When I think back to my early Birding trips to Kenya in 1987 & 1990, I remember a lot of Birding in mainly sunny conditions, with good light for photography. Not that my camera was any good. It was a cheap Olympus film camera with a 500mm tamron mirror lens. The quality of the photos were poor & generally they could only be described as record shots. In the future, when I look back on the Angolan trip, I will think of decent camera gear, but grey cloudy conditions and grim light, especially during the early mornings & evenings. Today was yet another day when I've had to work harder in the Lightroom package to try to improve the quality of the photos. I'm still feeling my way around Lightroom and I still have a long way to go before I master it.
Anyway, onto the Kumbira Forest or what's left of it. We headed off to be in one of the forest patches for soon after first light. Although we were only a few miles from the main road, it had taken around forty-five minutes of driving on the dirt tracks to get there. This included losing some time looking at another badly rutted area of track which was even more challenging to get through. An error here & Niall's 4WD could easily have slipped into the main rut, when the wheels on one side of the 4WD wouldn't have even touched the bottom of the rut. Fortunately, he worked out a way past it so we could get another two or three miles in towards the forest patch he wanted to reach.
Finally, we reached the first forest patch & we could start Birding. One of the first species was this delightful Green Crombec. I really like their bizarre shape with virtually no tail.
We had a good start to the day with a reasonable selection of species seen, albeit not photographed. This included my first Carmelite Sunbird, Gabela Akalat, Bates's Paradise Flycatcher, Yellow-throated Tinkerbird & Southern Hyliota. Later in the morning we reached a more open edge to the forest patch. Niall picked up a Honeyguide at the top of a tree. The lighting was still poor & the photos are not great. But they are good enough to confirm it was a Cassin's Honeyguide, which is on the most Southern end of its range: another Tick. I grabbed some quick photos before improving the camera settings, only to look back & find that the Cassin's Honeyguide had disappeared.
This area proved productive with a few Birds of Prey & a Klaas's Cuckoo.
We returned to Niall's 4WD for another field pack lunch washed down with coffee. We drove back out of the forest patches we had been in that morning & returned to the forest patches we had tried the previous evening.
Eventually, we found an area with a larger patch of surviving forest & even better, I found a proper trail into the forest. Niall was looking for the stunning Yellow-bellied Wattle-eye & the trail looked hopeful. Unfortunately, we had no luck with locating a Yellow-bellied Wattle-eye on it: a pity, as this would have been a Tick for Phil & Richard and given it was my favourite Bird on my first trip to Kenya, then I would have liked to see another one.
It was still a good track as Niall heard a Forest Scrubrobin singing. For the first twenty minutes, it proved to be very elusive, but eventually it popped up onto a hanging liana. This was clearly one of its favourite song perches & it sang for the next ten minutes from there. Finally, the others left in search of a Yellow-bellied Wattle-eye, which allowed me the opportunity to carefully walk a bit closer. It was one of my best Birds of the trip.
We were having a good day, but finally it turned to a very frustrating end to the day. We moved on & tried another area which Niall had as a site for a Gabela Bushshrike. We heard it in the area, and Phil & Richard managed to get poor flight views at one point. I was standing in a slightly different position & wasn't even aware they had seen it until we got back onto the main track. Rather than try a bit further along the track in the direction it had flown, we tried looking in another area & then left, in the hope of finding another one closer to the town. Quickly we were out of half-reasonable habitat. We gave up at that point, despite having a reasonable amount of light left when we could have left.
