Nairobi, Kenya
10 June 2006

Kenya covers an area of 582,646 square kilometres. The land stretches from the sea level (Indian Ocean) in the east, to 5,199 meters at the peak of the snow-capped Mount Kenya. From the coast, the altitude changes gradually through the coastal belt and plains (below 152 metres above sea level), the dry intermediate low belt to what is known as the Kenya Highlands (over 900 metres above sea level). The Great Rift Valley bisects the Kenya Highlands into east and west. Mount Kenya is on the eastern side. The Highlands are cool and agriculturally rich. Both large and small holder farming is carried out in the highlands. Major cash crops are tea, coffee, pyrethrum, wheat and corn. Livestock farming is also practised.

Located in an area once frequented by the pastoral Masai, Nairobi was founded in the late 1890s as a British railroad camp on the Mombasa-to-Uganda railroad. From 1899 to 1905 it served as a British provincial capital. In 1905 the city became the capital of the British East Africa Protectorate (called Kenya Colony from 1920 to 1963). In 1963 Nairobi became the capital of independent Kenya and annexed neighboring areas for future growth.

Local time: GMT +4
Approx noon temp: 32C
Weather: Sunny with cloudy skies, no rain

Nairobi, Kenya’s capital and thanks to its geography (’location, location, location’ as they say) an incredibly bird-rich city, has an overwhelming number of good bird sites and some very special birds. It’s hard to know where to start birding when you have such a frustratingly short time here, and arriving on a weekend also makes travelling a bit hazardous: Nairobi’s drivers - and there are thousands of them on the ancient and spine-rattlingly badly-maintained roads here - are constantly adapting what passes for a Highway Code to suit the mood, and it takes nerves of steel to rent a car and push off on your own. Add to that some of the highest insurance premiums I’ve ever come across (and eg the ridiculously high entrance fee to the world famous Nairobi National Park - it’s now 40USD/person and set to rise in the summer of 2006) and a day’s solo birding here can easily cost over 100GBP/175USD. The best bet is to get hold of a guide if you can - providing they supply their own transport the cost will work out about the same, but you will se more birds and have a better chance of still being in one piece in the evening…

Following a request on the AfricanBirding Yahoo group for a contact who might be able to help me out, I spent the day with James Kuria Ndung’u - a Kenyan guide who lives part of the year in South Africa and part here in Nairobi. We went to three sites - The Windsor Golf & Country Club, the river behind the Nairobi Museum where James and his colleagues do a lot of ringing, and near the Carnivore restaurant adjacent to the Nairobi National Park - before the heat and my lack of sleep put paid to the last few hours (and potentially more birds of course) and I had to return to the hotel before the flight home again.

We had quite a productive day, though it has to be said that James (who knows his calls - though he did have a slight predilection for calling anything he looked uncertain about ‘a Rupell’s Robin Chat mimicking’…) had a more productive day than I did, particularly in the forests around the Windsor Golf & Country Club where under gloomy skies he identified quite a few birds on call that I never even got close to (but,hey-ho, such is the nature of forest birding anywhere in the world though…).

Anyway, highlights of the day included good views of a number of birds that I’ve never managed to see well in the past - including Grey-capped Warbler Eminia lepida and Dark-capped Yellow Warbler Chloropeta natalensis, a Levaillant’s Cuckoo (apparently very scarce in the Nairobi area), and Red-faced Cisticola. The Day List is at the bottom of this short report and includes everything I actually saw, but not the species James called that I didn’t (which is not an indication of doubt on my part, just the way I keep lists).

1) Windsor Golf & Country Club:
The Windsor Golf & Country Club, a very smart upmarket place frequented by eg the chaps who steer the planes rather than the chaps who clean them, is a 200 acre site surrounded by coffee plantations and (on a clear day) views to Mount Kenya and the sacred Maasai Buffalo Mountain. Just 15km from Nairobi city centre, it’s not at all a bad place to go birding - assuming you can get permission to go in, or have a Guide who used to work there.

Looking back I can see why James chose to come here - it was a very short notice trip, and he probably felt on more solid ground going to a site he knew - but in the event we probably spent longer here than we needed to. There is a lot of mixed habitat to cover - the Club was built by clearing part of the extensive forest that once covered Nairobi so there is some nice gallery forest left; there is if course short-grass habitat (though for some reason strangely-dressed folks with sticks keep walloping little balls through it); and there’s a small lake with reeds and some dense cover along one edge - but access is difficult to parts of the site, and of course birders take second place to the paying guests, making intensive birding a little difficult.

Having said that, we saw a reasonable selection of birds here, including such interesting species as Black Sparrowhawk, Hartlaub’s Turaco, Red-chested Cuckoo, White-headed Barbet, Placid Greenbul, Grey-capped Warbler, Dark-capped Yellow Warbler, Northern Pied Babbler, Red-faced Cisticola, White-bellied Tit, a mixed flock of six species of swallows over the lake, and James’s first-ever Levaillant’s Cuckoo (his African list is over 2000, so it was a good record!).

Levaillant’s Cuckoo Clamator levaillantii

Dark-capped Yellow Warbler Chloropeta natalensis

Another interesting sighting here was troupes of Blue/Sykes’ Monkey, a guenon with a range from North Western Angola to South Western Ethiopia and down through southern Africa. Obviously fairly well-habituated, these curious and active animals are fairly approachable - though they don’t seem to like having cameras pointed at them…

Blue/Sykes’ Monkey Cercopithicus mitis

2) Nairobi Museum:
Our second stop was another site James knew well - a frankly uninspiring narrow corridor of secondary woodland with a stretch of rubbish-strewn river behind the Nairobi Museum/Snake Park. Right across the river, which is easily wadeable and only 10m or so wide, is the source of the rubbish - a densely packed slum that seems to be built entirely on trash. It’s not a birding site that a tourist would necessarily find on their own - and if they did wouldn’t bother with - but to be honest it was a reasonable place for picking up a “quick hit” of common, secondary forest/scrub birds like Olive Thrush and Bronze Mannikin. Additionally we had good views of, amongst other birds, the Grey-capped Warbler in the photo below, single African Paradise and White-eyed Slaty Flycatchers, three Cinnamon-chested Bee-eater, and three species of weaver (Baglafecht, Spekes, and Spectacled).

Sadly the one bird James desperately wanted me to see - a regularly-occurring Giant Kingfisher - was nowhere to be seen, but these things happen to the best of us so no problem…

Grey-capped Warbler Eminia lepida

Male Northern Double-collared Sunbird Cinnyris preussi

White-eyed Slaty Flycatcher Melaenornis fischeri

Male Spectacled Weaver Ploceus ocularis

Bronze Mannikin Spermestes cucullata

3) “Splash” Grasslands (near the Carnivore Restaurant):
By the time we reached out third site “Splash” - a small resort which backs onto one side of the Nairobi National Park - so had several hundred kids who were taking part in the equivalent of an outward bound award ceremony, complete with disco and games. It was one of the least conducive atmospheres I’ve ever tried to bird in. I was all for walking away, but James knew the site-owners so we did manage to get into a quieter area at the back with a tiny wetland (which James told me had held a very showy migrant Spotted Crake in March) where we saw a number of new birds for the day: nothing too unusual, but we got good views of five Little Bee-eaters (including one bashing the living daylights out of wasp or bee it had caught), Klaas’ Cuckoo, an African Grey Flycatcher, both Superb and Greater Blue-eared Glossy Starlings, an overflying Saddle-billed Stork, and had pretty good views of another Dark-capped Yellow Warbler.

Little Bee-eater Merops pusillus.

African Grey Flycatcher

Superb Starling Lamprotornis superbus

Back outside “Splash” I asked James to bump his car over a ditch and drive round a grassland area leading up to an abandoned housing development: it was a less-than-busy spot, but it was where we had good views of the magnificent Grey Crowned-crane in the photograph below.

Grey Crowned-crane Balearica regulorum

Almost the very last bird of the day we saw here caused us the most head-scratching - a very long-legged and strong-billed pipit that (according to James) may well have been the very recently-described Nairobi Pipit, a highly localised endemic found almost exclusively in and around the Nairobi National Park and separated by authorities including, notably, Don Turner and Brian Finch.

Africa’s pipits are a major identification challenge and I certainly felt that I didn’t have the experience to make such a difficult ID with any confidence: the bird was striking and looked slightly larger and ‘cleaner’ plumaged than the Grassland Pipits I’ve seen in South Africa (which I see far more often than Kenyan individuals) but thanks to Itai Shanni, one of the co-authors of a forthcoming paper on Nairobi Pipit (and organiser of the excellent Hula Valley Birding Festival in Israel) I can now be confident that it was in fact the widespread and highly variable Grassland Pipit after all. I guess we both should have known better (James because I was paying him to at least know the area’s commoner birds, and me because I should have remembered the old maxim of “If in doubt it’s usually the commonest species simply because there’s more of them”), but a valuable ID lesson has been learnt!

Grassland Pipit Anthus cinnamomeus

So, all in all, a mixed day really. I had an enjoyable enough time, but in hindsight perhaps if James had known that I’d been to Nairobi a couple of times and had seen most of the common birds before he may have chosen different sites and we may have seen more birds…but I wasn’t specific when he asked what I wanted to see, and he did his best under the circumstances: maybe next time eh…

Day List:
Little Grebe Tachybaptus ruficollis 1; Great Cormorant Phalacrocorax carbo 4-5; Reed Cormorant Phalacrocorax africanus 3; Darter Anhinga melanogaster ; Grey Heron Ardea cinerea 1; Cattle Egret Bubulcus ibis 3-4; Saddle-billed Stork Ephippiorhynchus senegalensis 1; Marabou Stork Leptoptilos crumeniferus 50+; Sacred Ibis Threskiornis aethiopicus 2; Hadada Ibis Bostrychia hagedash c)10; Glossy Ibis Plegadis falcinellus 3-4; African Black Duck Anas sparsa 2; Black Kite Milvus migrans 20+; Black Sparrowhawk Accipiter melanoleucus 1; Grey Crowned-crane Balearica regulorum 3; Black Crake Amaurornis flavirostra 1; Common Moorhen Gallinula chloropus 4-5; Red-eyed Dove Streptopelia semitorquata c)10; Tambourine Dove Turtur tympanistria 3-4; Hartlaub’s Turaco Tauraco hartlaubi 1; Levaillant’s Cuckoo Clamator levaillantii 1; Red-chested Cuckoo Cuculus solitarius 1; Klaas’ Cuckoo Chrysococcyx klaas 2; African Palm Swift Cypsiurus parvus 20+; Little Swift Apus affinis 20+; Speckled Mousebird Colius striatus c)20; Malachite Kingfisher Alcedo cristata 1; Pied Kingfisher Ceryle rudis 1; Little Bee-eater Merops pusillus 6; Cinnamon-chested Bee-eater Merops oreobates 3; Yellow-rumped Tinkerbird Pogoniulus bilineatus c)10; White-headed Barbet Lybius leucocephalus 1; Slender-billed Honeyguide Prodotiscus zambesiae 1; Cardinal Woodpecker Dendropicos fuscescens 1; Plain Martin Riparia paludicola 10+; Rock Martin Ptyonoprogne fuligula 2; Wire-tailed Swallow Hirundo smithii 2; Lesser Striped-swallow Hirundo abyssinica ; Black Saw-wing Psalidoprocne pristoptera 1; African Pied Wagtail Motacilla aguimp 15-20; Plain-backed Pipit Anthus leucophrys 1; Grassveld Pipit Anthus cinnamomeus 2; Common Bulbul Pycnonotus barbatus 20+; Placid Greenbul Phyllastrephus placidus 1; Yellow-streaked Greenbul Phyllastrephus flavostriatus 1+; Olive Thrush Turdus olivaceus c)10 ; Red-faced Cisticola Cisticola erythrops 1; Singing Cisticola Cisticola cantans 2-3; Tawny-flanked Prinia Prinia subflava 1; Grey-capped Warbler Eminia lepida 3-4; Grey-backed Camaroptera Camaroptera brevicaudata 8-10; Lesser Swamp-warbler Acrocephalus gracilirostris1; Dark-capped Yellow Warbler Chloropeta natalensis 3; African Grey Flycatcher Bradornis microrhynchus 1; White-eyed Slaty Flycatcher Melaenornis fischeri 1; Cape Robin-chat Cossypha caffra 2; Ruppell’s Robin-chat Cossypha semirufa 5+; African Paradise-flycatcher Terpsiphone viridis 3; Northern Pied Babbler Turdoides hypoleucus 2+; White-bellied Tit Parus albiventris 2; Collared Sunbird Anthreptes collaris 3-4; Amethyst Sunbird Nectarinia amethystina 2; Scarlet-chested Sunbird Nectarinia senegalensis 1; Bronze Sunbird Nectarinia kilimensis 3; Northern Double-collared Sunbird Cinnyris preussi 1; Variable Sunbird Cinnyris venustus 3-4; Broad-ringed (Montane) White-eye Zosterops poliogastrus 2; Common Fiscal Lanius collaris 10+; Black-backed Puffback Dryoscopus cubla 4-5; Fork-tailed Drongo Dicrurus adsimilis ; Pied Crow Corvus albus 20+; Greater Blue-eared Glossy-starling Lamprotornis chalybaeus 8; Superb Starling Lamprotornis superbus 2; Kenya Rufous Sparrow Passer rufocinctus 4; White-browed Sparrow-weaver Plocepasser mahali 10; Baglafecht Weaver Ploceus baglafecht 10+; Spectacled Weaver Ploceus ocularis c)10; Speke’s Weaver Ploceus spekei c)20; Grosbeak Weaver Amblyospiza albifrons 4-5; Red-billed Firefinch Lagonosticta senegala 4-5; Bronze Mannikin Spermestes cucullata 6-8; Reichenow’s Seedeater Serinus reichenowi 2; Streaky Seedeater Serinus striolatus 8-10; Pin-tailed Whydah Vidua macroura 1

(With thanks to Shailesh Patel for advice on identification)

Yellow Pansy Junonia hierta and Blue Pansy Junonia oenone

Green Banded Swallowtail Papilio phorcas (left) and Citrus Butterfly Papilio demodocus
(With thanks to Patrick Boireau for emailing me the identification)