What bird is that!

Spur-winged plover taking off as I tried to get a closer look at Bature dam, Serarou

Birding has been great here in Benin, unfortunately trying to get photos of all of them is exceptionally hard as birds here don’t like people. Before coming to Benin, I thought possibly that birding would be like Mozambique, where all the birds had been eaten and only the common ones managed to escape thanks to their generalized breeding. But Benin is different; logically it is a different country with a different history.

Benin birding isn’t at all easy, but then neither is birding downtown JHB’s CBD. So it is like trying to bird here in the town of Parakou. The gardens are barren and the streets filled with chickens and rubbish. One benefit is that there are many fruit trees around, but that serves the Common bulbul well (a new one for my Africa list none-the-less). There are a lot of chickens and whatever eats their chicken other than them gets shot… one sad story was a Shrika (little-banded goshawk) which ended up in the pot because it was harassing the chicks. So not exactly humane, but then a man has to eat and life is not exactly easy here. This all relative of course... but also the way it is here, despite this Shrika are fairly common, maybe because so are chickens.

Once you move away from the small villages and get out into the country side the birding is great. I have found myself a little sanctuary where I have seen most of my new birds and it stems true in South Africa too… that is, look for water and riverine bush and you almost guaranteed to see birds. The natural rain forest is a good 300km south of where I am, but the riverine bush towers 30 m tall even in the driest of streams. This makes it ideal for those transitional species and some forest species.

Hidden, an African paradise flycatcher watches
from his perch.

My big African year has been muddled up now in trying to keep a West Africa list and Life list and then my African Big year list. However I have got 30 lifers and 66 birds for West Africa so far. Some of them are Southern African species which are a lot easier to find here such as the Blue-spotted wood-dove and Green coucal. So far of the 66 birds I have seen here in West Africa 38 of them occur in Southern Africa, yet some are slightly different. One bird in particular is the African paradise whydah, the one I see a lot here truly resembles its name. Where there should be russet brown it is pure white, and when it flies through the forest canopy one can’t help but think it’s a fairy (whatever fairies look like). Seeing it for the first time is as exciting as seeing a new bird for the first time. Other birds which are rarely seen in Southern Africa seem to be fairly common here Yellow white-eye and Broad-billed Roller. Although we all know how common common can be when you happen to be in the right spot.

Bearded barbet, one of the most peculiar
 looking birds I have seen.

The rest are new ones to me and endemic to the Sahel line or West Africa itself. Interesting ones have been the Bearded barbet, Brown-throated wattle-eye, Abyssinian Roller and African blue flycatcher to name a few. What is really nice is the absence of Intra-african migrants when all the European migrants are around. This makes it a little less of hype when new arrivals come, like in Southern Africa. Yet it allows one to focus more on what birds from Europe and which ones are from Africa. Despite this, the two European migrants that I have crossed paths with have been the Pied flycatcher, European Oriole, and Western marsh-harrier.

With so many more birds to talk about I will just name a few to and save the rest for the next write-up. Guinea turaco, Yellow throated leaf-love, Senegal parrot, Grasshoper buzzard, Western Carmine bee-eater and Red-cheeked corden-blue. With two types of babblers, Black-capped and Brown babblers, in the area one has to look more closely at which one is which.