A Tanzanian Birding Safari—from Pemba Island to the Mara River (Part 1: Pemba)

Our epic nineteen day birding safari began with a flight onto the ever so green and sleepy, endemic-rich island of Pemba. Pemba is an engagingly conservative Indian Ocean territory 60 km east of Tanga, itself a quaint German colonial city, embodying the lost soul of a long-abandoned Tanganyika mainland.

Yellow-billed Storks: Photo Angelo Caruso Yellow-billed Storks: Photo Angelo Caruso

I went—to join my birding customers already in Pemba—on board Coastal Aviation's scheduled midday service from the big-game portal of Arusha. An airport whose baggage tag appropriately spells "ARK". Here soaring rufous-tailed Augur Buzzards, above Burkha coffee estate at the runway's end, bade us a close to wing-touching farewell. We were quickly spirited-away south east across the severely deforested northern Maasai steppe; flat and ochre, hazy and dry, a savanna half gone, carbonised in charcoal sacks to feed Arusha's new economic frenzy.

We flew via Pemba's big brother island—the unseemly, pressure-cooker island of Unguja; which the rapacious global-tourism industry quite incorrectly insists is the real Zanzibar; increasingly crowded, a paradise already ebbing away.

Our first big birds, wide-sky safari birds, thankfully began making their continued presence felt; even to those of us belted into a Cessna-Caravan; eastward from the Ars-Dar highway, as we began our descent toward Unguja, just south of the snaking Wami river, the southern boundary of Tanzania's far too infrequently-visited Saadani National Park. Birds in the shape of a soaring Woolly-necked and several Yellow-billed Storks, floating feather crosses suspended above the emerald canopy of an east coast forest mosaic, five thousand feet below us, birds and machine-men briefly united beneath a foamy white flotilla of westerly-racing cumulus.

Once over the Indian Ocean I kept a sharp eye out for pods of Humpback Whales, at this season the great pewter-grey cetaceans are oft times clearly visible, even from the air, ploughing northward on the pure blue surface currents of the Pemba Channel. There were no whales to be seen this time. But I did spot two dancing flocks of a score or so of terns, flicker-feeding by plunging flight, whiter than white, diving into a boiling surface pan of water, below which bounding piscivorous tuna were driving the shimmering shoals of smaller fish skyward toward the waiting, wheeling birds. For sure these Sterna terns were of the now-threatened nominate form of Roseate - Sterna d. dougallii. Threatened with extinction like the tuna upon whose great schools they depend to nurture their own downy young on widely scattered Indian Ocean islets. Tuna whose highly nutritious steaks continue to grace our not so noble hunter's plates on Pemba, and in lodges and restaurants both here and there. Yes, they're old comrades these Roseate Terns - a species first notched onto my pre-pubescent birder's lists in a different century and on another archipelago - the birder's Isles of Scilly, exactly thirty seven years before! These terns were also my co-habitants on Aride Island; during the south-east monsoon; Aride is that essential tiny 'desert' isle, a granite rock 1.5km in length, where JW passed most of 1992; a very educational year indeed, courtesy of Bird Life International and those delightful 'pied robin-thrushes', the then 'Critically Endangered' Seychelles Magpie Robin - Copsychus seychellarum.

Here and now. In and out of Unguja airport (i.e. "Zanzibar"), apart from a single circling Sooty Gull, and a skimming raft of a dozen larger 'crested' terns fleeing beyond the harbour wall, few birds flew. During my delayed stop-over just two soiled Cattle Egrets and a lone Speckled Pigeon ventured forth.

Yet avian life of a very clever kind survives in Stonetown, in the shape of Hitchcock's devious 'Indian' House Crows Corvus splendens,who patrol the skyscape from the air. Above all that cement and tin, strewn about with millions of branded plastic bags, rustling clashes in everlasting red and blue, these smutty feathered horsemen fly. They and the Marlboro bags frequently elope, to wheel and dance, the birds looking like little ocean blackfish, as they dash between the bloated bags that rise so brightly, shoals of satan's jellyfish, adrift on the putrefying afternoon 'breeze'.
These are the birds of only a bag-person's paradise - of an ecosystem already lost.Safely out of Unguja airspace and, after about half an hour, down on the sweet-smelling red earth of Pemba (40 km to the north east across the 800 metre depths of the Pemba channel) our real birding could begin at last.

House Crow: photo Anabel Harries House Crow: photo Anabel Harries

The lovely way north from Pemba's little airport begins along a tree-lined road almost devoid of traffic, from Chake Chake all the way to the town of Konde. Pushing onward to the lodge at Manta Reef, (on the island's northwest coast), one tunnels via a sandy track, through an ancient-feeling place, a way still plied by unselfconscious ox-carts, the shaded embrace of Ngezi forest, home to much of Pemba's endemic life.

On our return two days late we took a detour through the town of Wete on the west coast to marvel at the fruit bat roost, these red and orange ruffed Pemba flying foxes (Pteropus voeltzkowi) were Mangrove Kingfisheruntil recently declining fast, eaten as a delicacy. Unique to Pemba, thankfully they are now quite well protected. A thousand or more bedeck the lofty roadside trees on the humid hillslope down to Wete harbour, hanging all along the branches like great black and red drupes. This was our first bold indication of the remarkable bio-geographical link between eastern Tanzania, especially Pemba, the Usambaras and the coast of Zanj with distant Indian Ocean islands of South-east Asia. In the opal shade beneath the huge trees Mangrove Kingfishers whinnied, whilst alarmingly three slim House Crows Corvus splendens (the first I've ever seen on Pemba) caw-cawed among the indigenous Pied who were cavorting round the dock-yard.

Apart from exploring the wonders of offshore Mesali (an island reserve some three kms off the west coast) the best birding that one can enjoy on Pemba Island is above Konde town in the far northwest. Our first afternoon of this mid-August visit was no exception.

There are some beautiful fresh water pools and lily-padded swamps that lie just north of the 14.56 square kilometres of Ngezi forest. Here in addition to the more widespread endemics (the iridescent and irascible purple males of the Pemba Sunbird and the melodious bright yellow Pemba White-eye) typically one can find a pair of Dickinson's Kestrel, a placid study in soft greys, perched on a dead branch atop their favourite tree; a variety of waterbirds, and sometimes especially early of a morning, a brace of that rarest, and hardest to bag, of all the endemics - the Pemba Green Pigeons who come to enjoy the early sun in the tall dead snags that fringe the pools.

The waterbird groups often make for an interesting page in the safari note-book, and elicits a re-invigorating roll-call at the pre-dinner log. On Pemba, in addition to six species of resident herons and egrets, (both great, intermediate and small), we found two rarities in the dark-streaked form of Madagascar Pond (or Squacco) Herons. We found another one next afternoon in Ngezi forest and another ten days farther into the tour, this last one was 'wintering' in the turbid pea-green soup that constitutes the eutrophic "Hippo Pools" of Ngorongoro Crater. Incidentally a reliable place to see this increasingly rare 'winter visitor', between April and mid-September, is at the aforementioned Burkha estate, near the airport, on the outskirts of Arusha. However, as with so many places in Tanzania, ideally you need to obtain your permission well in advance to enter private land.

That first afternoon at the shallow pool on Pemba eleven tiger-striped and torpedo-shaped White-backed Ducks were threading their way between the delicate flower stalks of the blue-star water lilies. A. L. Archer and Don Turner writing in Scopus in 1993 suggested that the Pemba White-backed Duck would prove to be an endemic taxon. Better yet for my clients, were six dainty, extremely colourful 'anatids', a lifer, that in these hard-pressed days is becoming increasingly hard-to-find, in the form of African Pygmy Goose. The clown-faced males of which were, by one of or birders, perceptively likened to those eider drakes in the far-off Arctic. On striking two tone wings they flew back and forth across the largest of the three pools. As we were scoping the waterfowl, in the gifted tropical gold of a rapidly sinking sun, three young cow-herders with skin like shining ebony splashed their piebald oxen homeward from a reed-fringed palm island in the centre of the lily lake. And above the indigo-hues of a woodland canopy on the distant bank, a Pemba Black-bellied Starling, five or six Crowned Hornbills and more than twenty Broad-billed Rollers alternately Crowned Hornbill: photo Anabel Harriesrose and fell in erratic floppy flight, stealing nuptial termites from the evening sky above us. It was so good to sink back for a moment into the half-forgotten past - to a verdant Pemba, richly endowed by nature, fertile and fruiting year-round under an equatorial sun, to a time when the human population fell very far short of its current flash point - at almost half a million.

Around Manta Reef lodge itself the agricultural land and remnant scrub forest of the coastal coral rag still supports some interesting birds. During my forty-eight hour stay Zitting Cisticolas, which here on Pemba have an interesting erythristic form, called persistently in jerky song flight above the weedy fallow patches; whilst Grassland Pipits, Bronze Mannikins and moulting Black-winged Red Bishops fed on the ground in the nearby stubbles. The latter birds somewhat peculiar in that here at Manta the males were actively moulting into non-breeding plumage whereas around Ngezi forest, six kilometres away (which remains very wet indeed), they were still energetically displaying to females in the sugar cane fields. A pair of clean-cut Southern Grey-headed Sparrows, here at their northernmost outpost in Africa, called from a tree stump in the garden. Wire-tailed and Lesser Striped Swallows were common and breeding on the buildings at Manta and especially just before dawn, brave and noisy Galagos (Bushbabies) would even enter the guest rooms of the lodge in search of ripening fruit. As at Fundu Lagoon (please see an earlier post in May), Pemba African Goshawks circled above the lodge each morning, monotonously repeating their "chet ... chet ... chet" display call and one dark-mantled male was eventually scoped whilst sitting, partly-hidden in a small tree in the garden. Surprisingly few waders were back on the flats and beaches; just a few Whimbrels and Greenshanks from far-distant Russian tundra breeding grounds together with numerous Common Sandpipers that were best seen and heard when gathering at their high-tide roosts, the most picturesque of which was on an old, yet perfectly sea-worthy, traditional wooden fishing boat anchored just offshore.

Lesser Crested Tern: photo Anabel HarriesAlthough I have not seen one, two friends, both very good birders, have reported seeing an unusual skulking warbler or warbler-like bird in the coastal scrub on both Pemba and Mesali island in late August 2007, descriptions of the bird suggests an aberrant large-ish Sylvia or Hippolais warbler (or nowadays perhaps we might just say - an atypical Acrocephalus) or perhaps even a Tiny Greenbul? Is it the Pemba form of the 'suahelicus' African Reed Warbler or something altogether more mysterious and hitherto unreported? A necessarily truncated description of the bird received by sms was as follows: "Yellowish below, pink lower mandible, white throat puffed out when excited, as when responding to pishing, tail quite long, but bird overall not much bigger than a Pemba Sunbird. I was stumped".