Quail Plovers and Golden Nightjars in the Sahel

January 2023: Senegal (and Mauritania, sort of ...) 

Part 1 - The NorthWest

As a young birder in the UK, yearning for opportunities to travel, I used to look jealously at the early birding package holidays offered to the Gambia.  All those exotic West African birds so close to home but alas well beyond my financial means at the time.  These days, while folks still go to Gambia, the surrounding country of Senegal has become more of the go-to birding destination, offering a number of species not available along the narrow Gambia River.  Some friends had been in recent years so when the dates of a Wings trip, led by intrepid young world birder Ethan Kistler meshed with my calendar I took the plunge and booked the trip.

Saturday, January 28 - Popenguine

A direct flight from New York to Dakar, well that was easy.  Today was basically the 'arrival and buffer' day for the group to assemble at a comfortable hotel in the Dakar suburb of Popenguine.  Of course with a group of keen birders all arriving on time some local birding was bound to happen and so we checked out some local reserves and scraped together a lit of 65 species in the local area, finishing with spectacular Standard-winged Nightjar quite close to the hotel.

Sunday/Monday, January 29/30 - Richard Toll area

Some early local birding around town added mostly more of the same but good views of Gosling's Bunting were a treat,  Then we headed North into the fabled Sahel region where goats seems to outnumber people and green vegetation is but a distant memory in these degraded lands slowly devolving into desert under the weight of human and livestock pressure. 

The birds definitely had an African feel with Greater Blue-eared and Chestnut-bellied Starlings, Piapiacs, Abyssinian Rollers and Western Red-billed Hornbills.  A visit to the 'zone aéroport' in Richard Toll added some really nice Sahel specialties with Cricket Longtail and Fulvous Chatterer both showing very well and Eurasian Thick-knees and Temmink's Courser scattered through the scrub.  Even though it was a long day, it felt like we were exploring, new vistas, new habitats, and new birds so a group of very happy birders arrived at our hotel on the banks of the Senegal River feeling pretty good about what we'd seen.

Habitat shot with Eurasian Thick-knees

One of the traditions on these Senegal trips is a 'virtual' visit to Mauritania.  If you look at other birder's eBird maps, many have some birds seemingly just across the border but most, myself included, were actually safely scoping from the Senegal side of the river.  Is this kosher?  Maybe not, but it's fun and even has a popular term to describe it, it's called 'border flirting' and it certainly added interest to our evening at the hotel.  In the end we were able to spot around 30 species across the river, making sure that each species was over the opposite bank and safely in Mauritania as the border here hugs the North side of the river.  Nothing very exciting but I do enjoy that large, pleasingly yellow block on my eBird map.

Sudan Golden-Sparrow

The next day we kept picking away at the special Sahel birds in the area, tracking down Sennar Penduline-Tit and Little Gray Woodpecker among thorn trees completely devoid of any sort of undergrowth and swarmed with ravenous goats.  We also had an owl experience here.  I almost never find owls and joke that I simply do not have the 'owl gene' but today was an exception and I looked up to see a Northern White-faced Owl and, as we got closer realized it was actually group of three of them.  This never happens for me.

Sennar Penduline-Tit and Northern White-faced Owls

Our last stop of the day was the fabled Diatar Track, famous as the 'go to' site for Golden Nightjar. Unfortunately we'd had depressing news the day before, suggesting that much of the habitat has just been destroyed for some sort of development.  When we arrived it seemed that the reports were true, construction equipment on site and most the habitat stripped bare.  There were a few scraps of habitat left however so we formed a line and walked-in hoping to flush a straggler and sure enough, not 10 minutes later, Ethan shouted out that he had a nightjar and we all enjoyed wonderful views.  How long this site remains a 'go to' spot, who knows, but I feel we were lucky and I was very glad to see this spectacular goatsucker up close.

Golden Nightjar

Back to the hotel to celebrate and get ready to head back South in the morning.  The NorthWest corner of Senegal was good to us, now to try some of the other areas.

Despite the French colonial influence, the food in Senegal was more
'hearty' than distinctive.  The beer was good though ... 

Tuesday, January 31 / Wednesday, February 1 - P.N. du Djoudj

I'd been looking forward to this site for a while.  'The Djoudj' as it's known is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and globally important habitat for water birds, the first really major wetland South of the Sahara on the Atlantic Coast.  As such it's stuffed with birds in Winter, quite literally hundreds of thousands of birds crammed into its lagoons and scrapes.  It's quite a spectacle and we basically had a day-and-a-half to enjoy some really high quality birding.

Our hotel at 'The Djoudj'.

The first afternoon we couldn't wait for the baking mid-day heat to ease a little and to get stuck in to the birds we could see and hear in the distance while we had lunch at our hotel.  Once we got to the scrapes, the birding did not disappoint with tens of thousands of White-faced Whistling Ducks anchoring a supporting cast of duck species, thousands of Greater and Lesser Flamingoes and a good selection of shorebirds all close and easy to see.  There were even some lifers to some in the group, with Greater Painted-Snipes in the marshes and for me too when we were able to tease out a River Prinia, a bird with a small and scattered distribution across the Sahel.

The next morning we were up early and off for a full-day in the reserve.  The day started with a boat ride, meant to show the spectacle of breeding Great White Pelicans to tourists but also an excellent way to get into the marshes and see more birds.  In the end, the pelicans alone were worth the price of admission, flocks numbering in the thousands feeding, swirling overhead and noisily squabbling at the colonies.  There were plenty of other water birds too with African Darters, African Spoonbills, Spur-winged Geese and a host of others all easy to see from the boats.  By the time we got back to the dock I think we all felt we'd had our fill of birds but a whole afternoon, and some key target species lay ahead.

Great White Pelicans.

A West African Nile Monitor, a herp spectacular enough to
distract us from the birds.

The boat ride, and the area nearby, also gave us a few non-birds for the list.  Intricately patterned Nile Monitors basked alongside the channel and at one point we encountered a mother Warthog with her family enjoying the peace of a reedy sanctuary.  Most interesting to me though were the African Golden Wolves which sat, seemingly unafraid near the tracks, dozing through the heat of the day.  I'd heard that there was a change to see this species here but had assumed they'd be nocturnal and so expected no more than a glimpse of a canid crossing a trail at dawn perhaps.  In the end they were quite confident and allowed a relatively close approach in the van.  Always good to see a wild canid.

Warthogs.

African Golden Wolf.  Once considered a jackal, more recent DNA analysis suggests this is a complex
species with DNA from Ethiopian Wolf and (European-type) Gray Wolf.  A little like our Eastern
Coyotes, its lineage suggests a bit of a journey.

In the afternoon we headed to some scrubby areas with more lagoons and enjoyed thousands of dabbling ducks (8,000 Garganey!), more flamingoes, a good selection of waders and even flushed a number of Short-eared Owls.  The targets here though were bigger birds and after failing to track down an Arabian Bustard by line-walking through the scrub we were gifted when one of the local guides spotted one walking behind us while we were scanning for shorebirds.  As for Black-crowned Crane, I was feeling pretty good about myself for spotting two incredibly distant birds but we soon had better looks when we bumped into a flock of over 100 feeding together in a single dry lagoon.  All in all a very satisfying day of birding.

Black-crowned Cranes and Chestnut-bellied Sandgrouse

Thursday, January 2 - St. Louis

Mostly a travel day but productive stops added goodies like Allen's Gallinule and African Pygmy-Goose.  We ended up in the St. Louis area and, having made good time, decided to give the local star attraction a quick go to 'take some of the pressure off' our needing to find all the birds the next day.  As it turns out we did remarkably well, finding five (!) Quail-Plovers, Desert Cisticola and Horsefield's Bushlarks at our first stop.  Well that went well.

Quail-Plovers

Quail-Plover was undoubtedly my most wanted bird on this trip.  It is of course not a quail and definitely not a plover, but people 'think' it's probably a diminutive Button-Quail, a Hemipode if you like.  They are most definitely unique and even their behavior is eccentric, the shuffle and dance their way across the sandy floor of their scrubby home.  Having seen them only in books I had thought they were larger than they actually were and flushed two before I realized what I was looking at.  We had a few on the ground eventually and got our fill watching them.  What a cool bird, definitely worth the trip.

Friday, February 3 - Forêt Classée de Kousmar

Onwards and a second visit to good Quail-Plover habitat yielded two more (!) Quail-Plovers and a Saville's Bustard then more driving took us to the Kaolak area and lunch at our hotel. In the afternoon we headed out onto sun-baked scrubby plains (Mad Dogs and Englishmen?) but were rewarded with Saville's and White-bellied Bustards and Chestnut-backed Sparrow-Larks before heading to the area's major birding attraction.

Saville's Bustard.

At dusk, most nights, a small island nearby hosts an impressive roost of thousands of Scissor-tailed Kites and Lesser Kestrels.  We arrived early but one look at the ancient leaky dugout canoe, and muddy banks of the waterway we'd have to cross to get to the island, convinced us to stage our watch safely from the river bank.  The kites did come though, hundreds if not thousands, and higher than some nights but it was a spectacle for the raptor-inclined.

Saturday/Sunday, February 4/5 - Toubacouta area

The famous Saloum Delta and some mouthwatering target birds ahead.  Our main goal this morning was the scarce, and hard to find White-crested Bittern (sometimes White-crested Tiger-Heron).  This is a trophy bird indeed, thinly spread and prone to hiding in dense mangrove forests, I was really excited at the chance to see this one.  We set off for our morning boat-ride full of anticipation and had a great morning in the mangroves with Goliath Heron, Mouse-brown Sunbird and Swallow-tailed Bee-eater among the highlights.  The boatmen clearly knew where the bitterns were often seen and we worked back and for past one area in particular but alas today there were no bitterns.  After a rather lavish consolation lunch, we tried again and went to a couple of new areas where Ethan pulled the rabbit from the hat and spotted a bittern in the mangroves close to the waterway.  This bird wasn't at all shy and allowed us to pull the boat up quite close for photos and close views for all.  A very nice bird to add.

Goliath Heron and African Darter

White-crested Bittern

And so on to the East of Senegal ....