Mabira, bat hawk, etc.

We took a field trip for the older students in our mission school to Mabira May 26, and spent most of the morning in the trails in both the primary and secondary rain forest. Our guide took us on a route long enough that we had to maintain a quick pace and were not able to stop-look-listen the way one needs to do to observe many forest birds. Nevertheless we did see some fine specimens, especially after returning to the forestry office compound and waiting for lunch to get ready. Some of the species highlights on my list of what we saw:

Common (brown-throated) wattle-eye (Platysteira cyanea)
Olive sunbird (Nectarinia oliivacea)
Yellow-throated tinkerbird (Pogoniulus subsulphureus)
Speckled tinkerbird (Pogoniulus scolopaceus)
White-rumped swift (Apus caffer)
Cardinal quelea (Quelea cardinalis)
Great blue turaco (Corythaeola cristata)
Red-bellied paradise flycatcher (Terpsiphone rufiventer)
Purple-throated cuckoo-shrike (Campephaga quisqualina)
African blue flycatcher (Elminia longicauda)
Black-necked weaver (Ploceus nigricollis)
Common waxbill (Estrilda astrild)
Black-crowned waxbill (Estrilda nonnula)
Grey-headed negrofinch (Nigrita canicapilla)

We heard almost as many kinds of birds as we actually saw, but did not have leisure to wait around for them to appear, or to make detours to find them. Counting species both seen and heard, I wrote down about 70 for the day.

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Bat hawk

"The early bird gets the birder"--I guess that re-wording of the proverb is one way of saying it when one comes across a bat hawk (Macheiramphus alcinus) early of a morning before it goes to roost after its dawn hunting. I was on a pre-breakfast jog a few days ago, somewhere around 6:30 or so, when one of these mysterious raptors flew a semicircle in front of me before alighting in a giant muvule tree.

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Baglafecht nest

My boys showed me a Baglafecht weaver (Ploceus baglafect) nest just a couple of meters outside our dining-room window. We watched the adults coming and going into and out of the nest, which they had attached to overhanging bougainvillea branches above a retaining wall. Here's a picture of the nest; if I get one that includes any of the weavers themselves I'll post it later.