Bird-Streaming

At nightfall on December 12 our blue Land Rover 90 with her four human occupants might have been seen by satellites of Google Earth scurrying west toward the little town of Same (pronounced Saamay) which is midway on the main road which joins Dar es Salaam, on the Indian Ocean, with Nairobi high on Africa's ancient plateau.

To her left a deep red sun had just set, sinking beyond the horizon of the Maasai steppe of central Tanzania, drowning in a saturated collage of cloud, of the most soft and fragrant hue. Whilst on the opposite side of the road mighty galleons of cumulus lay moored at gaunt piers vaulting out of the savanna plain - outliers of endemic-rich Eastern Arc mountains. The lofty billowing thunderheads a gorgeous exuberance of warm and gentle colour retained, far above the quickly deepening dusk, all the blessings of waning daylight's fruits and flowers - of peach, saffron and tangerine.

A tingling animal apprehension quickly dispelled such reverie; for quite suddenly a tube-wave of cloud, silent and ominously white, was surging eerily through the serrated crest of indigo mountains all along our night-side flank.

The ghoul cloud seemed sure to engulf us in a hammering torrent of rain before we could make landfall in the still distant fluorescence on the eastern edge of Same town. In fact we reached the lights of the Elephant Motel under inky darkness just as the heavens cracked open; a mighty roar, the first thunderous salvo of a bombardment which pounded town and mountain at intervals throughout the night.

Same

The modest town of Same has grown up at a smuggler's gate through the mountain wall, behind which a century ago, British Kenya from German Tanganyika territory was, for colonial convenience, divided. Same now boasts one 'acceptable' Motel, a couple of hydrocarbon filling stations, a few basic hostelries and several scruffy guesties.

For the naturalist however this is a location of some strategic importance since from Same one can easily traverse the South Pare (Paaraye) mountains, who rise a further 700 metres above the savannas of the Maasai steppe, and explore the western corner of Mkomazi, a game reserve contiguous with the great Tsavo bush-land ecosystem of Kenya. And one can do so from a quiet and peaceful road, that skirts the backside of the mountains southwards, where four habitats converge.

This is an exciting location for me. Especially so during the wonderfully protracted Palearctic-African bird migration seasons: southbound from early October - late January and northbound from early January to late May! For a full eight months Palearctic insectivores pass through this portal. At times they appear to be pouring through in number and variety surely unimaginable to the birding youth of a cynically sterilized Europe that seemingly is acceptable as a homeland in these duplicitous days.

A full degree-wide avian flight stream passes through the Pare mountains between the atmospheric turbulence above Mount Kilimanjaro, at longitude 37 degrees 30' E, and the still forested East Usambaras at 38 degrees 30' E. A route by which many millions of Russian and Central Asian birds travel from northern African recuperation zones in Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Sudan (where they spend the months between August and December) to an equally vast area of Acacia-Miombo woodland and varied savanna, where they spend the second phase of their journey, south of the Equator. They then reverse the movement (with various lateral permutations) on their return north to breed in the renaissance of a Boreal spring. We came here to Same on this dreadful night as a humble pilgrimage, to experience this marvellous phenomenon. And we were not to be denied absolution.

Zangay

By dawn on December 13 the rain had more or less ceased. Under a canopy of soft grey mist leaking intermittent drizzle we were able to negotiate the fifteen kilometres or so of slippery track, up through the Same gap, around the South Pare mountains and down into a muddy wallow that leads to Mkomazi. We turned-off this route and descended the last two kilometres to Zangay. Even in such wet conditions this is a lovely little road, for it is, even by African standards, seldom driven. Arriving early at the very sleepy gate-house one typically has to wait until nine, for the reserve's officials to turn up for work, so there is plenty of time for some morning birding. Zangay is truly tiny. A resident population of maybe twelve souls, some six old trucks and as many simple red earth dwellings - mostly dilapidated little offices and mouldering workshops or storerooms of one kind or another. The hamlet stands at the head of a shallow valley opening north eastwards between two arthritic knuckles of the South Pare.

Reliably red, dusty and dry; in these El Nino rains any soil moisture deficit has been dramatically reversed. Zangay today seems overwhelmed by vegetation, vascular chlorophyll surging skywards, rank and lush and amazingly green. Just two narrow corridors of red compacted mud survive. Kept open by battered, skidding Land Cruisers who, in their daily search for fuel, painstakingly maintain some grumbling greasy contact with the few other vehicle-owning villages of the district.

Zangay is an ecological buffer zone. And for this pilgrim at least, it includes a very sacred grove. A four hectare thicket of mature acacia and baobab on the valley floor; tall trees surviving un-chopped by virtue of their closeness to the gate. The grove stands between the last maize and soya fields of Same and Mkomazi game reserve itself. Southwards rank and swampy ground fills the valley bottom, above the grove a grassy airstrip delineates it's eastern margin, in turn surmounted by low scrubby hills.The red earth hamlet and green-painted wooden entrance gate is eastward and finally beyond that the disconcertingly ungulate-free grassland inside the Mkomazi Game Reserve. Maasai pastoralists were evicted when the sanctuary was created in the 1980s; suddenly free from any browsing cattle a species-poor, even-aged commiphora woodland quickly sprang up and now dominates much of the park's western third.

At seven we parked the Land Rover at the great leafy baobab who stands guard at the entrance to the sacred grove. It was immediately apparent that today would be no ordinary safari stroll. The cold mists of the previous night were at last withdrawing skywards and by so doing encouraged, in the drenched and dripping verdure, an incredible chorus of bird sound that filled the soaking air. Apart from some trilling reed frogs and a few hardy crickets the only sound was that of the birds. Hundreds and hundreds of calling birds - of thirty kinds at least.

Donning pack-lite water proofs, and forsaking a redundant telescope and tripod, we stepped out on the muddy track and entered a river of birds. The action started as soon we closed those doors. And it eased only with the rains' return, coincident with a missed call from the modern world, at exactly nine o'clock!

With 360 degrees of constant bird action it feels as though one's brain, like a periscope, has pierced an invisible membrane up through some new planet's surface. One has to move so slow and carefully, very deliberately scanning with the naked eye, then stop to hold, select or relegate, frequently to postpone and loose for good - as unfamiliar calls or unknown movements tease and tug at each slight turn of one's head. In the bright or muted vegetative greens and atmospheric greys, shadows cast adjacent and above, in the clodding terracotta and slippery dark puddles of the ground beneath and out along the straight and narrow, immediately in front, are myriad wildness movements, energy often ignorant of man. Of countless living beings; frenetic, restless bird activity, far faster metabolisms than ours - appearing and receding on every side, and overhead as well, away in all the bushes and up into the sky.

At its best; in a tropical forest bird wave or, as in this thorny grove by Mkomazi, when one is birding through a fall of many passerine migrants in a diverse, partly enclosed habitat; I think it is the conscious discipline which is required to process all these energetic entities, birds seen and, with some luck and skill combined, rapidly identified against a consciously-created mural, a near-uniform background-field, the entire experience dependent upon a heightened awareness of colour, form and sound that, for me at least, keeps birding first, in a league of its own, putting all later sports and games to shame.

On this day there were three of us, three pairs of eyes; grown men, armed with some of the latest bins; and yet we were so easily overrun. Two hours of one of the most constant birding onslaughts Africa can muster - concentration, utter mental dissolution and total enchantment. And after two hours of this I was in need of a pause, if only to catch my breathe. Having been transported back, through forty years, to live again in the best birding forays of my youth, when time so easily stood still and a child's mind of wonder, immersed in glory, walked unspeaking and unchecked.

Finally - to the birds themselves!

So, as they say, let's move now to the bird species highlights of this my latest offering of: "Days in the Field".

Easiest to deal with, to see, and even to identify were the "resident birds"; and among these an especial mention must be made of the Bishops and Weavers. The conspicuous clash of colour plumage blocks, vermillion, scarlet, crimson or white set sharply against various shades of black and near-black, combined with their dancing displays in the swampy area, opposite the sentinel baobab, rendered the male bishops first to be seen and among the easiest to identify. Consequently looks at Zanzibar Red and Black-winged Red Bishop together with White-winged Widow Birds were soon abandoned; as we dealt with small flocks of Eastern Paradise Whydah (65 birds in all) arriving and landing on the road, in their search for seeds and grit, none of whom were yet 'in plumage'. Amongst all the migrant birds some very sedentary pairs of Parrot-billed Sparrows were feeding their fledglings on the road, the parents jumping up to pull down seed heads from overhanging grass tussocks. Five species of weaver were present along the track sides, including three handsome Black-necked Weaver, five Black-headed (Village) Weaver and ten Lesser Masked Weavers; perhaps somewhat surprisingly the only site where we recorded this species, preferentially a rains visitor to fairly dry country, during our week's birding tour.

Among the long distance migrants it is interesting, in this very wet year, to note the continuing scarcity of Red-tailed Shrikes (phoenicuroides) and we only saw two on this morning. In last year's drought they were here in force - typically they winter in dry conditions and are now presumably somewhere further north. Numbers of Spotted Flycatcher (like most migrants they have been arriving in small numbers and very late) are at last slowly accumulating and we saw five in and around the grove. Another dry-land acacia-country species, that is understandably scarce this year, is the Pied Wheatear and only one, a male, was seen at Zangay. And only one other, also an adult male, was seen later in the week, at a very favoured site, in the Angyata Osugat.

Since migratory warblers occupy a broad cross section of the habitat niches available in the Palearctic summer one would expect to see a few species of warbler during any fall of migrants here in Tanzania. Certainly we were not disappointed by the warblers. This year the commonest, or at least the most widespread Sylvia warbler in northern Tanzania, is clearly the Common Whitethroat and we saw two or three individuals, of one or both of the Asian races that 'winter' here, in the acacias around the margins of the wood. Eastern Olivaceous Warblers may locally outnumber Whitethroats and we saw four, and heard several others, in the two hours spent here. We found and saw three Great Reed Warblers very easily beside the track, as they were calling constantly and even singing in that monstrous frog-like voice, clearly reveling in or fighting one another in these wet conditions. As we reached the edge of the camp compound I was beginning to wonder whether a repetitive "dzre-dzre-dzre-dzre-dzre", reminiscent of a sowing machine or the line on a heavy fishing reel winding out, a sound we could hear all about us, was Orthopteran stridulation or some distant bishop or weaver's song. Suddenly a small, slim brownish bird with rounded tail threaded up through the lower branches of a partially-leaved acacia and then turned to face us and began to sing, in full view, at over two metres above the ground. The penny dropped as we looked at the open orange gape and diffusely streaked pale breast of the first River Warbler that I have seen since Lake Balaton in mid May 1979 (whilst on an RSPB project to investigate Great Bittern ecology in Hungary). Russian River Warbler, by Sergey Yeliseev: flickr.com/photos/yeliseev/We saw two others slightly less well nearby and many more were singing in the vicinity. Half an hour later whilst my colleagues were catching up on some resident bird species near the reserve gate (a softly singing Bare-eyed Thrush, two splendid male Hunter's Sunbirds and a pair of "Dodson's-type" Bulbuls) I walked up the sloping path toward the virtually unused airstrip. River Warblers seemed to be singing all around me and in one small bush three birds were slinking about and eyeing me cautiously through the mesh of twigs, they included a slightly yellowish-breasted bird, potentially a first year, together with a delicate looking 'soft-faced' Marsh Warbler with yellow soles and one of several unusually confiding Thrush Nightingales as well as one of two pale eye-browed, rufous-tailed eastern Nightingales (of the races africana or hafizi) out of four Nightingales that were seen during this morning walk. We later calculated that we had heard or seen not less than 26 River Warblers during our two hour session.

Not for the first time in Africa the most difficult birds to deal with on this wet, grey morning were not, as is often the case, the cryptic skulkers mentioned above but the swifts skimming overhead, up there in full view but in very poor light. There was a constant procession of mostly very dark swifts flying, perforce, fairly low and chiefly eastwards into Mkomazi reserve. African Black Swifts nest in the great cliff faces of the Pare and Usambaa mountains and in considerable numbers, however given the very wet conditions during the night of December 12/13, it seems likely that a large percentage of the birds we saw could have been Common (European) Swifts from rather more distant breeding areas in the Palearctic. Among all these all-dark birds were some smaller, paler, partly coffee-coloured Nyanza Swifts and about ten pointy-tailed White-rumped Swifts as well as a fairly typical smattering of chunky Little Swifts of many that we recorded later in the day. Incidentally my friend Alastair Kilpin phoned yesterday to tell me that on the night of 18 December many swifts perished in very heavy overnight rainfall around Klein's Camp on the north-eastern boundary of the Serengeti National Park. Most of the victims were Common Swifts and a large proportion of those were first year birds downed by the cold and rain and unable to struggle out of the long wet grass (see note below).

We also recorded a possible movement involving some fifteen House Martins and over four thousand five hundred Barn Swallows (chiefly in the opposite direction to the swifts i.e. westward); these swallows have been conspicuous by their relative absence over most of northern Tanzania 'this autumn'. During our week's safari we noticed that along the east-west highway Barn Swallows became very much commoner east of 38 degrees (E) longitude in the lower, more typically tropical, reaches of the Pangani river valley. Many of these eastern birds doubtless hail from the more healthy agricultural landscapes of Russia, and the former USSR, and one cannot help speculating that the paucity of swallows further west may reflect the 'endemic eastward wave of decline' in Barn Swallows, and other once very common birds, that has become so evident in the brutally-industrialized farmlands of the new European peninsula.

Finally mention must be made of the cuckoos. Although no solely Palearctic-breeding species was observed this day three species of cuckoo were calling in the grove: Red-chested Cuckoo with its prophetic and currently highly accurate cry of "it will rain" (or to my ears "give me milk"!) and two smaller 'woodland cuckoos' the onomatopoeic Diederic Cuckoo and the African Emerald Cuckoo ("hello judy" but to my ears more like "chop it, you bet") together with another bigger bird the smartly black and white Jacobin Cuckoo two of which we found flopping about, woefully wet and very bedraggled searching for caterpillars in acacias near the park gate. This last species is a particularly interesting one for a substantial proportion of the population of the race Clamator jacobinus pica that occurs in East Africa is probably derived from birds breeding on the Asian continent. They arrive in northern Tanzania with the multitude of Palearctic south-bound migrants in November-December and smaller numbers move back through the Pare-Tsavo area in March-April; they are hardly ever recorded here at any other time.

Bird Species recorded at Mkomazi Zangay Gate December 13, 2006 (0700 - 0900 hrs).

Crested Francolin 20, Yellow-necked Spurfowl 4, Emerald-spotted Wood-Dove 12, Ring-necked Dove 2 (the populations of all open country 'savanna' doves have been greatly reduced in Northern Tanzania by an epidemic of Newcastle Disease in August -October 2006), Red-eyed Dove 2 (in wet years they temporarily Lesser Striped Swallowdescend into the plains), Laughing Dove 1 (cf. 23 in a visit in November 2005 - Newcastle Disease), Namaqua Dove 3, Orange-bellied Parrot 12, White-bellied Go-Away Bird 5, Jacobin Cuckoo 2, Red-chested Cuckoo 6, Diederic Cuckoo 4, African Emerald Cuckoo 2, White-browed Coucal 8, Little Swift 25, White-rumped Swift 9, Nyanza Swift 250, African Black Swift ca 3000+ and European Swift ca 1500+ (constant movement east in what must have been "mixed flocks" ), African Palm Swift 25, Speckled Mousebird 10, Little Bee-eater 3, Madagascar Bee-eater 2, Lillac-breasted Roller 2, European Roller 1, African Hoopoe 1, Red-billed Hornbill 2, Von der Decken's Hornbill 6, African Grey Hornbill 5, Trumpeter Hornbill 2 (unusual here in what is normally 'dry bush' country), Black-throated Barbet 2, d'Arnaud's Barbet 5, Red-and-Yellow Barbet 2, Lesser Honeyguide 1, Nubian Woodpecker 1, Cardinal Woodpecker 1, Sand Martin 2, African Rock Martin 4, House Martin 15, Red-rumped Swallow 12, Lesser Striped Swallow 18, Barn Swallow 4500, African Pied Wagtail 2, Tree Pipit 1, Black Cuckoo-shrike 5, Yellow-vented Bulbul 12, Dodson's Bulbul (and intermediates) 6, Zanzibar Sombre Greenbul 8, African Bare-eyed Thrush 3, Pied Wheatear 1, Thrush Nightingale 9 + Nightingale 4, White-browed Scrub-Robin 12, Spotted Morning Thrush 14+ (one incubating one large blue egg in mud pot nest on the inside window ledge of the ladies' toilets), River Warbler 26+, Marsh Warber 1, Great Reed Warbler 7, Sedge Warbler 1, Eastern Olivaceous Warbler 9, Common Whitethroat 3, Willow Warbler 1, Zitting Cisticola 1, Rattling Cisticola 7, Grey-backed Camaroptera 3, Grey Wren-Warbler 6, African Grey Flycatcher 3, Spotted Flycatcher 5, Tsavo (Purple-banded) Sunbird 2, Hunter's Sunbird 4, Variable Sunbird 1, Eastern Violet-backed Sunbird 8, Long-tailed Fiscal 2, Red-tailed Shrike 2, Tropical Boubou 3, Slate-coloured Boubou 5, Brown-crowned Tchagra 2, Orange-breasted Bush-Shrike 2, Northern White-crowned Shrike 7, Fork-tailed Drongo 2, Pied Crow 2, Eurasian Golden Oriole 1, Red-winged Starling 2, Greater Blue-eared Starling 2, Superb Starling 22, Parrot-billed Sparrow 6 (pair with dependent young), Red-billed Buffalo Weaver 15, Black-headed Weaver 5, Lesser Masked Weaver 10, Black-necked Weaver 3, Baglafecht Weaver 1, Chestnut Weaver 4, Red-billed Quelea 180, White-winged Widowbird 20+, Zanzibar Red Bishop 8, Black-winged Red Bishop 15, Green-winged Pytilia 22, Red-cheeked Cordonbleu 5, Purple Grenadier 2, Red-billed Firefinch 10, Cut-throat Finch 8 and Eastern Paradise Whydah 65.

NB: Owing to the adverse weather conditions this morning no raptors whatsoever showed themselves until over an hour later, when the next period of rain had ended.