Birding slowly

Malachite kingfisher often seen flying around the dam catching fish

Reaching the 300 hundred mark is like reaching the 100 run mark in cricket, you’ve reached the century and now you think your good enough not to put effort in... well I know I am still an amateur after reaching 300 but each bird forward is harder and harder to obtain, I have to work harder at getting them, which can be discouraging because either you see a bird and do not have the binoculars or you have the binoculars and don’t see birds… such is the case for every woodpecker I've tried to find here.

Malachite kingfisher

Despite all of this the list slowly ticks over and there have been some exciting ticks to add to the list as well as to the list around Serarou.  So after mentioning how slow the new birds come, shortly after my last blog on birds I had to fetch a cricket that landed on the roof. While up there I noticed a larger different swift-like bird flying around. I had to get back to the cricket game and so kept in mind the bird I saw and went to go look in the book later. What I soon realized that what I had seen was the Mottled spinetails.  I figured I better make sure as they not common at all in R.S.A.. Hoping that it wasn’t a once off fly by I kept an eye out for them, and to my excitement I have seen them regularly since. I am still yet to make the effort to obtain a photo and mini-cricket always seems to get the better of me. This would be the great garden tick of the year so far.

Pin-tailed Whydah, eyeing out the females on the ground

Currently with the change in season it is encouraging to have the African migrant birds I saw in the beginning of the year start arriving here. Woodlands kingfisher is as noisy of an arrival in South Africa as he is a noisy one here.  Plum-coloured starling not as common but around and the dull boring birds start to put on their breeding plumage, thus birding times are good. The cuckoo’s have made their arrival here; Jacobin, levailiant, diederic, black and red-chested I have added to my West African list. Unfortunately they did not add to my Big Year list (apart from the Black cuckoo). The Afon hike I did in the Oueme help add the Senegal Batis and another great sighting of the African finfoot (who says they rare?). I did miss out on a Shining-blue kingfisher whom a friend of mine photographed and told me later in the day.

A lilly, because birds seem to fly away
when I want to take photo's, :)

A trip up to the Niger I was hoping for a few more but had to settle for one, the Chestnut-bellied starling. It was great birding up along the Niger River and I wish I had more time and that there was more natural bush around there to explore.

However Serarou still remains my most productive birding area. Out of the last 10 birds, 6 have come from there. The forest walk still has the Oriole warbler flying around and the white morphed African paradise flycatcher. Two new bird for the list were new arrivals to the dam after recent rains. Two Allen’s gallinules were seen near the island in the dam and then a Lesser moorhen towards the back of the dam. That specific area is productive with birds, it is also where I added Little bee-eaters to my list recently. A few new birds flew in while camping one day, White-breasted cuckoo-shrikes flew over our heads to perch above us several times while setting up camp. That same night we had a Red-chested cuckoo calling the entire night directly above our tents. Maybe jet lag works both ways as the bird kept us up the entire night calling? Doing a night drive around the property we had a great sighting of the Northern white-faced scops-owl, a new species for me and a new one for the list. Then just as I think the only hornbills flying around are the common African grey hornbill one flies by that does not fit that profile and with that I added the Pied hornbill, a new species and new one for the list. 

So with all these new additions my list sits on 325, far off from 500 hundred, just means I am going to have to put some tough birding hours in.

Serarou is great!

Serarou cottage, a great place to bird...