Recent Reports - February 2007
African Cucko-Hawk: Photo Anabel Harries
A female African Cuckoo-Hawk in Arusha National Park and other smaller gems.
On Sunday February 18 I was once again out at Angyata Osugat, for the fifth time this year, Osugat is of course the "Lark Plains of Oldonyo Sambu" - not 40km from Arusha. This time I was with my great friend Alastair Kilpin from Klein's Camp (CCA) on the edge of the Serengeti.
This was the fifth time in 2007 that I was looking at the one "habituated group" of Beesley's Larks that breed there.
For the first time in three years they appear to have bred successfully, as two fledged young were found with their parents on an earlier visit with Jim Vaughan and Sheena Watson on January 10. Nevertheless, after three years of drought, we believe that the total population of this Critically Endangered "newly upgraded" and charismatic little species remains at significantly less than forty individuals.
On Monday February 19 it was off to Arusha National Park; this time "riding Swarovski-shotgun" (well, we were in the setting for John Wayne's movie Hatari) with Zul Bhatia and yet another Nature Trek Tanzanian Highlights group, more or less freshly arrived off the plane from the UK.
On our arrival at the park gate a juvenile and attendant adult Broad-tailed Warbler Schoenicola platyura alexinae (typically this is an extremely skulking, albeit very lovely, species) were found 'just hovering around', in the open and at head height, over the middle of the grey volcanic cinder fan that is the entrance car park, surely a quite unprecedented observation of the species?
In the late afternoon we were treated to exceptionally prolonged views of a female African Baza (African Cuckoo-Hawk or even Cuckoo-Falcon) Aviceda cuculoides (of the race verreauxii) the sole African representative of this lovely primarily tropical Asian genus.
African Cucko-Hawk 2: Photo Anabel HarriesWhat a joy it was to find this beautiful and so seldom-seen bird, foraging at head height within the mid-canopy of this lush evergreen forest. We watched this adult female Baza for at least five minutes, often at very close range, in one tree that was emerging from just below our view point, here on the edge of the Ngurdoto crater. So close that we could see she had deep reddish irides to the eyes, not bright yellow - as "the spurious quicksilver" (thanks here due to Ian Wallace) of some of the newer field guides would have you believe!
During the time that we watched her she would occasionally fly out towards us and circle, on those long, loose flappy wings, from her favoured perch on a broad grey lichen-encrusted bough at our eye-level.
Once she swept up into a fruiting tree right in front of us; where two red-beaked Crowned Hornbills and an exquisite Eastern Black-headed Oriole were also feeding. In one delicate sortie she executed an extremely agile, on-her-back-flip-over and grasped what appeared to be one of these pendant globular green fruits.
Then she returned to the original tree, where she stood and consumed something stringy, viscous and orangey-pink. An item which we took to be the fleshy pulp of these small green fig-like fruits, hanging in loose bunches from the twiggy tip-ends of this tree.
Maybe it was not a fruit, perhaps it was an insect or even a chameleon that the bird took, for the books make no mention of fruit in the diet of Aviceda, but two keen clients who watched this also, similarly thought it had taken and eaten a fruit.
Whilst thirty feet away, on the other side of the little earthen track, at the crater rim viewpoint, we could see a Grey Crowned Crane sitting on its nest and a magnificent Saddle-billed Stork in the open papyrus swamp mosaic of the crater floor. Three hundred African Buffaloes also down there, chewing the cud, were a magnificent reminder that this really was an only-in-Africa "Jurassic Park" location!
