A Spotted Ground Thrush - and hunters
Category: Uncategorized | Date: Jun 17 2008 | By: davidngala
I start by saying Hallo wherever you are!!!!!!!!!!! And hope God has been good to you. We thank you for the support and are happy that things are a bit in the process of moving on in the hope that we are going to conserve our heritage at all levels of understanding.
There are few things I wanted to share with you…
It was very early in the morning one day at the end of last month as Albert and I went for a Spotted Ground Thrush survey, a bird species confined to humid coastal forest, a scarce and local non-breeding migrant from the southern tropics between April and October. Most records of this rare bird around here are from Gede Ruins forest and Arabuko-Sokoke Forest.
The weather was very cloudy and there was a short shower of rain. As we alighted from the car it was 05:55am at a place that is meant to be a camp site and in the first light of day we saw two men with five hunting dogs and a bow and arrows. They ran very fast from us, and sincerely, it is very concerning as the Rangers outpost is only five hundred from this position E 0599368 N 9921785!!
Reporting incidents like this is always part of our regular job, but we often feel the action we’re taking is being done is always in vain as little comes of it.
Continuing the survey a short way we saw a movement in the leaf litter - a Spotted Ground Thrush! - at a distance of 30m from our position, and it jumped happily and started feeding. It was a good and fantastic view. At least we saw one of those birds after doing almost seven transects in the mixed forest for this year and having seen none others.
The frustrating thing again was the cutting stumps of the vulnerable Manilkara zanzibarensis for timber. We actually would invite any ideas concerning this issue in how to stop the destruction and we need immediate help to keep our surveys going so as to help conserve our forest for the coming Generations.
Bird surveys and cut trees
Category: Bird Surveys, Tree poaching | Date: Jun 12 2008 | By: davidngala
It was a little while back now that this happened as we’ve been having difficulty getting information to Colin who’s got the internet access for posting blogs, but I wanted to tell you about one of our typical surveys we do in the forest. It was one of our regular surveys in the Arabuko Sokoke forest; actually it was very cold that morning as we drove our motorbike to our designated transect. Our target was doing a common bird point count survey for the first two and a half of the morning hours and then doing forest disturbances as it was to be hot for the birds.
Albert Baya, an A Rocha Kenya Field technician, who has been with me for almost 14 years doing the research and monitoring of the Arabuko-Sokoke forest and the surrounding, stopped counting the birds and pointed out some cut stems which were almost 2 metres from the transect, trying to look more further away, it was bad to see the most vulnerable trees were cut.
In a distance of 5 km we were able to count 46 cut stems, for wood and carving, 4 active campsites and 2 old
camps which we thought they moved two or three months ago.
Whilst our forest is being managed by an active Forest Management Team, we are actually frustrated to see all these activities still happening.
We have several vulnerable and endangered bird, plant, butterfly, lizard species in the forest, but on the day of this survey we saw Clarke’s Weavers about 25 in one group of which we used to see 50+, and we were not able to see any male actively feeding on a Brachystegia tree. The Clarke’s Weaver breeding ground is not yet known and now the feeding grounds are being destroyed, we need to have a support to help stop this distraction otherwise we will lose our heritage. The picture here is one that was taken by Steve Garvie who is a birder and photographer who I took into the forest last year to see the specialities. These are the best photos I have seen of Clarke’s Weaver and we like to say “asante sana” to Steve for letting us use them.
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