It was a cold, dull and damp November morning when Dad rang and said he had found just the thing for our planned December trip together: a birding tour in sunny Kenya.
The mention of birdwatching dredged up childhood memories of trips to Tring, outside London, where I would sit freezing in a bird hide for interminable periods of time as Dad trained his telescope on teal and widgeon ducks nestling along the water’s edge.
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| Verreaux’s eagle owl at Lake Baringo |
But surely birdwatching in Kenya would be entirely different, I figured; it would be a safari with some twitching on the side. Dad could spend as long as he liked looking at the Speke’s weavers from one side of the van while I watched giraffes from the other.
We were to spend 11 days with local ornithologist Ben Mugambi on a whirlwind tour of some of the best birding spots – and safari parks – Kenya had to offer. We would travel to the Samburu and Masai national reserves and would drive through the Rift Valley to the foot of Mount Kenya.
It was only when I printed off the bird species list sent through by the trip organiser that I realised I had inadvertently signed up for the equivalent of an East African birding “boot camp”. It was a 25-page checklist containing 1,090 species of birds, starting with the common ostrich and ending with the cinnamon-breasted rock bunting.
“Is it too much birding for you?” Dad asked when he next called. I worriedly scanned the itinerary, which contained paragraph after paragraph of likely bird spots for each location of our trip, but replied that I’d be happy as long as I got to see a Rothschild giraffe. (I’ve been obsessed with giraffes since a visit to Tanzania in 1999.)
It was on the flight over that Dad admitted to a bigger birdwatching ambition for the trip. What would make him really happy, he said, was if he could manage to view at least 112 species of birds he had not seen before.
Having acquired a copy of The Clements Checklist of Birds of the World at some point in the early noughties, Dad’s birdwatching had moved to a new level. He has travelled to Antarctica on a Russian ice-breaker and trekked through the jungles of Uganda under armed guard in search of new species. That was why he wanted to find those 112 new birds in Kenya, he would have seen 2,000, he said – about a fifth of the world’s bird species. Not bad when you think there are only about 580 different species in the entire British Isles.
Bird boot camp turned out to be not so much a holiday as a test of my endurance and stamina as I spent hours with binoculars glued to my face.
I was forewarned: as soon as Ben and Dad shook hands at Nairobi airport, they were twittering about the birds. Within seconds, it seemed, I knew that Ben’s favourite Kenyan bird was the red and yellow barbet.Ten minutes along the dusty road from the airport and the binoculars were out as they spotted sacred and hadada ibises along with red wing starlings and cattle egrets.
We drove straight to Nairobi National Park. Dad was raring to go but I was exhausted from the flight and crashed out on the back seat of the van. When I woke an hour later, I’d missed about 50 bird species – and a couple of Masai giraffes.
When we checked the bird list that night – Ben and Dad would exhaustively tot up all our spots each evening – we had managed to see the first and final birds on the list, the ostrich and the rock bunting, in just the first day. Little did I know it would be days before I got even a sniff of game as we went on the hunt for some of Kenya’s rarest birds. Up at 6am the next day – this was an unwelcome routine of the trip – we drove along the eastern edge of the Rift Valley, stopping off in scrubland where we found a beautiful green-winged pytilia, its red face raised to the sun.
While the pace was punishing, I loved the odd places where we would stop to watch birds, attracting curious smiles from the locals who clearly thought we were mad. We went to the Kinangop grasslands to spot the Sharpe’s longclaw, which is an endangered bird. One early morning, we even took a turn around some sewage ponds on the outskirts of Thika in search of birds and ducks.
And even though I didn’t always pay that much attention to the birds, I couldn’t help but learn about them on our long journeys. Ben was like a bird encyclopaedia. He told me about the female jacana, which lays the eggs and then leaves the male bird to bring up the chicks. At the other sexist extreme, the hornbill male seals the female in the nest and the male then feeds her for nine weeks as they wait for the eggs to hatch.
On the sixth day Dad had his birding epiphany, and the following day I had mine. For him, it was seeing his 2,000th species, the elusive African black duck, at Naro Moru River Lodge. Mine was stumbling across a huge Verreaux’s eagle owl asleep in a tree at Lake Baringo. It was about 2ft tall and perching just 20ft above me. I had never seen such a majestic bird. It was as wonderful to me as all the lions, giraffes and rhinos we saw at Lake Nakuru National Park.
By the time we made it to the Masai Mara for a final day on safari, we had travelled more than 2,500km across Kenya and seen hundreds of different birds as well as 30 different mammals from giraffes to black rhino. And as we drove down to the airstrip to pick up a flight back to Nairobi, Dad spotted his 400th bird of the trip, a western banded snake eagle sitting in the tree. We stopped for one last look through the telescope before the raptor took flight, leaving Dad a very happy man.
When I returned to London, I agreed to another birdwatching session in Norfolk over the Easter holidays. We may see only avocets rather than eagle owls but I have to admit that I am rather looking forward to it.
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Details
Sarus Bird Tours, (£2,150pp inc flights, meals, transport, lodging) www.sarusbirdtours.co.uk
Ben’s Ecological Safaris, www.bensecologicalsafaris.com
