NAIROBI NATIONAL PARK 16th AUGUST 2019

Dear All,
On Friday 16th August Nigel Hunter and myself arrived at the Main Gate
to NNP just before 6.40am, the road from my house was clear of traffic
and we had left there just after 6.25am, in the evening leaving
through Langata Gate we journeyed back without any hold ups. It wasn’t
all plain sailing though, on arrival the top car park was quite full
of tourist four-wheel drives and minibuses, the queue for processing
was right out the door and the second check-in office was completely
shut-up and only one person working the entrance gate. The personnel
worked efficiently and we were served twenty minutes after arrival,
with another ten minutes to pass through the gate. For the number of
people it worked well so if KWS is getting a deserved very bad
reputation for wasting visitors valuable game watching time standing
in queues then it is not the fault of these ground staff and the blame
entirely lies with the incompetency of the administration.

It was dark and cold, as it happens we could have well spent another
twenty minutes in the queue on this occasion and not missed anything!
Hardly anything called or moved on the drive in, and Ivory Burning
Site’s residents continued to have a lie in. Nagalomon Dam was
possibly the least interesting as I can recall. It contained a
Yellow-billed Stork, Great Egret, about six African Darters, a couple
of Black-winged Stilts, but little else worth remarking on. It had got
no lighter and if anything colder when we took the back road to Hyena
Dam. The nicest observation was a Red-faced Cisticola with a
plain-faced juvenile. Hyena Dam had attracted twenty-five Wood
Sandpipers, and one each of Common Sandpiper, Little Stint and African
Jacana, with four Black-winged Stilts. There was a Barn Swallow with
the Plain Martins, and many Palm Swifts, which were a common sight
over much of the Park, far more than is normal and the same applied to
Red-rumped Swallows.