James's blog

The following piece by Hans Peeters is from the yahoo group  raptor-conservation via the Tanzaniabirdatlas webmaster Stein Nilsen

The Continued Poisoning of Raptors in Kenya (and Tanzania)

Dear Hirondellers,

Barn Swallow over water: by Martin GoodeyHere in west Arusha; at 3 degrees South - that's in Tanzania (or Tanganyika to some) - for more than three weeks little bands of shining satin Barn Swallows, seldom more than four-to-a-flock, have been dashing north into our persisting drought of death - an East African dust tunnel - visible on the climate maps.

They, together with nearly all the trans-Eremics (to die-hard 'boreocentrics' these are of course Palearctic migrant birds), will be very hard pushed indeed to maintain fat through this sector of their route.  So I hope it's been raining, pouring in an unseasonal deluge, somewhere northwards - in the Horn, across Arabia, or beyond - in the Gulf, Iran and the 'farther Stans'!

Dawn March 30 again she promised some real rain, yet none came, and we saw only two Barn Swallows on the morning walk. However one was a fabulous male sporting the longest tail streamers that I have ever seen - in over fifty years of looking.

Full Moon, 11 March 2009.

"If you go down to the woods today ... you're in for a Big Surprise,
for every Bear that ever was there ... today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic"

Rift Valley woodlandsIn Rift Valley woodlands a bald and bearded birdman paces between leafless acacia thorn and shrubs of wilting yellow commiphora, walking a desert path.  At each step puffs of ochre dust escape on the dry easterly breeze. He's performing a birder's 'jongrom' (a Thai buddhist word, originally from Pali, which describes 'a measured path for walking meditation') and if you listen carefully you may hear a whispered mantra:

"Blessed be avian migrants meek, that they shall inherit this Earth"

A quarter century of globalisation of greed (or somewhat more, according to where you've been living) has ended, it's imploding and entering the void - just like that!

 The poolJanuary 30, 2009
Although leaden thunder rolls around Mount Meru on the heat of every day such moisture as returns to Earth is miserly indeed. Fitting really, the wages of our time.

In the near cool of morning the old blue Land Rover rattles and splutters across the desert plain. Dismas drives and he drops Pi and I first; the springer spaniel and the not so sprightly ornithologist. Hardly together we trot across the arid steppe toward the lonesome pool, now parched and full of bovid bones. All around it's dry and hellish overgrazed. Old safari guides on the Arusha circuit refuse to recognise the changes. They're locked onto routes around 'protected areas'; inside green exclusion zones; so they do not smell the desert wind. By contrast with every pace today I can place my feet in a fine ochre powder which fills the troughs between the waves of hard-nibbled tussock grass. Shaven grasses these; even yesterday's tiny verdant shoots, ungrazed for the moment, are already drooping. Life wilts in the glare of an uncompromising equatorial sun.

Beesleys LarkBeesleys Lark 2: photo Martin GoodeyIt's fair to say the 'short rains' failed and with them so did Beesley's. The Beesley's or Maasai Lark is an elfin, spike-heeled passerine. Inconspicuous, it's just a 'little brown job' - Chersomanes beesleyi. Yet somehow it is as endearing as it's emblematic, it's Critically Endangered. An endemic vertebrate who has lived here, and probably only here, for a milllion years and more. It could have been a 'conservation icon' then, for this tattered shrinking shawl of yellow-brown semi-desert steppe. A unique little area in the shadow of both Meru mountain and the mighty Kilimanjaro. But now Lark Plains has been totally surrounded by skinny 'stake-holders'. Poor pastoralists tempted here by the deep bore-holes drilled very recently by 'the Lord's do-gooders'. Consequently flock numbers have gone through the roof; after only two years everyone is desperate for grass. Marketing Maasai misfortune has made this little pygmy the rarest land bird in all of the Afrotropics.

Checking over my shoulder I see Dismas turn and stop the car. He is dropping Martin a kilometre distant on the south side of the dust-filled track that bisects the plain. Together they will pan and scan for a glimpse of the littlest lark. Perhaps they'll strike lucky where last we saw four birds, just one week ago.

I'm 500 metres further out now, heading for two very isolated acacias who are hunched beside 'the pool'. Suddenly Pi stops, and points, and I make out the tiny tell tale apricot blob of a Beesley's front-on, up a-top a tuft of withered sedge. Good, there are two adults birds here; but alas no young. The same story as last week; when we found and filmed two pairs, both bereft of young, over there where Martin is now, on the south side of the track.

I call Martin on the radio that is clipped to my waist belt. In time he comes over and takes up a sniper's position. However all attempts by James and Pi to very gently move the little birds closer to the seated photographer are fruitless. So eventually we leave Martin to secure what images he can alone. Sure enough after an hour or so of patient waiting some definitive shots are "in the can." From these photographs we can see clearly that these two birds are indeed different individuals from those four he captured digitally last week.  

Montagus HarrierPi: photo Martin GoodeyPi and I have walked to the two acacias to gain some necessary shade, since by ten o'clock the heat is fierce indeed. As we near the thorn trees an indescribably beautiful male Montagu's Harrier, in perfect plumage, drifts silently overhead. He's the only harrier that we see this day.

So where did we go birding in the first week-end of September 2008?
Burchells Zebra: photo Anabel Harries

Well, we went to our local park - Arusha National Park where, on average, we go twice a month.

It costs $80 (US) in TANAPA entrance fees for two adult 'foreigners', in a local car with a local driver, for a day visit; that's for twelve hours 0700 to 1900. Every visit is well worth the money; being completely different from the visit before. Every visit yields fabulous surprises. Each visit becomes a safari in itself. Sunday September 7, 2008 was no exception; even though it was my fortieth trip to Arusha National Park.

Why do I go birding?
Because most days it feels like a wonderful gift; for nigh on fifty years thus far - a fulfilling life experience.

Should we care about the label?
It matters not whether we are considered bird-watchers or birders, ornithologists or bird-lovers, bird-spotters or rarity hunters, tickers, twitchers or listers.

Are there 'philosophical implications'?
The gift of 'birding' has encouraged me to focus daily upon dynamic meditation; the interplay of the human mind and nature. Specifically to concentrate upon the way this interplay should enhance our life, both as humbled individuals and in the greatest groups.

Lesser Kestrel: Photo Jormo Tenovuo, www.jtenovuo.com

Before humanity's insatiable needs lay waste the farthest corners of our world a few more will be born who'll follow 'the way of birds'. And although they have only ever been a tiny percentage in any one human generation these birders, or ornithologists, will have helped document man's deepest disaster. Planetary degradation. Even though today's birders, like people everywhere, must register unwelcome change from a standpoint, or benchmark, made in the halcyon days when they themselves are young.

Out of all the great bird orders of our world one - the falconiformes or raptors - has probably suffered most from mankind's ecological ambivalence. As hunters of flesh raptors are seen as competitors for 'our' resources; simultaneously admired or hated right down the ages. However out of all the raptors, one species the Lesser Kestrel (Falco naumanni

Little Greenbul (Andropadus virens): Udzungwa, 1880m. Photo © 2007 Louis A. HansenPerhaps the noisiest, definitely the most secretive, avian denizens of the Minziro forest pools are the several pairs of brilliant White-spotted Flufftails (Sarothrura pulchra

Firecrest: by Peter Latham

It's so deeply ingrained it seems impossible to recall how birds became my raison d'etre. Yet perhaps it is possible to suggest how it was James fell in love with "the skulkers". Certainly it became confirmed one soft and sultry evening in June 1965. That evening a boy not yet ten was on hands and knees crawling through the tangled leafy gloom of a sallow grove, on so-called waste land, in Solihull on the outskirts of Birmingham (which is the centre of the English midlands). There he disturbed a pair of pale yellow and delicate olive trochilus Willow Warblers, as they were anxiously feeding flimsy green caterpillars to their unseen young, hidden within a tussock in a tiny thatched roof nest. The adults eyed the quietly crouching child with well-deserved suspicion (for in those days I was still a bit of an egger), yet soon, calling with the softest of bisyllabic "hooo-eets" they accepted my presence and resumed that most essential duty. Early next spring, on the drizzly Saturday morning of Easter (Easter day that year was April 10), he went with a school friend to search for dun-coloured Water Voles which, in those distant days could be found without fail, along the secluded river Blythe where it meandered around the far corner of Bruton Park. 

Paradise Flycatcher: Udzungwa, 1880m Photo © 2007 Louis A. Hansen.

As a British bird lover; born and raised as empire was being seamlessly reconstituted across the Atlantic; it has taken me until quite late in life to begin to embrace those things which cannot be changed. Yet now it seems only proper that a globe consuming empire should be dissolving at break-neck pace, together with our polar ice caps, after scarcely five decades at the helm. Collapsing into a darkness equally as fearsome as that which befell any imperial predecessor.