Nairobi National Park

The political scientist and historian Timothy Garton Ash once memorably described all British foreign policy since 1945 as "footnotes to Churchill". For me, all my birding in East Africa has been footnotes to Nairobi National Park.

A Long-crested Eagle (Lophaetus occipitalis) in Nairobi National Park last Saturday. 

It was here, back in 2000, that I had my first ever experience of African birding. I was taking a group of British MPs around Central Africa - Rwanda, Burundi, DRC - and like most people we had routed ourselves through Nairobi because that's where all the NGOs are headquartered for their operations in this part of the world (this was all before I joined the dark side and became a diplomat). I was blown away. Even without my binoculars, and with only the antediluvian Ber van Perlo guide to the Birds of East Africa to show me the way, I still came away having seen several tens of species in a matter of hours.

But that was nothing. The legendary Brian Finch, who has published a checklist to the birds of the Park, regularly reports seeing between 180 and 200 species of birds in a day. A day! My own best total for the park - and it's the largest number of species I've ever seen in a day, anywhere in the world - was 129. That figure is pretty fresh in my memory, because it happened this Saturday. But when I lived in Kenya I would come to the park every second or third weekend, and it was only on my very last visit before we left the country - and perhaps there's some symbolism here - that I had my first visit without seeing a species that was new to me.

Grey Crowned-cranes (Balearica regulorum), looking like they've just had a tiff

Those pesky Cisticolas - a complex group to tell apart. Ten species occur regularly in the Park, one of the highest species densities I've encountered anywhere. On this visit I saw six of those species. I make this a Stout Cisticola (Cisticola robustus), common in the grassy areas of the park.

There are many things that make this place special. Let's start with the most simplistic; it's on the doorstep of a major international city, right next to that city's two major airports, and yet it is still a place where you can reasonably expect to see three of the "Big Five" African mammals (Lion, Buffalo and both species of Rhinoceros) and have a reasonable chance at a fourth (Leopard). And these are wild animals, some of which regularly migrate in and out of the Park. A Cheetah showed up recently. It wasn't introduced. It walked here. To find this kind of megafaunistic wildness right next to a big city is, almost literally, incredible. Perhaps needless to say, it's also under threat - a subject I'll return to.

Turning to what makes it special for birding, though, the key element of the Park is variety of habitat. Effectively it's divided into three areas; highland forest, long-grass plains, and short-grass plains. These support a different variety of both mammals and birds, but there are further micro-climates around the various dams that have been built throughout the park, and the riparian forest that follows the Mbagathi river. There's more to it than this, of course, but that'll do for the broad-brush introduction.

What can I say about this particular visit? Well, in short, it came up trumps. After my last, melancholic visit in 2013, the place was back on form, or perhaps I was. I visited over two days and saw, in total, 150 species of bird, 17 species of mammal and three identifiable reptile species. Of these, seven of the birds and one each of the mammals and reptiles were new to me. So still, after perhaps 15 or 20 visits, this place continues to launch surprises at me.

Striped Kingfisher (Halcyon chelicuti)

Female African Paradise-flycatcher (Terpsiphone viridis).

In short, Nairobi National Park is a treasure. It's one of the best and easiest places in Africa to see Common Ostriches (Struthio camelus), which live in high densities here. I had a male Kori Bustard (Ardeotis kori) saunter out in front of me on the road, and watched at least 70 White Storks (Ciconia ciconia) launch themselves northward in a favourable thermal. I saw my first African Emerald Cuckoo (Chrysococcyx cupreus) in a treetop, and jumped for joy in my car at my first African Pygmy Kingfisher (Ispidina picta). I saw a huge African Rock Python (Python sebae) shimmy out of a hole in the road and watched a magnificent Ayres' Hawk-eagle (Hieraaetus ayresii) quartering over the forest. There were Lions (Panthera leo) basking near one of the dams, and a Bush Duiker (Sylvicapra grimmia) creeping through the undergrowth of the forest above. This is still a place (touch wood) where numbers of White-backed Vultures (Gyps africanus) and Ruppell's Vultures (Gyps rueppellii) remain healthy, and where Palearctic migrants like Turkestan Shrikes (Lanius isabellinus phoenicuroides) and Greenshank (Tringa nebularia) can find fuel to come back to us for the summer. And all these were just on this visit. I could go on, and on, and on, but rather than do so I'll let the unusually large number of photos in this post speak for themselves.

My first ever African Pygmy-kingfisher

Another Kingfisher - this time a Juvenile Malachite (Corythornis cristatus), biting off more than it could chew.

A Ruppell's Vulture (R) with two African White-backed Vultures.

Despite all this I have a feeling that people think that birding, or seeing animals here, is cheating, just because it's next to a city. But these creatures are as wild as those you'll see in the Masai Mara or Amboseli. It's not cheating. It's extraordinary. It's almost unbelievable.

And perhaps, soon, it will be unbelievable that it ever existed. Nairobi is expanding, and, thankfully, increasing in prosperity. It needs space, and infrastructure. To those with a certain frame of mind the Park is wasted space - a blank area through which lines can be driven. There has probably never been a time when someone has not had their eye on the Park for one economic reason or another, but the latest threat is serious; there is a proposal to drive a new train-route through the Northern section of the park, right through some of the most important watering sites and with potentially devastating effects on the Park's ecology.

So, come. And pay to come, and make it worth everyone's while to keep this unsurpassed urban birding location in existence, and springing surprises on me and you, into the future. If you don't come, they will build on it.

The ever-photogenic Superb Starling (Lamprotornis superbus)

Looking down towards the Mokoyeti river. Long may it continue to look like this.

South Sudan

When I first started working on the part of Africa I now cover, I began searching for Blogs that would aid me when I had a chance for birding between meetings in the region. One that I've mentioned before was Tom Jenner's Birding Sudan, now sadly defunct as he has left the country, though it's still well worth checking-out if you're heading there. Another is it's counterpart - Mark Mallalieu's Birding South Sudan. Even when I began reading Mark's Blog it had already "ceased publication" after he also had moved on from the country in late 2012. But it still makes for gripping reading, if birds are your thing, and I've been dreaming of the possibilities of raising my binoculars in the country ever since.

Alas, Mark's Blog was written in a different age, at a time when it was still possible to hope that the dreams of independence that had burned for decades and been finally realised in 2011, would result in a future of peace and prosperity.

It didn't work out that way, unfortunately. The ruling elite fell out amongst themselves in December 2013 and what followed was months of horrific fighting in which, of course, the civilian population was the victim. Despite a peace agreement that, even as a diplomat, I'm prepared to say has at most a 50% chance of holding in the medium term, fighting is erupting all over the place, and it's not pretty. Nowadays Juba, the capital, is febrile and nervous, and movement outside it highly restricted. It's not Mogadishu. But it's not a picnic either.

As a result of this, my first visit to South Sudan at the beginning of last week was a whirlwind of meetings restricted to the capital only. My only chance for some furtive birding was when I had lunch by the Nile one day. It's wide here, but surprisingly swift with the hint of rapids, and with several small islands covered with rushes dotted across its breadth. Mark Mallalieu describes days here with hundreds if not thousands of White-winged Terns (Chlidonias leucopterus) migrating up the river. Mine was not that day. There were a couple of Common Sandpipers (Actitis hypoleucos), though, flitting nervously between the islets. Pied Kingfishers (Ceryle rudis) used a small boat as a lookout point, and Black-headed Herons (Ardea melanocephala) and Squacco Herons (Ardeola ralloides) patrolled the water's edge. Overhead was the usual African scene of hundreds of Yellow-billed Kites (Milvus migrans parasitus) and Marabou Storks (Leptoptilos crumeniferus). The surprise, though, was a hulking great Goliath Heron (Ardea goliath) on a rock in the middle of the river. It's not a bird I associate with cities and it's one I had missed entirely last year. It sat, almost completely immobile, for the entire time we were there.

Lunch by the Nile. My only chance for birding in Juba

I would hope to visit Juba in more propitious circumstances. And I'd love to get out of the city and explore a little. But the chances of this are not as great as they should be, I fear. For now we'll just have to read Mark's Blog, and dream.

A quick stop in Addis Ababa produced two local endemics - some White-collared Pigeons (Columba albitorques) at the airport and some very tame Brown-rumped Seedeaters (Serinus tristriatus) at our hotel. As an indicator of how tame, the photo below was taken with my phone.

A Brown-rumped Seedeater with biscuit crumbs in Addis

From Addis it was another jump to Nairobi. This city is unsurpassed for urban birding in my experience, and Friday was no exception. After a day in the office we crawled out through Nairobi's appalling traffic to a friend's place in Karen - a suburb to the West of the city. I've written about this place before, and it didn't disappoint this time. Yet again, with no more effort than sitting at the table in the garden with a beer, a new species found its way to me. A Cabanis' Greenbul (Phyllastrephus cabanisi) - indeed a whole family of them.

But even this pales into insignificance in comparison to Nairobi National Park, where I spent the majority of the weekend. That, though, deserves a post of its own.

Nairobi - abundance

I've written before about the abundance if birds that you see in Equatorial Africa. I've been lucky enough to bird in tropical South America as well, but it can't compare with Africa, or at least East Africa. No doubt the overall levels of diversity are the same or greater, but presumably it's the habitat or, I like to think, perhaps, a longer history of cohabitation with humans, but in any case they're certainly easier to see in Africa than South America, in my limited experience.

To give an example, I think my overall list on my first visit to Amazonia was around 120 species. Bear in mind that this was proper rainforest birding, which is not straightforward, and that I was the only birder on the expedition, so I wasn't overwhelmed with help, but, still, it's not a vast figure for three weeks in the "torrid zones" (as they used, charmingly, to be called). By comparison I've seen 110 species in one day in Nairobi National Park, and my year list by this stage last year, which was almost all spent in Kenya, was almost 400 species.

Still, not all locations are created equal, and Nairobi does seen to have some sort of magic. Perhaps it's the altitude; at almost 2000 metres it makes for a near-perfect climate, neither too hot nor too cold, and ideal for spending a whole day in the field. Try that in Amzonia and you'll be exhausted pretty quickly. It's also perhaps the fact that Nairobi spans at least two distinct ecosystems - the open grasslands of the Athi plains, dotted with acacias, to the South, and the highland forest to the North. If you play your cards right, and even if you simply drive from the airport to the centre, you're going to bridge those two ecosystems and see birds from both habitats.

I had a day in Nairobi between my visits to Sudan and Somalia, and another day there after Mog. I spent most of that time in the leafy suburb of Karen, named after Karen Blixen, whose farm was there. How did it measure up?

My friend's hideaway in Karen

Well, I won't go into the usual list of species, partly because I'm on the road and can't be bothered to check their taxonomic names, but I'll add the list later. Suffice to say that having spent 5 days in Sudan, and seen 21 species, within 10 hours of arriving in Nairobi I'd seen 38, and had 45 before I left, and this without any real effort beyond sitting in my friend's garden with a beer.

All the effort I put in. Garden, binoculars and beer.

Amazingly this list included a LIFER - a bird that had eluded me all the time I lived here; a Common Scimitarbill (Rhinopomastus cyanomelas), which made sure I saw it by repeating its loud song so long, so insistently, and so close that I couldn't ignore it. And perhaps even more amazingly it included a species I managed to tick off while basically asleep after the early morning flight from Khartoum - the unmistakable and unmissable sound of a flock of migrating European Bee-eaters (Merops apiaster). Good luck to them. They've a long way to go and according to all the emails I've seen from my old Kenyan birding networks, the migration is very late this year.

Anyway, as I said, Nairobi has a certain magic, which perhaps comes across with my enthusiasm. But I mentioned that I'm on the road again. Where to? Well, the clue's in the photo below - a book I never would have believed in a million years that I would ever need. To my enduring amazement this is a work trip, but I'm taking the time to explore as much as I can while there. I'll post in due course.

Never, ever, thought that I would need this book. Not in a million years.