Dear Kenyabirdsnet members,

During the last 2 years I had the great privilege of initiating and 
maintaining Kenyabirdsnet mailing group. In this time, the group has 
grown from 12 members to almost 100 now (3 are still pending…)
Many interesting bird observation have been sent during this time 
and I believe that a great deal of information have been collected, 
using this media. For those who remember, the first record for the 
group was the 3rd Pectoral Sandpiper for Kenya and ever since a lot 
of other `status', `distribution' and `rare' records have been sent 
in; The last one being a new species to the EA region - Sooty 
Shearwater! 
Personally, I feel very proud of this initiation and believe that I 
have learnt a lot from the many records that came in. As a 
moderator, it was sometime very hard to decide which message will be 
of interest for the rest of the group and which might be too 
specific and will just overload on people computers (without any 
specific, interesting record in it). I hope that by moderating this 
system I've managed to keep everybody happy and if I did some 
mistakes on the way, I hope that these have been forgiven already.

In my personal view (in spite of what I wrote in another mailing 
group as a member), I believe that `Kenyabirdsnet' should get
more and more grassroots members, coming from site-support groups, 
naturalists, guides… who are spread throughout the country. As
long as this mailing-list will keep on running, its main power will 
be in its members being spread all over the country and thus 
contribute records from as far north, south, east and west corners 
of Kenya.

In the coming future, most probably I will have to move away from 
Kenya into Musoma, Tanzania. 
I hope that while there, I will be able to contribute to this 
mailing list (and maybe also help in the Tanzaniabirdnet that has 
been established sometime last year). It is my hope that even when I 
will be away (physically) from Kenya, we will still be able to 
maintain and run this great source of information with no problems 
(after all it is the internet…) I also hope that there will be no 
need of me stepping down from moderating the group, but if things 
come to that, I believe that it will be possible to find someone 
else to take over or just decide to make it an open forum, with no 
moderation at all to the different messages that are being sent and 
to the members.

I would like to thank all of you for making this system work and 
hope to keep on getting messages and more members to this very 
special group. You are all welcome to visit me in Musoma, Tanzania 
and hopefully we will be able to find some interesting birds over 
there also (after all, this is where the Mara river mouth is and 
there are huge Papyrus swamps and edges around It that were never 
explored. Who knows what is waiting over there...)

All the best to you all and happy birding,
Itai Shanni