Saturday, December 29 - Accra
I woke up that morning in Africa. The day before I'd been in New York but courtesy of Delta Airlines and one of the few direct flights between North America and Africa, here I was getting up early and ready to go birding in Ghana. This was actually my first trip to West Africa and to say I was excited would be a huge understatement, I was ready to see a lot of life birds. First however was breakfast, and lots of patience, as today was a travel day with a long drive taking us from Accra to the Kakum Forest, one of the best scraps of wet tropical forest remaining in Southern Ghana.
Breakfast took for ever, or seemed to, but eventually we were on our way with my expert local bird guide Williams from Ashanti Birding Tours and a local driver navigating our way out of the city and off towards the birds. Perhaps I wasn't looking all that patient though as before long Williams decided to make an unscheduled stop at a dry scrubby area called the Achimota Forest 'while it was still cool', and so birding started quickly and didn't stop for the next seven days.
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| Senegal Coucal and Double-toothed Barbet |
Achimota wasn't much of a forest, it looked more like scrubby waste ground to me, but it was native scrub and early in the morning it was hopping, adding 35 species to the list. For me, the best birds were parrots, a couple of Senegal Parrots and a fly-over AFRICAN GRAY PARROT. The latter was probably an escapee but it was a bird I'd long wanted to see in the wild so it signified some sort of formal 'arrival' ... I was birding in West Africa.
As the morning warmed up we kept pushing on, making a stop at the Winneba Plains and the Fosu Lagoon before stopping for lunch at Cape Coast Castle. This building is a major tourist attraction, and former hub of the West African slave trade, but I was here for birds so did some seawtaching at lunch rather than join the tourist crowd.
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| Brown-throated Wattle-eye and Long-tailed Cormorant |
By mid afternoon we arrived in the Kakum Area and, still having some daylight decided to do some birding along the forest edge at Ebekawopa. Kakum National Park is a relatively small protected area but was surrounded originally by large chunks of buffer forest like this one, unfortunately these buffers are being cut down at a tremendous rate and converted to villages and gardens to feed and house a booming population. It's not an organized effort per se but more the effects of many hands chipping away at the edges. For the next few days most of our birding ended up being in forest edge habitats like this one with occasional forays into the small remnant forest patches. The edges are birdy it turns out but with the forest behind them shrinking that's likely to be a temporary phenomenon. Lots of conflicted emotions today, and on the rest of this trip, but in the end I was here to go birding so that's what we did.
The late afternoon at Ebekawopa was incredibly productive and gave me my first real taste of West African forest birds. There were a whole bunch of unfamiliar families like Gray--headed and White-breasted Nigritas, Green and Lemon-bellied Crombecs and Red-vented Malimbe. There were also some star birds like Black Bee-eater, Olive Long-tailed Cuckoo and Black-casqued Hornbill. The birding was so good that we stayed out until dark, ending the day with Fraser's Eagle-Owl, Akun Eagle-Owl and several calling Brown Nightjars. Not bad for what was billed as a travel day.
Sunday, January 30 - Kakum National Park and Surroundings
The next three days were allotted to explore the area around Kakum NP and it's surrounding buffer forests. We were based at the pleasant, and surprisingly empty, Rainforest Lodge and hotel which was neither a lodge nor in the rainforest, but it was clean, close to the park, and had good food. From there we ventured out to the National Park itself and to various roads and tracks in the surrounding area. We saw a lot of birds.
The highlight at Kakum, assuming you aren't afraid of heights, is the impressive system of suspended walkways and tree-platforms that allows access to the forest canopy. The walkways bounced around rather too much for my liking and the platforms seemed uncomfortably small at times but the access to the birds was superb so I tried my best to ignore the 100+ foot drop beneath us and focussed on all the new forest birds I was unlikely to see from ground level.
The canopy was a treasure-trove of new species for me with wonderfully named species like Green Hylia, Rufous-crowned Eremomela, Yellow-browed Camaroptera mixed in with a host of Greenbuls, Barbets and Honeyguides. We ended up spending two mornings and an evening up there on the boardwalk and saw a lot of birds and even a few mammals like Lesser Spot-nosed Monkey, African Giant Squirrel, and the spectacular Pel's (Giant) Flying-Squirrel. We had permission to go to the platform early and that was just as well because by 9am tourist groups started to arrive, making enormous amounts of noise, and scaring the wildlife, and us, away from the walkways. While we had it to ourselves though, it was a very special place.
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| Lesser Spot-nosed Monkey on the walkway (before 9am) |
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| Rufous-sided Broadbill |
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| Cassin's Hawk-Eagle and Long-tailed Nightjar |
One special afternoon side trip took us on a long drive to the Pra River to 'twitch' ROCK PRATINCOLES which sat motionless on rocks in the middle of the flow. I wanted to see this species very much so had asked for the diversion and thus couldn't complain about the long drive. They are special birds though so it was worth it in the end.
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| Rock Pratincoles (they didn't do much) |
Tuesday, January 1 - Bonkro Village
There were two mega star birds that I wanted to see above all others on this trip. Egyptian Plover was further to the North in the dryer habitats but the other was our main target for New Years Day. We left Kakum after some early morning birding and made a few stops on the way North, one of which actually yielded another much sought after bird of a different type when we bumped into a LONG-TAILED HAWK. We'd been listening and looking for this species for the past few days at Kakum and I thought we might have missed it but it came through for us in the end.
By mid-afternoon we arrived at Kakum Village, a nesting site for the WHITE-NECKED ROCKFOWL, a bird I much prefer to call by it's older name WHITE-NECKED PICATHARTES. These odd-looking, giant, hopping passerines, nest in limestone caves in the forest, are rare, very local and undoubtedly the star birds of any West African birding trip.
To protect them, conservation groups have worked with local communities to leverage eco-tourism revenues to provide incentives to the villagers to look after the birds rather than hunt them. At sites like Bonkro, birders pay a fee to the local villages in exchange for access to see the birds. The money earned is divided up by the village elders and in this case there are plans to expand the operation by building a tourist lodge, allowing birders to stay closer to the birds and to expand both the village revenues and provide job opportunities for villagers. It all sounds very sensible and does indeed seem to work, within minutes of arriving at the village we were on our way down the trail to the forest accompanied by two villagers who had been trained as guides. Now all we needed was for the birds to cooperate.
A half hour into the forest we stopped at the top of a small ridge where there was a limestone outcropping that had created the kind of overhanging ledges that Picathartes needs for it's nests. Sure enough there were several mud nests in the dry area under the ledge and, while it was not the breeding season, we were told that they birds would come in towards then end of the day to inspect the site. So we waited, and waited, for an hour and a half for the birds to come to us, and then ... well it all happened so fast.
One of the locals spotted a bird that had come to a tree about 30 meters away from us and was circling us in the forest but largely keeping at least a few branches between itself and the crowd. There were five of us at this point, me, my Ashanti guide and driver and the two locals, so we were hardly inconspicuous. The bird continued to circle while I fumbled my camera in the fading light, trying desperately to change settings, while tracking the bird and getting a lot of well meaning but mostly unwanted advice from my four companions. The whole thing got quite stressful, which of course didn't help me as I fired off a series of out of focus shots, getting increasingly frustrated, and frustrating my "team" even more. Four africans all earnestly trying to get me on the bird and some even giving photographic advice was all a bit much. In the end I put down the camera, told everyone to be quiet, and just decided to watch, and I'm glad I did because the bird only made one more pass but I was able to put bins on it and get a good look. A bird I'd wanted to see since childhood .... and who needs a photo anyway?
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| Picathartes in all it's slightly out of focus glory. It's hiding all the colorful bits behind the branch. |
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