We were in the Tana Delta again from March 29th to April 1st.
As has been noted by others, the coast is teeming with palearctic migrants these days with European Rollers, Golden Orioles and Eurasian Cuckoos by the bucketload in any area with trees. The derelict wastelands of the failed JICA irrigation scheme (TDIP) are now becoming bushy and small Acacia sprouting up, with regular red-backed and red-tailed shrikes in all of them. Obviously the mathenge (Prosopis juliflora), introduced by the other failed Worldbank Bura irrigation scheme upstream, is also invading the area and becoming a real threat all over the delta. Unfortunately also the local communities are starving, their wells are drying out or becoming more salty and their only livelihood alternative is to destroy more of the forest (charcoal, poles, etc.). As some clever guys have blown up the inflatable dam at Sailoni, the 3 lakes to the east of the TDIP have been dry since 2006 so there is also no more fishing and the riverine forest there is dying (and being burnt from the eastern side). Tragically, still zero progress on the excellent 2005 proposal by Quentin Luke et al. (Critical Ecosystem Partnership fund) to restore the area and create forest corridors. Very soon there will be nothing left to connect. It would seem a spare inflatable dam has been in Mombasa for a year now but also no action on that front, perhaps a strategy of Tarda to starve everyone out of the scheme hoping they will encounter less opposition for some of their other planned failures such as sugar cane.
Back to the migrants: a late Eurasian Marsh Harrier was still floating around over the floodplains, a Eurasian Hobby was travelling with its lunchbox barn swallows just upstream from Kipini. A dark form Booted Eagle over the Tarda guest house at Gamba.
The sand quarries used for the Garsen Lamu road are increasingly becoming significant wetlands with 40 White Pelican fishing in one of them, dozens of hippos in another plus the usual gangs of Yellow-billed Stork, African Spoonbill, Sacred Ibis, Long-tailed Cormorant, Spur-winged Lapwing and the occasional Goliath Heron all easily visible from the road. Some of them seem to become salty also, a trend to watch now that groundwater recharge from flooding is in terminal decline.
At the Kipini sandspit on the southern bank of the river thousands of waterbirds still come to spend the night. We counted some 2200 Glossy Ibis coming in small groups at sunset (and taking off in a wide band low over the river in the morning) before it got too dark to distinguish them from the Whistling Ducks and other stuff ( a few Comb Dock and several thousand terns and some 600 Gulls). It would really be important to count that place with some night vision equipment, especially as we saw only a single! Glossy Ibis in the floodplains the next day while we normally see hundreds. Therefore, during the annual maximum (December-February?) we expect that there could be more than 10000 Glossy Ibis in the Delta, hopefully all going to the same roost in countable batches.
We took the boat from the Kipini Mwembe lodge (now confusingly called Tana River lodge) to Lake Mbililo and, though waterbird numbers are much lower than earlier in the year, we still tallied 6 Pink-backed Pelican, 10 African Darter, 18 Long-tailed Cormorant, hundreds of Cattle Egret, 2 Black-capped Night Heron, 1 Common Squacco, 3 Striated heron, 5 Intermediate Egrets, 5 Goliath Heron, 2 Purple Heron, 1 Blackheaded Heron, 3 Grey Heron, 2 Hamerkop, 19 Yellow-billed Stork, 1 Abdim’s Stork, 11 Wolly_necked Stork, 9 Open-billed Stork ,18 African Spoonbill, 30 Spur-winged Goose, 60 Egyptian Goose, 6 Knob-billed Duck, 180 White-faced Whistling Duck, 30 Fulvous Whistling Duck, 13 African Fish Eagle, 4 White-backed Vulture, 64 Water Thick-knee, 150 Collared Pratincole, 320 Spur-winged Plover, 3 Long-toed Plover, 2 Ruff, a greenshank and 60 African Skimmer. At Mbililo itself there were “only” about 200 hippos and crocs galore along the way. On the way back we had the privilege to observe a Pel’s Fishing Owl dozing away in a large tree (see picture). White-throated and Northern Carmine Bee-eater are abundant and there are still a few Blue-cheeked hanging around.
The Tana River is pathetically low, with people crossing it on foor in places!, and the floodplains are so dry that the vast majority of the tens of thousands of cows have moved into the forests, which, as in the rest of the country, are burning, burning and burning… It does attract a few dozen Senegal Lapwings but that is hardly compensation. At great cost the Water Department is digging trenches everywhere to try to force the river back into its “old” bed (incidentally closing off the main water supply to the western floodplains, enraging the Orma and Wardei and threatening the breeding colonies of Yellow-billed Stork) but as long as nothing is done to stop the river bank deforestation and lousy agriculture practices upstream, the zillions of tons of sediment will continue to clog up the system. As their trenches neither have any geotextile lining nor a low slope we can even expect that the next flood will seriously erode the new banks and take even more sediment down, compounding the problem for the farming communities along the eastern branch.
We also saw a pair of Black-headed Lapwing, a Broad-billed Roller, a bunch of Lesser Kudu, a dozen Waterbuck and an unnecessarily large python (without its head) floating in the river.