Atlasville – 14 Sep 2008
In late June we started building a field camp for the project in the Kolwezi area that I have been working on. Then the camp was not much more than a fenced off area with two tents and some basic camping equipment. Work has continued during the past 2 months and the camp is now starting to take shape but not yet fully finished. We now have a proper kitchen, which still needs to have the roof thatched (but not much chance of rain for the next month), a septic sewage system, hot water shower, a 2000 litre water storage tank and satellite communications system (including satellite TV so we won’t miss those late evening UEFA Champions League games!). Exploration drilling has at last commenced and my visits will be more frequent and still interspersed with my other ongoing project on the Zambian Copperbelt. (P.S. latest Google Earth imagery shows the concrete base of the water tank as the only indication of the position of the campsite)
I am just back from a week at the Mamaje (“place of plenty”) camp and found the camp living up to its name on the birding front. I managed to get in 45 minutes or so each day just after sunrise and just before sunset walking around the pristine miombo woodland on the hill behind the camp (P.S. Google Earth imagery from May 2023 shows that most of the trees are now gone). No DRC endemics, but a few not found south of the Zambezi – Black-collared Bulbul, White-winged Black Tit, Splendid Glossy Starling, and several Miombo woodland specials – Pale-billed Hornbill, Scaly-throated Honeyguide, Miombo Tit, Miombo Scrub-Robin, Miombo Rock-Thrush, Western Miombo Sunbird, Racket-tailed Roller and Broad-billed Roller, plus a few other “goodies” – Cabanis’s Bunting, Short-winged Cisticola, Grey-hooded Kingfisher, White-breasted Cuckooshrike, Copper Sunbird, African Golden Oriole, Schalow’s Turaco, Meyer’s Parrot, Pennant-winged Nightjar, Freckled Nightjar and Fiery-necked Nightjar. Every night we would hear that iconic night sound of sub-Saharan Africa, the call of the Fiery-necked Nightjar, so I was rather pleased to be able to find and finally photograph a bird that up till now I’ve only seen flitting around in the dark.
The week’s total was 79 either seen or heard within a few kilometres radius of the camp. The summer migrants are streaming in (or through). I picked up 4 cuckoo species (call only), as well as Yellow-billed Kite, Wahlberg’s Eagle, European Bee-eater and Violet-backed Starling – although the latter is possibly a resident species here. A resident species seen every day was Brown Snake Eagle.
The “photo that got away” was just pre-sunset one evening when the noise of a bird party attracted my attention to a spot just 150 m from the camp, where Fork-tailed Drongo, African Golden Oriole and White-crested Helmetshrike were swooping and shrieking, and Cinnamon-breasted Bunting, Miombo Tit, Chinspot Batis and White-winged Black Tit were distinctly agitated hopping from branch to branch. Just as I realised that this was not a feeding party, but an assault on an intruder, I was too late to photograph the African Wood-Owl as it took flight.
The most difficult to photograph, and still remaining elusive, is the Meyer’s Parrot. There are several dozen in the area and they are heard squawking throughout the daylight hours, but they are active high in the canopy of the Miombo and are spotted only when they move from tree to tree.
The area around our campsite had been badly burnt early in the winter, indeed it was one of the reasons the site was chosen as the bush was essentially already cleared. Despite this I am finding a lot of new plant growth springing up in the middle of burnt grass tussocks, such as this Dwarf Red Hibiscus.
