Birding Ethiopia, Jan 2 -17th, 2010

Two weeks birding in Ethiopia is not really enough. The country is big, almost 1 million sq.kms (three times the size of Britain or Finland), and there are so many birds…That’s why you have to go back again, and again.
On this tour, with a Finnish group, we focused on the Ethiopian Rift Valley, with just one day at higher altitudes (2500+ metres a.s.l.) north of Addis. In the Rift we explored the areas from the Awash plains in the north to almost Mega in the south, a distance of some 6-700 kms as the Pied Crow flies.

Development
I have been to Ethiopia several times, but it is already 4 years since my last visit. During these years a lot has happened. The construction business is booming in Addis (and elsewhere too), the main roads are really good (a truly unbelievable change) and there is a lot more heavy traffic on the main roads. Particularly the road from Addis to the harbour in Djibouti is very busy with heavy and slow trucks, and overtaking is both slow and dangerous. Abandoned, neglected and forgotten by Europeans for over a century (since the glory days of colonialism, really) the Chinese have now seized the opportunity making Africa their “colony”. It is with Chinese money that the roads have been improved and it is Chinese investments behind the tall buildings in Addis. Is this the beginning of a brighter future for Africa, or is history only repeating itself?

Drought
Driving south along the Rift it soon became apparent that the rains had been poor. In this part of Ethiopia there is one wet season from June-July to September-October, but the amount of rain varies from year to year. The ground vegetation was all but gone at the bottom of the Rift, and vast areas looked more like semi-desert than savannah. The crops had been poor and you could almost tell it by just looking at the people. Big herds of cattle roam the dry plains disappearing in clouds of dust and the horizon is dotted with dust devils reaching for the clouds. To me this is the picture of Africa in the dry season.
Another matter of concern in Ethiopia, and in so many other African countries as well, is the rapidly growing human population. The western world is now busy talking about global warming and suddenly the population explosion is no longer an issue?

Deforestation
The population of Ethiopia is now around 80 million, but it has doubled in less than 30 years and has been growing by 2 million per year during this millennium. This is bad news for the environment. The deforestation progresses at frightening speed, and every time you go back you can see the change with you own eyes. This time the worst shock came to me at Wondo Genet, in the foothills of the eastern escarpment of the Rift Valley. Wondo Genet is one of Ethiopia’s famous birding sites, a place where everybody goes (approximately 7degrees 05mins North x 38 degrees 39mins East on Google Earth). It has been famous for its indigenous and well preserved forest covering the rather steep slopes of the valley above the village itself. It is a classic site for endemics like Yellow-fronted Parrot, Abyssinian Woodpecker, Banded Barbet, Abyssinian Oriole, White-winged Cliff-chat and Black-winged Lovebird, but the list of birds is long including species like Spotted Creeper, Narina Trogon, Half-collared Kingfisher, White-cheeked Turaco, Crowned Eagle and Ayre’s Hawk Eagle, Abyssinian Ground Thrush and Sharpe’s Starling, just to mention a few. And now, when I with great hopes started to climb the slope, I could not recognise myself! The forest was all gone! There was not one tree left of the conifer plantation, where Greater Sparrowhawk and Little Sparrowhawk used to breed, but much worse, the whole indigenous forest above it, covering several square kilometres in the past, had all disappeared! At first I thought that it had been harvested for fire wood by the locals, which is the way most of the forests go, but I soon realised, that the scale of the project was far too huge for the locals to manage in such a short time. Also the improved tracks into the forest, with rather fresh tire marks from big lorries, in a place where only foot paths existed in the past, explained it all. The forest had been illegally logged for timber, but nobody seemed to know, or want to know, who by? Still, the fact remains that the bird-rich forest above Wondo Genet is gone for good.

Birds
But, of course, there were brighter moments too. Generally speaking the birding was excellent, as it always is in Ethiopia. Our group added one new species to Ethiopia’s national bird list, when we saw and photographed two Lesser Crested Terns Sterna bengalensis at Lake Awassa, some 700 kms from the nearest sea, where they should have been. At the same lake we also saw and photographed a Eurasian Bittern, which apparently is only the third record for the country (according the new bird atlas by Ash and Atkins).
Other birds worth mentioning were the seven Lesser Jacanas we found on three different lakes, probably reflecting the drought and the drying-out of smaller bodies of water. At least 4 birds were found along a stretch of some 400 metres along Lake Awassa. All in all we recorded 434 species, which is not bad given our route, which did not include the Bale Mountains. Personally I only had one lifer, the Red-naped Bush-shrike, which was found thanks to our guide’s, Merid’s local knowledge.
Ethiopia is a great place for raptors, and we had superb views of 46 different species of raptors, the most memorable being those of African Swallow-tailed Kite, Lammergeier, Verreaux’s Eagle, PygmyFalcon, Eastern Chanting Goshawk, the endemic unduliventer subspecies of African Goshawk, Secretary Bird and African Peregrine Falcon.