Ashy Starling: photo Anabel HarriesThere is a very special bird, known by the name of Ashy Starling Cosmopsarus unicolor, who lives in the bushy baobab woodlands of Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park. This is a Tanzanian endemic bird. Bird watchers from all over the world make a special effort of getting to the main gate of Tarangire, even of going into Tarangire Safari Lodge, just for a brief meeting with this bird. The Ashy Starlings are very tame, they live a safe and comfortable life here, because ‘NN Security’ (that is national nature security!) protects the woodland that is their home. So tame in fact, that some of them walk with a cool and jaunty swagger, straight through the open door of the TSL café, each and every morning, heading straight for the cake and sugar!
Now Ashy Starlings are considered very special birds because of their very restricted range, occurring in only one habitat, within one country. They occur nowhere else, only on the Maasai steppe of central Tanzania. They are however rather a dull bird to look at being, to our eyes at least, a sooty-brownish colour, albeit with a fine long pointed tail. In the proper light conditions however we can see that many of their feathers have a subtle bronzy-green iridescence that certainly glitters and glints in the sunshine.
Not very far to the east of Tarangire National Park, in dry Acacia bush-land skirting the flank of the Pare mountains, lives dark and dowdy Ashy Starling’s most splendid and glorious cousin, their very close relative, in the same tiny genus of two, the magnificent Golden-breasted Starling Cosmopsarus regius. These birds are exactly the same size, shape and build as ‘Ashies’, yet they are definitely one of the most marvellous looking birds in all of Africa, if not in all of the world. Golden-breasted Starling is also an East African endemic, whose range is confined to what we now call the Somali-Maasai biome. So you must look for them only in a certain type of thorny Acacia-Commiphora woodland that grows on bright red soils, between Yabello in southernmost Ethiopia and Kilosa in Tanzania, at an elevation of less than 1200 metres above sea level.
Golden-breasted Starling: Photo Derek Toomer
During the past three years in Tanzania, healthy groves of this beautiful open woodland (it’s always full of exciting birds), have become very much harder to find. The sky-rocketing demand for quality cooking charcoal, in our expanding economy, has pushed the price (even at the roadside source) to over 8000 TShillings a sack. This means that enterprising teams of young men, hiring dusty donkey trains, have already cleared almost every mature acacia tree from anywhere within 15 kilometres of the tracks and paths that criss-cross the land inhabited by this starling.
In June 2006 you could still meet a family group of seven Golden-breasted Starlings, who lived in some old trees close to a petrol station, beside the highway just north of Manga, (which is on the road to Segera and Dar). But when I went back there with a client in December almost all the trees had gone. It took us an hour, walking through the low and tangled scrub, to find a single surviving ‘Goldie’ sitting in the shady canopy of the last tall acacia. But why had this fine tree (and its one starling) been spared the wood-cutter’s axe? Well, quite clearly this fine old tree ‘belonged to someone’, for round the back on iron chains hung two bleached wooden barrels, hollowed-out tree-trunk bee-hives.
So while in the beginning it seems the Golden-breasted Starlings had all the luck, with their splendid imperial clothes, it seems that their dingy-looking cousins the Ashy Starlings have a much brighter future ahead of them, protected from our need for nyama choma charcoal, in the sunlit woods of their Tarangire home, by the TANAPA guards of ‘NN Security’.
