I laughed, I cried, I soiled my garment...

Via boingboing

Together, we can rebuild Red Hook!

08/28/2011 Hurricane Irene

Waiting for Irene on Saturday, 1PM

This morning you could feel her for the first time, the air thick, wet, gray and heavy. Gone was the surreal, disconnected feeling attending yesterday's balmy blue skies and glorious regiments of perfect white clouds. Hurricane? Yesterday calamity seemed impossible, although there was not a single parking spot to be had at Lowe's, and the checkout lines at the Pathmark supermarket snaked back into aisles denuded of pasta. The sheets of plywood screwed down tight over the doors and windows intensify the silence of the streets. It rains from time to time with quick, fierce downbursts that quickly fade into a drippy calm, as if we are already feeling a kind of cyclonic, circular churning of the oblong Irene, still 400 miles away. Down the block, I hear the whine of circular saws.

Waiting for Irene

The homestead is in Zone "A", which describes the lowcountry areas of the city most vulnerable to flooding. I would estimate that the floor of my basement is within inches of mean high tide. Another way of putting this would be to describe Irene as payback for the dozens of times over the last 9 years that I have gleefully described my house as being within a couple of blocks walk of New York harbor. One does not have to go downhill more than a few inches to take that stroll. Currently buying guns, bottled water and canoes. Don't forget us out here in the swamps, FEMA.

Reading: Need for the Bike by Paul Fournel

There is nothing about Paul Fournel's meditative little volume on his lifelong addiction to bicycles that smacks of avant-garde literature. Reading it, I was reminded of an episode from my college days in which a bunch of us, fanatical devotees of experimental cinema, attended the premiere screening of an eminent vanguardist's new work. The film proved to be a remarkably normal documentary about the filmmaker's other passion. I think it was on the restoration of wooden toy train sets or dancing nutcrackers, or something along those lines (but I've forgotten, just as I've forgotten his name). It was a perfectly beautiful and simple documentary, but I was so desperate to locate deep metaphorical and formal subversions of the genre between its frames that I scarcely appreciated it.

But I've aged, and mellowed. I read Need for the Bike with pleasure, neither looking for nor noticing even one example of Oulippian technique. For Fournel is, according to Wikipedia, the president and also the "Provisionally Definitive Secretary" of Oulipo, a French group of mathematically interested writers who set up rigid constraints and then attempt to write literature within them. For instance, from the Wiki:

"S+7, sometimes called N+7 

Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." (from Moby-Dick) becomes "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago...". Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs."

 
Only the French could turn Mad Libs, the mildly amusing children's word replacement game booklets we used to fill out on long pre-teen car rides, into an avant-garde literary movement. But the sense one gets from Fournel's book about cycling is that in describing the many roads he's taken on his bicycle, he's also meditating on the road not taken. Deep into this short book of short chapters he writes "for a long time I wondered why I wasn't a racer." He then answers his own musing: "the objective reasons are many: I had 'better things' to do, and at the age when one tries to become a racer, I had set off on other adventures."

Wherever he has been, whatever he has been doing, Fournel has always had a bicycle to turn to, for exercise, escape, meandering, socializing. "I've only owned beautiful bikes," he writes. "I prefer rigid but supple steel, which isn't really so heavy...." Fournel writes about crashing, about the absurd tan that results from thousands of miles cycled in shorts, jersey and ankle socks. He writes of scaling the most notorious mountain roads made famous by the savageries of the Tour de France, and the sense of ownership of the landscape that comes from pedaling urgently through it. Before they even get on their bikes he knows from the look of his companion's legs what sort of a ride they will have together, how much competitive potential is there. He fondly describes the state of permanent, dull ache the rider feels in his calves and quads for the duration of the cycling season. The bike is his barometer of all things: "I know that if I succomb to depression, it will start with a breakdown in my thighs. It will start with cycling sluggishness, and the rest will follow."

This, you may have gathered, is not a book for everyone. If hearing the word "Campagnolo" doesn't trigger a flutter of acquisitive adrenaline at your temples, if you're uninterested in having a peek at the cutouts in my bottom bracket, if you find nothing romantic about a velodrome, or don't even know what one is, if you object to spandex shorts, if your legs aren't sore and you're scarless, if you've never heard of the Paris-Roubaix, you may not find this book as charming as I do.

Rick Perry for President? UPDATED

Obersturmführernkadet Ricardo Perry in full-on patriotic purple turtleneck Texas A 'n' M swashbuckler mode, photo via nedslist. This image alone is enough to get me charged up about the Obama reelection campaign.

UPDATE: In response to the above, jumping on the Obama bandwagon, an anonymous friend sends the following photo of Michele Bachmann corndogging her way around the Iowa State fair. Not surprisingly it seems already to have gone viral.

The Wall Burners of Camden

  

The Manhattan subways have been all but graffiti-clean for close on two decades, at least the rolling stock. (Cars that are painted in the dead-of-night are immediately removed from service until cleaned). In my rugged youth, I quite liked the chaos of riding in a subway car whose contours, doors, maps, seats, warning signs and windows were buried under a miasma of tags, inch-wide marker strokes and spray-painted curiosities. The dense lattice of indecipherable texts were their own advertisement; the ensemble announced that you were living on the edge, in an overwhelmed city, a place at once vibrant and out-of-control. This was New York in the 1980s, a place far scarier than today's city, but more alive, more thrilling and unpredictable. (I'm aware that this is the classic lament of any middle-aged person throughout history, that their formative decade of entrance into adulthood was the most vibrant, and raw, but who would disagree that today's clean and shiny subway cars are but the tiniest indicator of the ongoing sanitizing of our city?)

In the 1980s the most adept graffitists came out of the ghettos and into the galleries. Guys who in the middle of the night risked german shepherds, barbed wire and prison time in their quest for the fleeting glory of seeing their name ride by on a train found themselves suddenly invited to fly to Amsterdam and sip white wine with museum curators. Op-editorialists argued about whether graffiti was art or plague, as if it couldn't be both. Meanwhile the MTA spent more and more dollars trying to keep the trains clean. They tried space-age coatings, attack dogs, advanced stainless-steel treatments and multiple rings of perimeter fencing around the train yards, until the resting subway fleet was as well-protected as Riker's Island. (If you were caught after getting through all the defenses of the former you then became eligible to try and escape from the latter).

The graffiti-eradication budgets ballooned. Slowly the vast resources of the transit system prevailed. The immediate and rigorous quarantine of "infected" subway cars and the MTA's gigantic buffing machines destroyed countless masterpieces before they ever rolled down the line and into the public eye. But simultaneous with the cleansing of the trains, graffiti was going international; youth inspired by the 1970s New York legends were painting on walls, bridges, overpasses, storefronts and derelict vehicles from Romania to Australia.

 "Mecro"

"Above-ground" graffiti was never as interesting to me as the full-car canvases that once rolled through the tunnels of New York, and I rather lost interest in the phenomenon. As an art-form, graffiti has the most in common with Chinese calligraphy. Marking a clean line with a spray can demands the same combination of precision, speed, and commitment that underpin the zen master's slash of camel hair brush on paper. In both, tentativeness is the greatest weakness the artist can show. In both, the form and shape of the letters eclipse their meaning. The motion of the artist's hand is implicit, and supreme, in the finished work. Graffiti is all about this motion, and it is about the fame of the letter. To use a train as a canvas was first to put the motion into the letter, and then to put the letter in motion, to send word of one's existence and talent from the margins to the heart of the city. Without the train, without the awe and surprise of standing on a midtown platform as the subway pulled in, bringing the revelation that every square-inch of its surface had been carefully, masterfully, coherently, freshly and lovingly painted, graffiti literally lost its dynamism.

 "Empty"

But sometimes I'm still awed. Around the country and the world, well-known to "writers," are walls comparatively free of the buffer and the white-washer. These graffiti walls of fame can have long lives. Sometimes they develop in collusion with the authorities. If given a remote corner of industrial wasteland to paint as they wish, the thinking goes, the graffitists will be less likely to vandalize the bank downtown. In other places, authority is simply overwhelmed, as New York was in the 1970s. There is more to worry about than paint, and less to worry with. Camden, NJ, is a place like that.

Graffiti removal cannot be high on the list of priorities for the government of that small city. I spent a couple of days in Camden last week with my friend Camilo José Vergara. He has been regularly visiting for some thirty years, photographing the fortunes and misfortunes of this little-known but staggeringly blighted place. Once a thriving blue-collar appendix of Philadelphia, the city has lost the vast majority of its once-diverse industrial base, half its population, most of its tax revenue, its reputation and its pride. The landscape will be familiar to anyone who has seen "The Wire," or watched Baltimore go past the windows of the Amtrak. Weedy vacant lots are punctuated by countless empty, doorless buildings with jagged holes and blown-out double-pane windows; boarded up storefronts, the plywood that was long ago nailed there to prevent egress now itself ancient and weathered and warped and curling away from the facades; enormous factories, burned to the ground, with melted and rusted i-beams curling skyward from perilous mountains of brick rubble. Prostitution and drug-dealing seem to be the most thriving and visible of the few remaining commercial ventures.

"Joker"

Here, among auto scrapyards and vacant lots, Camilo guided me to an epic "wall of fame," a place graffiti artists from all over the tristate area, and perhaps beyond, have been coming for years, to paint and repaint hundreds of yards of cinderblock wall. Few people likely see this work besides other artists; it is a kind of constantly evolving collective scrapbook of wall-art, as impressive in scope and scale as anything a major museum could find the outdoor space to present.

Camilo José Vergara photographing The Great Escape.

"The Great Escape," detail. As Camilo put it, here a Peter-pan like figure rides rocket-like crayons up into outer space, as if metaphorically managing to get out of Camden.

 "Distinct," I think

 

A rabid, evil bleach-bottle, rushing to eradicate the graf.

A goose-stepping buffing squad, here to erase all the hard work.

They're Breeding!

Faithful antarcticiana readers may recall an item from last fall celebrating the original bicycles manufactured by Giovanni Pinarello and the cult-like dedication with which certain cycling nerds perpetuate his legend. Earlier this week a second meeting of the Brooklyn Pinarello Society convened in Prospect Park for a few blistering laps, generating the envy of the poor, misguided trendoids who have replaced the timeless elegance of Italian steel with one of those absurd carbon-fiber monstrosities that now passes for the "state of the art" in road bikes.

I tre Pinarelli. I believe you are looking at 148 years of combined cycling wisdom in the image above. And I'm not talking about the bicycles, which probably have about 75 years between them. Portrait of the musqueteros courtesy of champion shutterbug Wolfgang Wesener, left. In the middle, in the ominous glasses, our man from ATLAS.

The day was not without its purple hearts, as yours truly suffered a head-on collision with a tentative and indecisive fourteen year-old girl who weaved back and forth down the hill on a mountain bike directly into our churning peloton. I was inches off of the back of Wesener's wheel, enjoying the draft, and I didn't even see the threat coming until the moment before impact. Although I was bloodied, and the girl suffered a very fat lip and enormous embarrassment, the precision steel of Treviso came through unscathed. Without even so much as a wobbly wheel I managed a further six laps before leaving the park in search of a winery.

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