Arusha National Park visit

Lesser Flamingos - Jenny thought this would make a good jigsaw.

Arusha National Park is often left off the itinerary of visitors to Tanzania's National Parks.  Other parks have lions, cheetahs, rhinoceros, wildebeest, crocodiles.  Kilimanjaro has a higher mountain.  Arusha has small areas of open grassland, large areas of wetlands, woodland and forest and a huge dormant volcano looming over all.  It has a selection of large mammals - elephants, giraffe, buffalo, zebra, assorted antelope but mostly it has birds.  With 550 species recorded it has more than Tarangire and only a few less than Serengeti.  I have now seen 141 species in 5 visits - plenty of work to do still.

Hard not to photograph Little Bee-eaters.

A Rufous-naped Lark singing away (The have rufous napes in other parts of Africa!)

A Giraffe posing nicely.

It is a small park and you can drive most of it in a day.  Yesterday we decided to take a track we have avoided on previous visits in an effort to get up high.  Mostly we keep below 1600 m but there are a dozen or so bird species that only occur above about 2000 m so after a drive to the Momela Lakes we climbed to about 2200 m to a picnic ground.  The road kept going up but some people driving down said it deteriorated badly from that point on.  We possibly would have walked further up but earlier we had seen several buffalo way higher than we thought they would be.  Birding along the road and at the picnic ground produced some lifers - Abyssinian Thrush, Bar-tailed Trogon and Brown Woodland-Warbler along with other forest specialists such as Mountain Buzzard, Kenrick's Starling, Hartlaub's Turaco and Mountain Greenbul.

White-eyed Slaty Flycatcher

Brown-hooded Kingfisher

Otherwise we had a great day in the park.  It was quite busy with family groups enjoying the holiday and safari vehicles with foreign tourists but apart from a few places it was easy to get away from them all.

Giant Fig - according to the signboard you can drive an elephant-sized car through it.

Maio Waterfall above 2000 m.

Ancient Podocarps at Maio Waterfall.

Another highlight was a flock of 22 Maccoa Ducks on Small Momela Lake.  This is a close relative of the Australian Blue-billed Duck and is becoming increasingly rare.  Arusha NP is one of the few places it can be seen in any numbers - formerly in 1000s now not more than 100 at a time.

Maccoa Ducks (stiff, erect tails at the back) with Southern Pochard (at the front).