From: Fleur Ng'weno <fleur@africaonline.co.ke>
Date: 2008-04-06 11:23
Subject: Tana River Delta birds
Tana River Delta birds
Greetings all
Over the Easter holidays, I had the chance to take part in a Kenya Museum Society outing to the Tana River Delta. The weather was hot and the landscape was dry, but each morning there were thunderstorms coming from the sea, a foretaste of the rainy season. We stayed in Kipini, where I could observe the birds roosting on the sandbanks on the south bank of River Tana. The lodge provided a nine-hour (including lunch) boat ride up the Tana River to Hippo Lake, a widening of the river in which hundreds of hippos congregate. The Hippo Lake area is surrounded by seasonally flooded grasslands, and although the ground was mainly dry, the grasslands were full of birds, more than we could count. Some bird highlights:
Evening roosts on the sandbanks and mudflats at the river mouth, including estimates of:
400 Glossy Ibis
400 Sooty Gulls
2000 White-winged Terns
Also small numbers of Gull-billed, Caspian, Lesser Crested, Roseate and Saunders’s terns
Flocks along on the river banks and in the seasonally flooded grasslands, including estimates of:
2000 Cattle Egrets
100 Common Squacco Herons
200 Yellow-billed Storks
400 Spur-winged Plovers
200 Collared Pratincoles
And a group of 20 African Skimmers
A gathering of scavengers at a carcass near Hippo Lake, including:
±12 Hooded Vultures
± 6 African White-backed Vultures
± 6 Rüppell’s Griffon Vultures
2 Lappet-faced Vultures
And Carmine Bee-eaters everywhere.
These brief observations confirm that the Tana River Delta is an extremely important area for large congregations of African and migratory waterbirds.
Wishing you good birding, Fleur