Dawn slowly silhouetted the island’s imposing trees, especially a huge sycamore fig and a rain tree. A clamorous spurfowl took over from a fiery necked nightjar enquiring, in a querulous voice, ‘Did sleep deliver us?’ After breakfast we went for a walk and Peter maintained a worried lok because he could smell buffalo.
I made a discovery. The party were mostly birders. So it was five steps, scope, discussion, ID, five steps, scope. Discussion. I like birds. You know, they’re nice, but…. With plenty of time on my hands I took to imagining what the birds were saying to us. I decided the mourning dove was really a dove of peace, calling pleadingly ‘No more war’. A black-crowned tsagra was the mournful one, saying ‘I’m not cheerful. I’m not cheerful’.
Eventualy after much scoping and discussion we packed up and set off through reeds – miscanthus and phragmites – which rained spiders. It kind of went on for an awfully long time. ‘Why the reeds when there’s the Boro River nearby?’ I asked Julius, who was doing the guiding. ‘The channels belong to the hippos,’ he replied. So it was spiders or hippos.
