| Here’s a Trivial Pursuit question. What is the least number of countries you have to pass through to get from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean? Watch as the respondent draws mental maps across northern Africa: Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco — five. No, hold on there’s a catch. Cunning! You don’t need Tunisia; you can go south and hop straight from Libya to Algeria. Thought you could catch me out. Ha! The answer is four. Except that it is not. It is three. From Egypt head south to Sudan and then west through the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and follow the river that gives the country its name until it opens out into the Atlantic — three. |
At least until today. The day of writing is January 9, and today the people of southern Sudan are voting in a referendum, agreed upon as part of the 2005 pact that ended the Sudanese civil war, to decide whether they want to remain part of a united Sudan or whether they want to secede and form their own state. All reports indicate that the vote will be overwhelmingly in favor of secession and a new republic will be born with all the political, economic, and social implications that one involves. Commentators invariably cite the striking cultural differences between the Arab, predominantly Muslim north and the Christian/Animist, predominantly African south. While this is a gross over-simplification, it is a split that holds broadly true of Sudan’s fauna – a largely Palearctic north and a predominantly African south.
A friend of mine had the immense good fortune to travel last winter from Wadi Halfa in the very north of Sudan south to Khartoum. A keen birder — astute and sharp-eyed rather than manically obsessive like myself — and uninitiated in the joys and challenges of sub-Saharan birding, he noticed a growing number of species unfamiliar to him, a consequence of the increasingly African nature of the birds as he traveled south.
There were large sparrow-like birds but not in the dull browns and beiges of the familiar House Sparrow, rather they were bright yellow and contrasting black with, in the males, sharply demarcated black caps and red irises. These were Northern Masked Weavers. There were slender dove gray birds with crests, long skinny tails and a blue back to the neck: Blue-naped Mousebirds. And there was a mystery woodpecker, plain pale gray below, pale olive above with a bright crimson crown: Grey Woodpeckers. All unfamiliar, all typically African.
I have not made the overland trip south from Egypt to Khartoum but have visited the capital and traveled south from there, a trip sadly curtailed by a mix-up with papers and permits and an unfortunate night in a Sudanese jail. However even as far north as Khartoum there are decidedly African elements in the birdlife.
Just south of the confluence of the Blue Nile and White Nile at Omdurman is a small island called TutiIsland accessible by local ferry. Outside the island’s main village the land is farmed, and away from the thronging crowds of the main city I was able to stroll undisturbed with the binoculars, ticking off species with a distinctly African flavor.
There were Little Bee-eaters, green with bright yellow underparts, a black collar and a long, slender down-curved bill ideally suited to, well, eating bees. There were dainty Namaqua Doves, much smaller than the Palm Doves so familiar here, with long slender tails and, in the male, a striking black facial mask, throat and breast. This species is now being recorded with increasing regularity in southern Egypt. I found a White-browed Coucal, a clumsy relative of the cuckoos with a long, broad, black tail, bright chestnut upperparts and a heavily striated head and neck relieved by the white brow.
At the waterside were two special species, once found in Egypt but now locally extirpated. The first was the Egyptian Plover. Sometimes known to ornithologists as the non-Egyptian non-Plover this distinctive wader was last definitely recorded here in 1932, and rather than being a plover, it is a member of a small family of wading birds known as the coursers and pratincoles. Herodotus famously records it as the Crocodile Bird, famed for, supposedly, hopping in and out of crocodile’s mouths to pick at the food scraps and parasites from between the reptile’s teeth. It is unmistakable: pale gray above and white suffused salmon below and strikingly patterned black and white across the head and neck.
Then, as dusk settled, the Sacred Ibises flew in to roost at the southern tip of the island. These large, largely white heron-like birds have naked black heads and necks and a bustle of lacy black plumes at the rear. They were venerated by the Ancient Egyptians as the god Thoth, master of scribes, but disappeared from modern Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century. There is talk of a re-introduction program.
My other stomping ground was a large area of forest south of Khartoum’s center known as the forest of Sunt. This was acacia forest and held a different selection of species, some again with an African flavor. The most distinctive was the Grey Hornbill. Hornbills are large birds of forest and open woodland. The true forest hornbills from further south are spectacular birds. I have seen Silvery-cheeked Hornbills at 75 centimeters long in the coastal forests of Kenya and the similarly proportioned Black-and-white Casqued Hornbill in the Botanical Gardens at Entebbe in Uganda.
But the king, even larger at 80 centimeters, has to be the Black-casqued Hornbill I found in the KakumNational Park in Ghana last year. Memorably described by my field guide as “a stonking great forest hornbill,” it was indeed impressive and was indeed great.
The Grey Hornbill is not in that size league as it measures a mere 50 centimeters, but all hornbills are birds of immense character. Perhaps this is because of their rather ill-proportioned appearance, oversized heads with often huge bills surmounted by the horny extension known as the casque, angular wings and sharply accentuated calls that are so much a part of the African bush. Or perhaps it is, almost uniquely among birds, the fact that they have lush, elongated and very fetching eyelashes so elegantly incongruous on such gawky birds.
I digress, perhaps over-excited! The Grey Hornbill is indeed predominantly gray with a bold white eye-stripe and a cream and black bill tipped red in the female. And O! those eye-lashes!
Far less spectacular but rather special was the White-headed Babbler. This is a rather dull, olive brown bird, paler below with a sharply demarcated white head. I had not expected to find this species quite so far north.
Of course Khartoum is hardly southern Sudan. My plan had been to travel south, and I had permits for the DinderNational Park on the border with Ethiopia and a letter of introduction for the head of Wildlife Conservation in Wau even further south. The temptation was a spectacular bird known as the Shoebill or Whale-headed Stork reported to breed in the vast southern swamps of the Sudd.
At that time, though, Wau was surrounded by southern rebels and any attempt to get there would have been at best foolhardy, at worst suicidal. Had I got that far south — and more to the point, had I lived to report back on the trip — I would have found the birdlife largely unrecognizable from that in the north. Leafing through my Cave and MacDonald Birds of the Sudan (1955), I missed out on such gems as the Chestnut Wattle-eye, Fairy Blue Flycatcher, Blue-shouldered Cossypha (Robin-chat), Splendid Glossy Starling, Crested Shrike Flycatcher, Blue-bellied Roller and so, so many more. Happily I have caught up with all of these species in subsequent visits to DRC and Uganda across the border from southern Sudan.
Sadly, I was never to get even as far as Dinder. South of Sennar, on the way to Dinder, I ran into problems with my permits and was a reluctant overnight guest of the Sudanese authorities prior to being sent back to Khartoum. But even incarceration has its plus points. I shared my room with a gecko species that I sketched and noted but to this day have not been able to identify. And in the grounds of my ‘hotel’ I was serenaded by the monotonous but rather reassuring call of the African Scops Owl, rendered by Cave and MacDonald as “a rather soft and musical ‘kurrurruk’ frequently repeated.”
If, as seems extremely likely, southern Sudan does vote to break away from the north, and if this split can be completed peacefully, then perhaps I will at last get to these largely unexplored areas that until now have just been intriguing blanks on myAfrica map. If the transition is peaceful, and the infrastructure can be developed, the newly independent nation of South Sudan, or whatever it decides to call itself, will have the opportunity to develop an eco-tourist industry that has served its sub-Saharan neighbors of Uganda and Kenya so well in recent years. |
Comments
Leave a Comment