Tanzania 2019-23: A quiet few weeks

Since our visit to Mkomazi National Park in early January, Jenny has been at work most days and I have stayed at home. I am comfortably retired and am keeping busy with several projects. I've long wanted to relearn calculus as I loved maths at school and university and have long forgotten the calculus I learned. Amazing how little maths I used as an agricultural scientist really. Anyway it turns out that I needed to relearn algebra, trigonometry etc. so I am working my way through some online courses and will tackle calculus when I am caught up.

I can thoroughly recommend the Khan Academy courses which
can take you from primary school to university level.

I usually take my laptop out into the back garden every morning and spend as much time watching birds as solving equations. We have had little rain in recent weeks and the birds are coming regularly to the birdbaths.

Grey-backed Camaroptera

Thick-billed Weaver

Baglafecht Weaver

Adult and juvenile Rüppell's Robin Chat

Red-billed Firefinch

Juvenile Rüppell's Robin Chat

My tourist visa expires in a couple of weeks and I have to leave the country and return - hopefully with a new 3-month visa. Jenny discovered that Nambia has recently relaxed their COVID entry requirements for tourists so we have booked a 3 1/2 week safari for Feb and March. We visited there in 2015 and had a great time. This time we will go to some new areas and repeat visits to others. There are still quite a few new bird species there for me. So over the last couple of weeks we have spent quite a bit of time planning routes and choosing accommodation. We will be there for the wet season so it will be interesting to see how different things are compared to our last visit which was in May-June and very dry.

Our pink road through Namibia

The weekend of 16-17 January was International Wetland Bird Count Day (or something like that) and we went to Arusha National Park with a couple of local birders to count the waterbirds there. Normally there are thousands of Flamingos so I was not looking forward to counting them. This time however there were only a few hundred Lesser Flamingos, no Greater Flamingos and manageable numbers of ducks, grebes and waders. I think we ended up with an accurate set of numbers. Neither of our comrades had been to the park before so we had a nice time showing them some of our favourite areas and animals.

Godwin, me and Edwin at Momella Lakes, Arusha NP.

Cape Teal and Black-winged Stilts.

Augur Buzzard

A very close Giraffe.

I met up with James and Izack from the Attraction Bird Conservation group and we had a great day birding in the Oldonyo Sambu acacia woodland areas last week. Highlights were Gabar Goshawk, Spotted Eagle Owl, Abyssinian Scimitarbill, White-headed barbet, Lesser Honeyguide, Pygmy Falcon, White-necked Raven, Mouse-coloured Penduline Tit, Foxy Lark, Tiny Cisticola, Yellow-bellied Eremomela, Bare-eyed Thrush, Straw-tailed Whydah and Tree Pipit.

Spotted Eagle Owl

Lesser Honeyguide

White-naped Raven

Yellow-bellied Eremomela

Then yesterday Jenny and I joined James Nasary and three other club members for a walk in the Mount Meru forest. Part was through farmland and part in the forest which was a beautiful with tall gnarly trees festooned with moss and ferns. Several large ground orchids were also flowering. There are quite a few birds in this forest that I haven't seen and I had high hopes. Forest birding is very difficult however and many species (including some potential lifers for me) were heard but not seen. It was cool with 100% cloud cover so activity was low. We climbed to 2200m - the highest I've been on the mountain. At the turnaround point I had only one new species (Evergreen Forest Warbler) but on the way back I managed three more (African Hill Babbler, Cinnamon Bracken Warbler and Hunter's Cisticola). We made plans to return on a sunny day soon. It turns out we were lucky with the weather as today it rained heavily and it would have been no fun if that had happened yesterday. When we got back to the car we could see the peak of Meru with fresh snow. Other birds seen in the forest and adjacent farmland include Hartlaub's Turaco, African Olive Pigeon, Mountain Buzzard, Bar-tailed Trogon, Mountain Greenbul, Stripe-faced Greenbul, Black Saw-wing, Bar-throated Apalis, Broad-ringed White-eye, Abyssinian Thrush, White-starred Robin, Yellow-bellied Waxbill and Grey-headed Nigrita. The only mammals seen were a troupe of Blue Monkeys and a couple of illegal bulls.