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At nightfall on December 12 our blue Land Rover 90 with her four human occupants might have been seen by satellites of Google Earth scurrying west toward the little town of Same (pronounced Saamay) which is midway on the main road which joins Dar es Salaam, on the Indian Ocean, with Nairobi high on Africa's ancient plateau.

To her left a deep red sun had just set, sinking beyond the horizon of the Maasai steppe of central Tanzania, drowning in a saturated collage of cloud, of the most soft and fragrant hue. Whilst on the opposite side of the road mighty galleons of cumulus lay moored at gaunt piers vaulting out of the savanna plain - outliers of endemic-rich Eastern Arc mountains. The lofty billowing thunderheads a gorgeous exuberance of warm and gentle colour retained, far above the quickly deepening dusk, all the blessings of waning daylight's fruits and flowers - of peach, saffron and tangerine.

A tingling animal apprehension quickly dispelled such reverie; for quite suddenly a tube-wave of cloud, silent and ominously white, was surging eerily through the serrated crest of indigo mountains all along our night-side flank.

The ghoul cloud seemed sure to engulf us in a hammering torrent of rain before we could make landfall in the still distant fluorescence on the eastern edge of Same town. In fact we reached the lights of the Elephant Motel under inky darkness just as the heavens cracked open; a mighty roar, the first thunderous salvo of a bombardment which pounded town and mountain at intervals throughout the night.

Short-toed Eagle: Photo Tommy Ek

Just back from a very intense nine days birding. Ploughing tracks between the red mud of Mkomazi, the damp Cisticolas of Nanja black cotton, and the dapper undescribed-drongos of a dripping forest-edge in the West Usambaa - a total of 363 bird species recorded.

On Friday morning December 15; after we managed great views of the ‘kuni’ pair of the now near-invisible Beesley’s Larks; they are only to be found these Indian Ocean dipole days by following-up on their shorebird-like “kreek-kreek-kreek” through the knee-high waving grasses; at ten forty a typical adult Short-toed Eagle (very probably a male) came-in low southward from Kenya (and heaven knows where else), swirling round, hovering twice, clearly hunting en route, over the driest area remaining – the acacia commiphora grazed mosaic along the northern fringe of the Angyata Osugat and over the Sinya track.

Typical is - one with a complete soft brownish grey ‘shawl’ and grey-streaked white lower throat, grey-brown covert bar contrasting with darker brown flight feathers of the upper wing, with blackish stippled lines on the underwing coverts and well barred flight feathers, and a white breast very lightly marked with crisp dark brown crescent rows, the belly and undertail coverts appeared an almost immaculate white.

My client - the illustrious ‘Greater Baltic’ conservationist Tommy Ek - managed to fire-off three pretty good, yet distant, pictures of the bird’s underside as it began drifting away toward West Kilimanjaro-Ngare Nanyuki; and then I dropped to kiss the warm yellow earth in euphoric prostration.

1st of December 2005, just as now, saw me not so very far from the jagged crown of Mount Meru. I was guiding in Tarangire National Park on the inaugural Bird Seekers tour of northern Tanzania. The weather was warm and sunny, clouds were light and puffy - it was definitely dry.

A thunderous tropical rain storm arriving, most unusually out of the north, broke against the great black massifs of Meru and Manjaro in the early hours of November 23. Shortly after daybreak Dismus and I once again escaped Arusha via the northbound "Nairobi road"; for a while yet this African highway is both dangerously and delightfully narrow - all too soon it will be upgraded by engineers of the next dynasty to a far more murderous, three-lane 'Chinese modern standard'. Maybe. Because today raging torrents of coffee-coloured water frequently impede our progress as they rush the great slopes down. And, once we have descended to the desert plain of larks, it is clear, very few cars are making it through from Kenya.

Tuesday November 21 really was a Red Data Day.

Returning to Osugat, after an ankle injury enforced my absence for eleven days, Dismus and I discovered many changes out on the desert plain. In eastern Africa we are in the midst of what a climatologist might call - an exceptionally productive "short rains event". On the arena, behind the walls of Meru, occasional showers averaging perhaps a few drops more than one, and on every other day, have thrown a green veil across the ochre yellow soils and tempted the desert steppe into partial bloom. Presumably after loitering in the Horn lands, at long last Palearctic bird migrants are arriving, many local passerines are nesting and some butterfly populations are being bountiful, dispersing downwind and westward in search of habitat new.

At last yesterday, Friday November 10, at ten in the morning, Dismus and I trundled away from the seething mass of bureaucratic compromises that daily permeates existence here in the city of Arusha. In less than an hour, fossil oils fueling the old blue Land Rover, we had put a million years between ourselves and the dark-day rain puddles of the twenty first century African street. Yes! We were back in the sparkling silence of a little desert, the one that is called Angyata Osugat.

Angyata in the Maasai language means a treeless expanse - a type of steppe to the ecologically-minded; and Osugat their name for the seasonal watercourse (a korongo or wadi) that drains the area northeastwards toward Lake Amboseli, just inside Kenya territory. The Angyata of the Osugat is indeed a unique fragment of the earth's surface, lying as it does between three towering volcanic giants: Kilimanjaro to the east, Longido to the north and Meru to the south - one that I have come to call in these gladiatorial days "The Arena of the Larks".

Photo:Anabel Harries Dusky Flycatcher:

Muscicapa adusta

Rather plump and short-tailed; some races are greyer above; the breast is smudgy contrasting with the pale throat.

M. adusta has marked intrapopulation (i.e. within the races) and clinal variability (i.e. across the range).

Out of the Log - and into the line of fire - These Days - One Year Ago - November 11, 2005

I spent a couple of hours in the morning around "transmitter hill" on Burkha Coffee Estate by Olasiti; wildness increasingly squeezed between Arusha's small 'safari-specials' airport and the city's sprawling lower westside Majengo 'suburb'.

Usambara Eagle Owl: Photo Steve BirdDay One: Drive west, via a brief visit to the Eluanata wetlands, to the eastern shores of Lake Manyara where we will spend the remainder of the day searching for the range-restricted specialities of this savannah wetland. Night at the edge of Tarangire National Park.

Anyone with the slightest interest in African bird life, whether they be living in or just visiting Tanzania, is indeed fortunate. For here in Tanzania there are birds literally everywhere.