We've been staying for a short while in Kijabe and it has been great to do some up-country birding. Juggling work and looking after a 4-year old means atlassing is a bit of a challenge but yesterday I hit the magic 100 species for a pentad mark with 103 total - and that is without a single waterbird species! What helped was visiting 'The Forest' - an ecotourism project in Kureita forest near Gatamaiyu where I picked up Mountain Buzzard, Scarce Swift, Horus Swift (interesting to have those at such high altitude??), Brown-capped Weaver and Mountain Greenbul. That was an afternoon visit - an early morning visit with a focus on birding would bound to add several more species... (which Patrick Ngotho demonstrated with his card of 83 species in Feb this year).

Species of note at the lower altitude of Kijabe which are new to my list over the past 2 months included Cardinal Woodpecker (seen by Jeff Davis and added to the pentad card), Long-billed Pipit, African Firefinch, Yellow-necked Spurfowl (apparently maybe not really recorded for Kijabe before - but then, there are a number of species which have arrived here over the past few years... a drying climate and removal of forest...), Red-throated Wryneck, White-browed Scrub Robin and Long-crested Eagle (which used to be common here but these days is rarely seen apparently). Also there are swathes of Leonotis flowering in the shambas slightly lower than Kijabe (c. 2,000 m) - and there were literally dozens of Golden-winged Sunbirds on them - and just one Bronze...

Bizarrely (and this is one of the many interesting things with atlassing with a set protocol as with the Bird Map), the 103 species did not include species I would totally have expected such as Black Kite, Little Swift, Tacazze Sunbird (which I've seen a lot around most of the time), Eastern Double-collared Sunbird and Grey-headed Sparrow..

Colin

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Colin Jackson
A Rocha Kenya

Cell: 
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www.arocha.org
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http:/kenyabirdmap.adu.org.za