Arusha October 19, 2006 "Birding the Prison Ponds"

The so-called prison pools are excellent, especially during November-December, for incoming migrants and the surrounding acacia scrub and farmland is always turning up some local surprises.

At ten to six, half an hour before sunset; as Dismas and I were counting the Palearctic shorebirds at this small wetland site on the outskirts of Arusha; two first year Black Storks spiralled down from the north. These were my first of the return. Alastair Kilpin at Klein's Camp, on the eastern edge of the Serengeti has seen singles on two dates just prior to this. These two beauties were first spotted high in the peach-coloured cumulus that was stacking up in the Monduli Gap (the 11km of air space between Mount Meru and Monduli mountain) through which migrants sometimes literally pour.

Could these storks have been siblings even? Travelling together so far, across the sea and spreading desert, from the same secluded Russian forest bog?

The aforementioned shorebirds were:

Ruff 6 (1 was a first calendar year),
Little Stint 16 (not aged),
Wood Sandpiper 10 (not aged)

and as previously there was a male Greater Painted Snipe, out for the evening stalking through the lush emergent grass, on the periphery of the pool.

Had we waited until after dusk I am sure we would have sensed at least one of the African Marsh Owls which reside in the taller herbage along the edge of the weedy maize fields immediately west of the pools.

Two other 'refugees from boreal darkness' passed over the shallow pools, with the merest cursory dip at the shining water, a bright male 'lutea' Yellow Wagtail and ...
a single skipping Sand Martin which, my being an Anglo-Saxon from fifity degrees north, is for ever the harbinger of - the first soft day of - spring.
“They arrived with the wheatears,
one morn in march,
just winking-out the sun
and surely cursed was anyone
who failed to feel it thus?”

Here though, at three and a half degrees south in the highlands of East Africa, they are one of the heralds of a return to austral moist air, typically sometime in late October.