[1]Firecrest: by Peter Latham

It's so deeply ingrained it seems impossible to recall how birds became my raison d'etre. Yet perhaps it is possible to suggest how it was James fell in love with "the skulkers". Certainly it became confirmed one soft and sultry evening in June 1965. That evening a boy not yet ten was on hands and knees crawling through the tangled leafy gloom of a sallow grove, on so-called waste land, in Solihull on the outskirts of Birmingham (which is the centre of the English midlands). There he disturbed a pair of pale yellow and delicate olive trochilus Willow Warblers, as they were anxiously feeding flimsy green caterpillars to their unseen young, hidden within a tussock in a tiny thatched roof nest. The adults eyed the quietly crouching child with well-deserved suspicion (for in those days I was still a bit of an egger), yet soon, calling with the softest of bisyllabic "hooo-eets" they accepted my presence and resumed that most essential duty. Early next spring, on the drizzly Saturday morning of Easter (Easter day that year was April 10), he went with a school friend to search for dun-coloured Bank Voles which, in those distant days could be found without fail, along the secluded river Blythe where it meandered around the far corner of Bruton Park.

Picking their way through a dense willow copse, between hanging broken branches, across a soggy mulch of last year's blackened leaves, they passed in silence beneath the canopy of the yellow catkin willows and purple budding alders to the back of what was called the frog pool. There they stumbled upon an avian gem, a radiant stripe-faced sprite intent on catching the miniscule midges of spring. A bird of a type previously unseen by any in their gang, and thus a rare bird evidently; one whose name they did not know. What was it? Was it a wanderer from distant lands? Whatever it looked utterly fantastic in that subdued spring light.

I had only recently been given a copy of the Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds (written by Richard Fitter and illustrated by Richard Richardson) and was as yet unaware of the existence of the Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe (sic! - by Roger Peterson, Guy Mountfort and Phil Hollom). Nevertheless in that Easter Saturday moment of 1966 I stood in a damp little wood, clearly on the brink of adolescence and at the beginning of a life birding sans frontières.

We watched that bird so hard; studying it as closely as we possibly could without any optical aids, we followed it on carefully treading feet, as it flitted up and down from spindly twig to unfurling bud. And we willed those images to burn indelibly into our receptive brains. So it was that then and there I believe a link was fused between a child's receptive consciousness and the outstanding power of nature. It was also the moment when I became aware of the pivotal role in the field recognition of birds of a good memory and the importance of conscious attention to detail, both out there in the field and back home with the books.

That tiny exotic-looking bird was not, of course, an incredible Pallas's Leaf Warbler Phylloscopus proregulus as I had hopefully suggested to my friend, but a Firecrest Regulus ignicapillus. Nevertheless a Firecrest in those sixties middle England days was quite a notable rarity. Up until that moment I was unsure as to whether I might already have seen a Firecrest; for in our family we thought we were familiar with Goldcrests Regulus regulus, since occasionally they would appear before us, even in our suburban garden. And at times we had supposed that the fiery orange of their expanded crowns (as revealed by males in moments of excitement) indicated that some of them might in fact be Firecrests.

So, looking back through forty years, I feel that it was on that soft morning of early spring that my will to be a lifelong birder was forged. And an awareness of the hunting ways of the skulker and of skulking was first recognized; an awareness that reinforced my earlier experiences of the breeding habits of the Willow Warbler - of seeing woodland birds right up close.

But it's all too easy in middle age to briefly loose track, sitting at the humdrum desk, of just how far birding can take you. Nowadays though, living in East Africa, I feel very lucky, for my work will take me fairly frequently to little visited regions where real wildlife remains, where events easily conspire to recreate the condition of a child-like mind, the conditions necessary for what Zen Buddhists have called "kensho-dogo"; perhaps best translated into English as "a preliminary awakening of the mind".
Searching for migrant and vagrant birds, sea-watching on a storm lashed headland, and birding on foot in ancient forests are three of my favourite pathways to nature. They are essential to my health, forms of active meditation which enable this very unsubstantial one (my egotistical identity), to step outside, at least momentarily, the confines of the self. As if apparently to hover in the space between all things. When I have been living deep within the urban world of man it has only been by engaging in forms of dance that I could claim to have come anywhere near to such exstasis - to revelations which are increasingly becoming the privilege of those determined few who continue to seek the beauty, and endure the minor hardships, of finding wild nature at the edge.

Naturally there are skulkers in every kind of forest zone yet, in each longitudinal segment of our Earth, it is in the fabulous forests that lie astride the equatorial belt where inevitably one finds the greatest diversity of skulking birds. I came to live in East Africa in 2005 but it was not until last week, mid February 2008, that I finally made it to the edge of the dark green heart of Africa; to the real rain forests, core habitat on the last terrestrial frontier of Earth, the humid lands of the mighty Congo. Incidentally the most enduring no-go area for missionaries of the rabid beast unleashed, the grinning consumer totalitarianism that rules our day.

At fifty years of age the human body is both considerably larger and painfully less pliable than that of a nine year old youth. Consequently and despite what we try to regard as the benefit of accumulated knowledge and skills, of expanded awareness even, I think most of us oldies would admit that tropical forest birding just gets harder as you age. Consequently after the decade which has passed since my Indo-Chinese jungle days I have come to expect to see much less in a day of tropical forest birding than I used to. So it was with total delight that last week, in what was for me a completely new kind of forest (the Guinea-Congolian), I discovered an old man's way to bird the tropical forest, a way that should suit even the most aged observer, and one that should, at certain times anyway - given suitable weather conditions, be possible in almost any tropical forest.

[1]Minziro: Photo: Len Helen HörlinMy good friend Tommy Ek and I were on a birder's reccey to Minziro Forest Reserve, the only sizeable outlier of the Congolian forests to lie under the jurisdiction of Tanzania. Minziro village is in Kagera region, on the Ugandan border and immediately west of Lake Nyanza-Victoria. A dusty logger's road links the village of Minziro and its border post to the international highway and the regional capital of Bukoba some 50 km southeast. And this minor road bisects the encircling forest.

Minziro forest is usually fairly moist, in many places decidedly swampy, or at least it used to be, for it occupies part of the flood plain of the great Kagera river where it snakes between huge expanses of papyrus and reed, carrying silt-laden rust-colored water from the seething fertile highlands of Rwanda into Lake Nyanza-Victoria. We were warned not to go to Minziro in February, for surely it would be too wet; yet when we arrived at the forest at eleven a.m. on February 17 we found the weather sunny and warm and once inside the forest the terrain was remarkably dry. Nevertheless there had been substantial recent rain, up until perhaps four days earlier, and it was clear that many passerine birds were either 'in plumage' or at a very active stage in their reproductive cycle.

After various social formalities in the village had been performed we were able to explore an area of forest edge and trails from midday until about four p.m. before returning south along the road that led back to our village lodgings, 20 km distant on the Kagera river bank, in Kyaka's "Comfort Zone Motel".

However on the way-in we had noted two trails entering some rather degraded forest on either side of this access road. So just before five p.m. we bailed out of the Land Cruiser and decided to follow one of these paths which took us alongside a partially dried-up stream channel, about as wide as an English canal, to three adjacent and secluded forest pools.

These three pools have been separated by the trunks and debris of fallen forest trees into three distinct types of waterbody. The first pool one comes to is of very shallow brown water, a leaf-filled pool lying, even at the brightest hours, in delightful dappled forest light. And yet, luckily for us, it becomes slightly more exposed to the sky as the afternoon progresses when the declining rays of the westward sinking sun illuminate the forest floor through a large gap in the canopy.

The next pool is a slightly deeper and shadier place, carved by storm water run-off into a figure of eight, and into which a number of large branches have fallen and now lie scattered, partially submerged. Fringing the pool thick clumps of pink flowering knot-weed (Persicaria) and spear-leaved lilies, resembling Strelitzia, reach a height of between one and a half and two metres.

[1]Forest Pool in Minziro: Photo Len Helen Hörlin The third and longest pool is more enclosed and is for the most part deeply shaded by some five big trees which lean across it. The water is almost entirely covered with a mat of bright green duckweed and at the far end, cloaking a dam of fallen logs, a lush emergence surges skyward with all the floristic exuberance of equatorial energy being endlessly recycled. On the far side of this third pool a great net curtain of vines and creepers straps broken forest stumps and inadvertently pollarded trees (this forest has been 'selectively' logged) to a tangle of streamside bushes into the dank water beneath. When we first arrived at this, the farthest and most shaded pool, at about five fifteen it became immediately obvious from the cacophony of chacks and clicks, chip notes and reedy trills, that a great many birds were bathing here hidden behind the verdant web of this living curtain.

For the next two hours (sunset over the equator at this longitude is not until seven o'clock East African Time) we crept, carefully and quietly as the sunlight slowly faded, back and fore along the hundred or so metres of footpath that connects these three forest pools to the gravel road. It quickly dawned on us that we were being treated to an unanticipated wonderful phenomenon, that we were witnesses with special privileges indeed. At each of the three pools there came a different selection of forest birds, boldly patterned birds with bizarre names. Birds whose secretive habits are little-known, as vaguely recognized as are their names to those outside the motley team of birders active in tropical Africa. For many of these birds are master skulkers of the forest interior. Yet they came down before us to bathe, in a queue, just one after another, to one or other of these little pools as night drew near.

Our first evening here was so incredible that we made sure we were back at the pools by five o'clock on the subsequent evenings (18 and 19 February) so that in total we spent over six hours of wonder witnessing variations in an extraordinary avian spectacle.

See also: Part 1 [1]