mourning dove
ring necked dove / cape turtle dove
laughing dove
emerald spotted wood dove / green spotted dove
namaqua dove
red bellied parrot / orange bellied parrot
white bellied go away bird
little owl (one only, at Wadi Debis, second night's camp)
little swift / house swift
blue naped mousebird
grey headed kingfisher / gray hooded kingfisher (several singles, in heavier wooded wadi situations)
little bee eater (commonest bee eater)
somali bee eater (singles and pairs frequently encountered in open country)
white throated bee eater
madagascar bee eater
european roller (one only)
eurasian hoopoe
abyssinian scimitarbill
red billed hornbill
eastern yellow billed hornbill (common around Baligubadle)
red and yellow barbet
black throated barbet (Las Gaal cave paintings site)
nubian woodpecker
cardinal woodpecker
singing bushlark
somali long billed lark / somali lark (Tuuyo plains only)
gillet’s lark
lesser hoopoe lark (Tuuyo plains only)
chestnut headed sparrow lark / chestnut crowned sparrow lark (Tuuyo and Quoryaale plains)
desert lark
blanford’s lark (Quoryaale plains)
somali short toed lark
short tailed lark (one only, Quoryaale plains)
thekla lark (widespread, presumed not to be crested larks)
barn swallow
ethiopian swallow (widespread breeding, i.e. in Hargeisa buildings)
red throated pipit
yellow wagtail / blue headed wagtail
common bulbul
rufous tailed rock thrush / common rock thrush
blue rock thrush
desert cisticola (Tuuyo plains only)
red fronted warbler
gray wren warbler
great reed warbler (one migrant on the grounds of the Ambassador hotel)
eastern olivaceous warbler
yellow bellied eremomela
willow warbler (migrant, abundant at this time)
asian desert warbler (rather common in acacia scrub)
banded warbler / banded  parisoma
african gray flycatcher (numerous) 
spotted flycatcher
white throated robin (widespread migrant at this time)
rufous tailed scrub robin / rufous bush robin
common redstart
whinchat
somali wheatear (found near Hargeisa, but rather more work than expected, likes rocky slopes)
pied wheatear
blackstart (rather scarce. one at Las Gaal)
gray headed batis
scaly chatterer (good stop on first day out with Abdi)
somali tit (wadi debis campsite only)
mouse colored penduline tit (mixed flock in acacia scrub near Tuuyo plains camp)
kenya violet backed sunbird / eastern violet backed sunbird (Las Gaal)
mariqua sunbird / marico sunbird
shining sunbird
variable sunbird / yellow bellied sunbird
eurasian golden oriole
red backed shrike
rufous tailed shrike / isabelline shrike
lesser grey shrike / gray
somali fiscal (common around Baligubadle and most of drive with Abdi)
white rumped shrike / northern white crowned shrike (a few, first morning in patch of acacia forest)
brubru
slate colored boubou (one, first morning in patch of acacia forest)
rosy patched bush shrike (fairly common, dryer desert situations)
fork tailed drongo
pied crow
somali crow / dwarf raven
wattled starling
greater blue eared glossy starling
golden breasted starling / golden bellied starling (a few singles from the car, driving)
superb starling
white crowned starling (around rural human habitation, i.e. village on Tuuyo plains)
magpie starling (one in Baligubadle, a few near Las Gaal site)
red billed oxpecker (only one group of a few, on livestock)
swainson’s sparrow (widespread)
yellow spotted petronia
red billed buffalo weaver
white headed buffalo weaver
lesser masked weaver
rüppell’s weaver (colonial breeder at the Ambassador hotel)
chestnut weaver (huge roost at Ambassador hotel grounds, each evening)
red billed quelea
black cheeked waxbill / black faced waxbill (a few at the Las Gaal cave-paintings site)
blue capped cordonbleu / blue headed cordonbleu (photographed on the outskirts of Hargeisa. Abdi has seen this bird before, near Baligubadle, so there is obviously a relict population, or a range extension, as range maps show this bird's nearest range in southern Somalia)
purple grenadier (a single female in remnant acacia forest)
green winged pytilia / melba finch
red billed firefinch
cut throat / cut throat finch (in dry wadi near Hargeisa)
eastern paradise whydah
straw tailed whydah
white bellied canary
somali bunting / somali golden breasted bunting

Simba!

My most recent flurry of travels included flying from Somalia to Calcutta with a layover in Kenya, permitting me to revisit a favorite haunt.

The vast, sprawling city of Nairobi, and both of its airports, butt right up against a premier game reserve, Nairobi National Park, the splendid legacy of a time when the city was little more than a tiny high plains retreat for British colonials. Imagine if New York's Central Park was the size of Queens, and roamed by herds of wild game. The park holds all of the so-called "Big Five," the animals on the "must see" most-wanted list: elephant, buffalo, rhinoceros, lion and leopard.

As the city expands, the pressure on this real estate must be significant, but so far the park survives, ringed by dozens of miles of electrified fence, minimizing contact between urban human and dangerous wild game. The insensate Buffalo is the most dangerous; it will rear and charge and trample you under its mighty hooves before it has even evaluated what sort of threat you might pose. The hippo, separated from its offspring, or rushing back to the safety of the water, will flatten you like a diesel road roller. In East Africa, the elephant, a genial creature by nature, has had too many unpleasant experiences with humans. It does not trust you, and the rogue, lone male will sometimes attack even your vehicle. For all these reasons and more, it is prohibited to descend from the car in many African game reserves.

But this regulation makes birdwatching difficult. One wants, always, to follow that elusive call into the bush, to peer deep into shrubs, to get out of the car and stroll in the forest. I cautiously ignore regulations against walking in Africa. After all, millions of carless Africans have been living in relative harmony with all these animals for years. If someone is occasionally munched, or flattened, that is the way of things. I accept that. In Rwanda's Akagera National Park I have camped, alone, where I liked, hiked into the acacia forests, startled giant crocodiles at the edges of the swamp, and even skirted herds of elephant on foot. Always keeping a healthy distance dictated by respect, but not paranoia.

On my last trip to Nairobi National Park I had therefore fearlessly gotten out of my hired taxi whenever I spotted a bird, which is to say, almost constantly. But on this visit, within minutes of pulling through the front gates, I was embarrassed  to be busted by a park ranger, who pulled up short in his green Toyota Landcruiser when he saw me standing in the road, some fifty yards from my van and driver. "What you are doing is very dangerous. And it is not permitted," he said, in crisp, officious, post-colonial English. "Yes, sir," I said.

"Return to your vehicle at once." After I complied, the ranger drove up and held a brief conference in Swahili with my driver, the excellent George Olukuye. Then he sped off, and George and I wrestled open the safari pop-top of the van. "He said that if he sees you out of the car again, you will be fined," George told me. I fumed. Birding out of a van, even a convertible one, was not what I had had in mind.

Tourists in game reserves demonstrate a herd mentality, as if eager to prove they are not so very different from the animals they are watching. Pause for a few moments looking out of the top of a van through binoculars, and every other van within sight will hurriedly u-turn its way back to your patch of track, fearful of missing something. "Een ornitholoog," I heard one disgusted dutchman tell his family, after they sped over, only to realize that I was looking at a small, nondescript bird.

An Ostrich might get a pause and a glance, but what most visitors really want to see are the Big Five. Two drivers passing in the track pause and ask each other if there have been any rhino sightings. "Simba?," they ask, in hushed tones. The lion is king. It is possible, but difficult to see. It is perhaps at the top of the list for most visitors. (You could spent twenty days of layovers here and never see a leopard, so that spectacular cat generally remains in the realm of fantasy).

Imagine our joy, then, as we were driving slowly up the track, to come upon a lioness, drinking from a puddle in the road.

In the natural state of things, unless startled, harassed, or abnormally hungry, the lion does not attack we humans. Like bullies, they prefer prey smaller than themselves. The phenomenon of the man-eater, of the lion that has tasted human flesh and found it to his liking, gives one pause, but the presence of lions is not normally enough to keep me in the car. (However, I would never get out of a car in the presence of a lion).

Where there is one lion, there are generally more, and as we sat, parked in the track, watching and waiting, another one appeared from an insignificant shrub beside the road, just the sort in which on another day I might have searched for a singing bird. If they are unlikely to attack humans, they also care little about them. Simba is not scared of you, and he will walk languidly across the road and examine your car with a slow twist of his powerful neck.

Soon, three lions had settled into the shade of the only shrub found on our patch of savannah. Had you told me that the lone bush, above, provided sufficient cover for three lions, I would have laughed at you, but I saw the lions go in to it and become invisible. Had I not seen them I must admit that here I would happily have gotten out of the car after looking around, certain that there was no big game, no threat, just open bush. A lesson learned.

Half an hour later, when we passed back that way, they were still there.

Camping in Rwanda, Part Deux (highlands version)

The contrast between Nyungwe Forest and the Akagera National Park (see Camping in Rwanda, Part One) could not be more extreme. From the baking sun, whining locusts in the trees and a bronzed landscape of blonde hillsides and shimmering lakes I traveled in a few hours to dense, wet, closed forest. At 2400 meters above sea level Nyungwe is chilly and shrouded in clouds. Here the distinction between the rainy and dry seasons, so crucial to Akagera's animals, might better be characterized as the drenched season versus the merely soggy.

The attraction here are the Albertine Rift endemics, both simian and avian. A series of mountain chains running down through the heart of the so-called Great Lakes region of Africa, the Albertine Rift is home to at least 30 species of birds that occur nowhere else. Its plant and insect life is similarly exotic and restricted in range, and Nyungwe is home to no less than 13 species of primates, one of the highest totals for any location on earth. L'Hoest's Monkey is common, and often found patrolling the shoulder of the lone switchback highway that crosses over the mountains to Cyangugu and South Kivu state, in the Congo.

L'Hoest's Monkey

Blue Monkey

At Uwinka camp, on a high mountain ridge, there were no other campers, and I chose the most remote campsite, amongst the dripping epiphytes and soggy mosses of the forest interior, beside a thatched bungalow with a central hearth for cooking. "Est-ce que vous êtes capable d'allumer le feu?" Asked the park ranger. Are you able to light your own fire? His tone suggested he had never yet met a muzungu with these skills. Although I indignantly answered Of course! as if I were some sort of tinder-box wielding eagle scout, it transpired that my campsite came equipped with a kind of African National Parks version of a Filipino house-boy, a young man who, while I was camped out in the middle of the woods, brought me hot water with which to bathe. At the end of my first day, a long mountainous trek in search of the Handsome Francolin, I limped into my campsite to find a blazing fire and a steaming bucket awaiting my bath. I half expected him to stand by holding a towel for me as I lathered up.

My digs at Uwinka

Having had luxurious views of the Handsome Francolin, a skittish, quail-like bird that is actually one of the more common Albertine Rift endemics, but a bird I had missed out on during my last visit to Nyungwe four years ago, I bedded down for the night in the trusty tent.

Superlecker Spargelcremezuppe mit Ramen-nudeln

At 5:50 AM I awoke in a panic; I was due at the headquarters at 6 for Chimpanzee-tracking, a thrill I had forgone on my last, entirely bird-obsessed, visit. The outing is based on the extremely lucrative Mountain Gorilla tracking concession in Volcanoes National Park, which pulls in $700,000 a month in foreign currency earnings just in permit fees. Park rangers, full-time chimp trackers, follow the roaming bands of chimps as they feed during the day, watching them bed down at dusk (Chimpanzees make leafy, mat-like beds high up in the trees each night, used once only), and then returning at dawn to follow them as they move on. Guides, bringing tourists like myself, then coordinate with the trackers via walkie-talkie and determine how best to get the muzungus to the fruiting trees which the chimp pack has chosen for that day's gorging. They range widely, and fast, and spotting them can be a literal half hour walk in the park or an experience more closely resembling the crossing of the Andes on foot.

The "oh-so-very" Handsome Francolin, Francolinus nobilis

In the pre-dawn darkness I scrambled up the steep trail to the guard post, where I found my fellow-travelers, an Indian-American “in software,” living in Mumbai, and the Irish publisher of a “businessman’s lifestyle magazine,” from London. The former was one of the few legitimate tourists I have met in Rwanda; a wildlife aficionado, he had arrived directly from Volcanoes National Park where he had done two back-to-back gorilla trekking excursions. The latter had accompanied a posse of humanitarians from the British conservative party who were touring and participating in various aid schemes, a jaunt he claimed was not quite so completely a publicity stunt as it might sound. I judged him politically suspect but gratefully piled in his car anyway, as I didn’t have one.

Ten kilometers down the road the vehicles left us, and the three rangers, on the side of the road. It was about 6:30 in the morning. “Well,” said Claude, the ranger who had taken me bird-spotting the day before, “unfortunately they are quite far down. There’s quite a walk ahead of us.” The day-before-yesterday, he had told me on the yesterday, the entire group of chimps had been within half an hour’s walk of the headquarters. Chimpanzees move fast over long distances, looking for the best fruiting trees.

I was alarmed to see that my friends had daypacks stuffed with camera equipment, changes of trousers, biscuits and camelback hydration packs; in my stumbling, sleepy getaway I had brought only my camera, binoculars, and half a liter of water. We started down a steep track, winding around the side of the mountain, the valley to our left, the rising hill to our right. We walked fast, ignoring tantalizing birdcalls in our rush to descend and locate the chimps.

I’m generally opposed to these sorts of organized outings for this very reason; all too often they resemble forced marches, with no time for stopping to look at "lesser" wildlife, or just to experience the grandeur of the forest. We were on a mission, however, and, concerned by Claude’s ominous scouting report, I put my head down and hurried on.

A tranquil forest scene

After an hour of dishearteningly steep descent on a trail cut into steps, the future retracing of which made me pant for breath just thinking about it, Claude’s walkie-talkie crackled with an update from the trackers. Soon we heard an unearthly screaming and chattering, which seemed still to come from far below us in the valley. At a meeting of four paths, we paused, and suddenly, there beside us, was a ranger we hadn’t met before. A handful of female chimps were feeding nearby, he said. We waited. The tracker disappeared. I proposed to Claude that he and I move gently down the track away from the group in hope of seeing a bird or two.

When we had gone a hundred meters or so around a contour the tracker came running back up the path towards us. “Quickly, quickly!,” he said, urging us forward in a sort of shouted stage whisper. I looked behind me. The others were out of sight beyond the bend. We were already a team, we three. Should I abandon them? “Go,” said Claude. “I’ll tell the others.” I rushed headlong down the trail, following the tracker towards a majestic grove of towering trees. He stopped, pointed. Up, far up. I got the binoculars to the eyes and saw her, very briefly, before she saw us, and immediately bolted, shimmying down the trunk and away. The magazine publisher jogged up just in time to see the dark shape of the ass end of a female chimpanzee, flailing away through the mid-story canopy. The software guy, hard on his heels, nothing.

We stood staring longingly up into the trees, as if she might return. “Too shy,” said one of the rangers. The huddle of Rwandans in their green ranger’s fatigues looked at one another with resignation, sharing a look that suggested they knew that their day, which had been so close to being over, had only just begun. “These females,” said Claude, “they are just too shy when they are traveling with the babies. But the trackers say they think the males will be in some fruiting fig trees, beyond the next mountain. We’re going to try for that. I told them it is a good thing we have a strong group of tourists today.”

I thought: beyond the next mountain? The trackers had already melted back into the forest, like Viet-Cong. We set off again, fast, but the sweaty rush to chimpville was only beginning. When we next paused, many ridges further away from where the jeeps had dropped us off hours earlier, Claude simply pointed down over the edge of the trail. “This way.” It looked impassable, a clifflike steepness overgrown with mats of liana and shoulder high underbrush. He went, we followed. It was like walking down a woven web of ropes. There was no ground, just an abyss of compressed vegetation in which to put one’s trust. I am convinced that the descent we made would have been impossible on dry ground; without that choked infinity of vines, branches and trunks we would have fallen right off the side of the mountain. Twigs and leaves whipped our faces and tore at our clothes, but they stopped us from plunging down to the valley floor.

On a parallel spur, visible through the soft edges of the clouds wherever there was a break in the canopy, chimps were feeding. The foliage in those distant treetops moved and swayed unnaturally. We heard eery screams, then, apparently, cackling. In return, we trudged and grunted, slipped, slid and swore. Finally, soggy of foot and streaked green with trails of chlorophyll, we arrived at the foot of the looming fig trees. All was still. “Where did they go?”
“Shhh,” said Claude. “They are here.”

With DNA 97% identical to theirs, it's no wonder you like figs so much.

We heard a rustle in a branch in front of us, visible through a gap between trunks. The branch bobbed up and down. A chimp emerged onto a mid-high branch, some seventy-five yards off, and began acrobatically picking off fruits and stuffing himself. As he ate his fill, we watched until we too were sated, passing binoculars around and snapping one blurry and backlit photo after another. I’m not sure that we actually high-fived, but the mood was certainly of three men who might at any moment break out in an orgy of self-congratulatory palm-slapping.

At last we declared that we were satisfied. The rangers huddled again, and debated. It appeared that we were, as the saying goes, somewhere in the back-ass of beyond. Should we go up through the impenetrable tangle of impossible steepness, or down? The goal being to hit a real trail as soon as possible. Down looked easier, and Claude suggested that the drivers, when we could reestablish radio contact with them, could be instructed to drive down a jeep track to a village on the valley floor, where we might rendezvous with them.

Having seen chimps, we were now rather less motivated. Adrenaline had ebbed. Feet were sore, not to mention moist. It was a hard slog, and I believe it was a good hour of bushwacking before we finally reached the beaten path. After our time in the dense underbrush the narrow dirt trail seemed to us like a broad and sunny boulevard. We paused and I took tiny sips from my much diminished supply of water. Claude radioed. "Unfortunately," he reported, "the drivers are saying they don't have enough petrol to drive down into the valley. They are afraid they won't be able to get back." Our prolonged chorus of groans perhaps reminded the rangers of the chimpanzees they spend so much time with. Looking up at the cloud-shrouded ridges above us, it was impossible to see how far up we would have to climb. "Where's the helicopter?" I asked Claude. "I thought the tracking fee included a helicopter." He laughed, nervously, and set off up the trail. Steely adventurers all, we bravely marched behind. The ascent was long, but finally we emerged at the top, back on the trans-montane highway. Congratulating one another, and ourselves, we piled back into the jeeps and drove back up to the camp, where I looked forward to a hot meal:

Epuisé of Ramen a volonté in West African peanut butter sauce with "overripe" tomatoes

...

Ghettoornithology

When it comes to vagrants and rarities in New York, I'm like cancer, a man with the plague. It has almost come to the point where I don't even call the New York Rare Bird Alert (212-979-3070) any more because I don't want to be a spoiler; you can pretty much bet solid money that if I go chasing after some accidental bird that has washed up unexpectedly in the New York area, no matter how long it has been hanging around, that will be the end of it. I won't see it, and what's more, it will never be seen again. The last record of it will have been the day before, or even that morning, and once I set out for it, as if it knows I am coming, it's gone, forever.



I don't take it personally. At this point I'm rather amused by the consistency and infallibility of it all, to be honest. But thank God I don't really fraternize with the local birding community, otherwise they would have caught on and would have already stopped by and snuffed me out, to prevent my chasing off their rare birds.

There was the Boreal Owl in Central Park a winter or two ago. Been there for months, hanging out in the top of one particular evergreen tree not far from the Dakota, sniping mice at Tavern on the Green [Update: See "Comments"]. I was out of town when it arrived, or didn't hear about it right away, but since I would (still) love to see a Boreal Owl, I drag-assed up there at dawn one day as soon as I heard tell of it. After all, this little beast only rarely makes it south of the vast conifer belt crossing east to west through the middle latitudes of Canada, for which it is named.

Needless to say, the owl wasn't there on its customary perch. At the foot of the tree was a sportive gentleman with flowing white facial hair and binoculars, "gripping off" the arrivistes with exciting tales of how splendidly the bird had "been showing" the day before, and the day before that. He had apparently been studying the specimen at his leisure for some weeks. "I'm sure it's still around here somewhere," he said, airily. "It's just a matter of re-finding it." Hah. Never seen again.

On another occasion I got onto the news of a Broad-Billed Sandpiper, a minute wading bird that breeds in Siberia and generally migrates down through Japan and the Philippines to Australia, a little late. This is a major rarity in New York, or anywhere in the USA, for that matter, and I only found out about it after scads of people had been seeing it daily in the West Pond at Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge for something like a week. I called my main man Joseph, who could care less about waders but is always up for a bizarre sociological phenomenon, and inspired him to take the afternoon off and drive out there with me. The power birders with the frequent flier miles had mostly already seen the bird, which was only about two miles as the sandpiper flies from JFK. But the broke ones were arriving by car, from Maryland, Tennessee, Ontario, Florida, and so on, after getting the gas money together, having another bird-war with the wife, and calling in sick to the job. The parking lot was full of forlorn birders and out-of-state plates. What should I have said? Should I have jumped up and down yelling "sorry, it's my fault!" I don't think so. As Joseph and I made our way through the clusters of disconsolate telescope-toting mooks wandering aimlessly around, I tried not to look guilty.

I dipped on the Long Island Harris' Sparrow and the Smith's Longspur at Jones Beach as well.



One never wants to completely give up hope, however, and so, in an idle moment on the way back from the airport after coming home from Rwanda, I gave the old hot-line a call. In my absence a Western Reef Heron, the first record of the species for New York State, had taken up residence in a Brooklyn body of water I had never even heard of, the Coney Island Creek. I knew exactly where it was, though, because the instructions on the tape-recording suggested parking in the lot of the Coney Island Home Depot. Since I'm going into the fifth year of a career-long house renovation, I'm familiar with every Home Depot in Brooklyn and Queens.


This is not a bird I would generally drop everything and rush off to see, as I added it to the life list in Dubai a couple of years ago, and apparently the last time this particular individual had been spotted I was still chasing chimpanzees in the Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda, so it seemed like a long-gone long shot. But I was out reuning with the family down in Princeton on Thursday, and as the Rare Bird Alert is updated on Fridays I gave another little jingle as I was rolling back up the Turnpike on Friday afternoon. The Reef Heron was back, and had been seen Thursday morning, the very day before! I had seen one last year in Ghana, which is about as close as it should normally ever get to New York, but I didn't have it yet for this year's epic and growing year list (816, by the way, stop drooling with jealousy), and I was going over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge anyway, which is only a short Belt Parkway traffic jam away from Coney Island.... Since it had first been found all the way back on July 8th or so I figured anyone who would want to had probably had a chance to see it already anyway, so why not give it a shot, even if "the curse" were to chase it definitively away.



Upon arriving one can only think: boy, is this a hole. Coney Island Creek is the sort of scummy disused New York City waterfront that people are referring to when they complain about the neglect we have heaped on our former maritime glory. No "greenway" bike paths here, just rats skittling across rotten pilings, a beach of green sludge impregnated with abandoned truck tires and half submerged shopping carts, and everywhere the skeletal rib-cages of vast, long-abandoned barges. Graffiti, fat men in wife-beaters fishing for toxic fish: it is the sort of place where, stumbling through the weeds to view the water's edge, one expects at any moment to surprise a party of crack-smokers, or worse. And that was what I thought even before I read this.


Looking around at this desolate post-industrial wasteland I really had to wonder what sort of dedicated nut-job birder would have ever come down here to go birding in the first place. The next thought was how improbable it was that any self-respecting bird would eat anything swimming here. However, there was a Great Egret marching through the muck, and many fishermen, so the waters must be capable of sustaining some form of life. The sonorous tones of the recorded voice on the hotline had warned that the Western Reef Heron was easy to overlook as it skulked about the abandoned barges, of which there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply. Most of these were viciously backlit by the afternoon glare and stranded beyond a moat of foul muddy sludge. Some were far away on the opposite shore and would require a telescope for effective viewing. I had none. There was nothing about the dismal scene to suggest that I had any chance whatsoever of ending my losing streak of rarity-seeking outings.

There is a Western Reef Heron in this picture; the tiny black dot to the left of the bigger black triangular lump of rusting boat that looks like a shark's fin. I shot all the pictures for this post with my cellphone, not only because I forgot to bring a decent camera, but because they look so much more ghetto this way. If you want to see what this Western Reef Heron actually looks like, go here.

Working my way around the squalid shore I flushed a few shorebirds (a complete list of species from my brief outing to Coney Island Creek is in the comments) and saw a Black Crowned Night Heron flying across the creek and into a sheltered cove, where, in fact, numerous egrets and herons were patrolling the flats. Among the six Great Egrets were two Snowys, three night herons and a dark, almost black, slate-colored heron with an exceptionally long and fine dagger-like bill. The closest thing we have in all the Americas to a heron with a bill like this is the Agami Heron, a permanent resident of densely forested wet tropical swamps that would be even less likely to wash up in Brooklyn than the Western Reef Heron, the bird I was definitively looking at. It was actively feeding, flying from one possible patch of fishery to another, and showing off its black legs and yellow feet. The curse was lifted!

Camping in Rwanda, Part One

Only about a two hour drive west of the capital, Kigali, Rwanda's Akagera National Park is a collision between a series of parallel acacia-clad golden mountain ridges, and the Akagera River and its broad valley, which cuts through them. After filling my cooler with ice at the renovated Akagera Hotel, a formerly decrepit relic that on my last visit was literally occupied by baboons, I drove north along the "mountain circuit," and then cut down a valley to continue along the edge of the marsh.

Camp One: There are a variety of possible campsites dotted about the park, and every intersection of two jeep trails is marked by a numbered cement pillar corresponding to a point on the map, so assuming one stays on the tracks, it is almost impossible to get lost. As the sun started to set, I chose a campsite and drove back up onto the ridge to sleep on this promontory overlooking the valley. Note my immaculate tent installation in the lower right hand corner.



Camp Two: On the shores of Lake Rwanyakizinga. This is one of the best spots for elephants in Akagera, and although I thankfully didn't encounter any right where I camped, I saw one on the way in, about a kilometer before I arrived, and then three more grazing in the papyrus when I left the next day. Not one unnatural sound intruded to disturb the snorts of the hippos, the kloo kloo kloo calls of the fish eagles and the splash of pied kingfishers dive bombing the lake.

The immeasurably baritone belches and yawns of the hippos grazing on the far spit, half laugh and half cough, were so loud that I felt certain they had to be coming from the reeds just in front of me instead of from a thousand meters across the water, where I could see them wallowing. Through the binoculars I watched families of warthogs coming down to feed, their tails held straight up, perpendicular to the ground. A goliath heron, the world's biggest, roamed the shore and varieties of antelope snuck down to the water's edge to drink, looking about in paranoid fashion. You would be extraordinarily lucky to see any of the big cats here, but the antelope certainly know that there’s always the possibility one could be about.

Fire, and dinner: a double dose of Ramen with blanched tomatoes "Al Fresco"

The next morning I walked along the shore and found a few hippos that had moved over to my side of the lake in the night.

Elephants are most easily found in the northern reaches of the park, perhaps because fewer people drive all the way up there. Although they are not easy to see, signs of them are everywhere, from enormous chunks of dung left in the track to sizable acacias rendered into puny matchsticks.

When the elephants are feeding they will snap trunks in half or uproot entire trees to get at the uppermost leaves. Along parts of the northern lake circuit there are patches of forest that look as though they have been devastated by a tornado, and in many places I had to drive off road to circle around downed trees.


Camp Three: Perched on a high and breezy mountaintop overlooking the spectacular chain of lakes and vast papyrus swamps along the Akagera River. I won't presume to tell you what you are thinking. But what I think you are thinking is something like: "that's funny; his tent doesn't look nearly as spiffy at Camp 3 as it did at Camps 1 and 2.... It doesn't look quite so much like a tent commercial." If this is indeed along the lines of what you were thinking, then you absolutely have a point. After driving four hours of kidney-lurching rutted jeep track up the side of the mountain, fighting a near-constant assault from battalions of tse-tse flies streaming in through the windows and into my ears, I was ready for a quick dinner and a good sleep. Only when I finally arrived at Camp 3 and got the tent out of the car did I make the unpleasant discovery that I had left the tent poles back at Camp 2. Luckily I had a boom pole in the jeep with which I managed to improvise this elegant structure. Still, rain would have been most unwelcome.

This is what comes of what I was thinking that morning when I packed up, which was "hey, I have a car, with three empty seats in it. Why bother to pack up the tent in its bag? I'll just cram it all in here somewhere.”

The tent calamity did nothing to diminish the indescribable tranquility of sitting out on my own personal remote scenic overlook, soaking up the approaching evening as the sun lowered in the sky behind me. Thinking that the light was just getting nice for some landscape photography, I got up and went to get the camera from the car. Looking up at the ridgetop I saw, sticking up out of the grass and peering at me, this immediately recognizable neck.

I pursued the confused beast, who was probably wondering what on earth had gone wrong with my tent setup, and why I had put it directly in the way of the usual giraffe route down to the river.

The next morning, after a slight detour to collect my tent poles, I continued the “lake circuit,” reaching the very northernmost section of the park, where some of its most spectacular savannah is to be found. Wild game was abundant.

I had forgotten to bring my Kingdon, and my large ungulate identification skills are a little rusty, but I believe this is a magnificent buck Kudu, with one of his wives just to the left. [UPDATE: Oops, my bad. This looks much more like a Defassa Waterbuck, Kobus ellipsiprymnus.]

Even the non-birder will appreciate the spectacular plumage of the Southern Carmine Bee-Eater. My complete bird list from two trips to Akagera can be found in the “comments.”

I’m good enough with my large ungulates to know that these are Cows. Cattle remain the major threat to the park. Before the genocide Akagera was three times its current size, but the turmoil of the war led to large-scale invasion and settlement of the park by refugees and squatters. It is still a huge park proportionate to the size of the country, and the current borders are well protected. These longhorns are outside the park perimeter but in places where the route runs near the edge of the park territory the graze line exactly followed the park boundary markers, with long grass on the park side and nubbly razored stubble on the cow side. Unless significant numbers of visitors come to Akagera and deposit their hard currency in the park coffers it will be all to easy to understand if over time the current rules are relaxed and grazing cattle are again allowed inside. Population is extraordinarily dense in Rwanda, and protecting a vast, unpopulated wilderness like this park requires a major political tradeoff. I drove for three days without seeing anyone else, camped where I chose, saw abundant wildlife in great variety, and spent as much on the entire experience as I might have paid just in one day's entrance fees at a game reserve in Kenya or Tanzania. This is a major bargain, and you should rush over and visit right away.