Although quite a distant corner of Uganda, Buhoma is on the well-trodden tourist trail, with daily organized viewings of Mountain Gorilla (at US$ 500 per person per morning!). Quite a few bird tours visit the area, I think, but my weekend there was so fantastic, I thought it was worth a report. I joined Fred (Tel: +256 7750 4131), who is a ranger born and raised in Buhoma and the well-known bird guide in this area, and Jude was my hard-working, reliable driver, as always (Email: ainomugishajude@yahoo.com).
Bwindi is remote 10-hour drive through endless smallholdings with bananas and fields of maize, with a brief section of moist Acacia savanna as you pass near Lake Mburo National Park. Once you get closer to Bwindi, the tarmac ends, and the last few hours of the drive is spent navigating a constantly changing maze of poor roads close to the park (some becoming impassable from time to time). There are a few visitable areas of the park, and you access them via completely different routes. Ruhija is a higher elevation section, well over 2000m, where you can hike down to a highland swamp with Grauer’s Rush-Warbler, and Grauer’s Broadbill and Dwarf Honeyguide in the surrounding forest, as well as a very healthy complement of Albertine montane endemics. Buhoma is much lower down (the town at about 1400m but we hiked up to about 1700m), meaning you get a smaller selection of the Albertine birds mixed in with a greater diversity of Congo forest species. Our route to Buhoma this time took us on a long drive along the border with DR Congo – on one stretch near a small town called Butogota, the border was less than 1km away and the hills to our right were well inside DRC.
I heard that tourist numbers have dwindled the past year or so in Bwindi. It could be the bad economy. Personally, I wonder if the accessibility and longer drive is a problem, since gorillas can also be seen (at an equally high price) only two or three hours from Kigali, if you visit Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda.
At Jude’s urging, we’d left Entebbe about 4:30am to avoid the Saturday morning traffic and zoomed along the good tarmac roads to the southwest corner of the country—which is Jude’s home country. At Rukungiri, we stopped at a restaurant owned by a friend of Jude’s, then hit the dirt roads, and about an hour later crossed a deep valley across the Birira river into Kanungu district, bordering DR Congo. We’d arrived all the way to Buhoma by early afternoon, and after a quick drink at the hotel—a beautiful balcony overlooking pristine forested hills—spent the afternoon walking along the wide dirt road from the park entrance– travelling through patches of nice, mature secondary forest and passing various park administration buildings and a succession of gorilla safari lodges. Luehder’s Bushshrike and Petit’s Cuckoo-shrike are quite common in the forest, even around the lodge we stayed (I think it is called “Bwindi View Bandas and Gorilla Nest”… I opted for the bandas myself)—Bocage’s (“Gray-green”) Bushshrike periodically called in a tall tree visible from the restaurant, Red-headed Bluebill (which I missed) in the gardens at dawn, and a few greenbuls such as Yellow-throated “Leaf-Love” and Red-tailed Bristlebill (frequently heard but devilish to see). A singing Snowy-crowned Robin-Chat perched on the cabin next to mine was being watched intently by a skinny cat, and on a walk down to the river below park headquarters just before dusk, Fred showed us his spot for Gray-winged Robin-Chat, with a bird conveniently perched to greet us on arrival. Blue-shouldered Robin-Chat also called briefly from the area near the river… together with White-bellied Robin-Chat and Equatorial Akalat seen the following day… this is an excellent area for robins. A brilliant male African Emerald Cuckoo, perched above our heads, was probably the other highlight of the evening, you hear the famous “Hello, Georgie” call constantly through the forest here.
At the far end of the road, at the start of the footpath into the forest, a large, black male gorilla ambled across the trail in front of us. Much more exciting just to bump into it—I didn’t get hit in the pocketbook like the other gorilla tourists. I wasn’t required to turn around or close my eyes, but was strenuously forbidden to take any photos since I hadn’t paid the gorilla trekking fee. The poor gorilla was soon followed by a gang of about 10 rangers, as I understood it, trying to discourage it from crossing the border into DR Congo.
L’Hoest’s Monkey is the other common primate in this area (a characteristic black monkey with a white bib – you can see them on the ground or in trees). We also saw a single Red-tailed Guenon, a beautiful, small monkey (common in areas like Kibale Forest) with a stubby white nose. After waking up at 4am on the Sunday, I took a short walk in search of some nocturnal mammals and found a group of White-eared Fruit-Bats rooting under a tree. My best guess was Franquet’s Epauletted-Bat, but it could have been Wahlberg’s, which I think is more of a savanna species—any expert advice welcome! They were still there the next morning. Fred says that, aside from the primates, mammals are pretty thin on the ground in this area.
After breakfast on Sunday, we took a long walk up into the forest. A nice mixed flock in the secondary forest en-route contained Buff-spotted and Elliot’s Woodpeckers and Red-headed Malimbe. Some way up the trail into primary forest, we got nice views of a Short-tailed (Neumann’s) Warbler, one of the Albertine Rift endemics, on the forest floor, after hearing its feeble call. Chapin’s Flycatcher is one of the special birds in this area, and Fred has found over the past year (something I can’t find in any of the guides) that this species has a distinct preference for a particular type of emergent tree in the area. Indeed, nearly all that we saw were in restless pairs or groups right below the canopy of this tree species. Only one of our groups stayed put for a bit longer, and I managed to get a long recording that is posted on Xeno-Canto Africa. I’m afraid I’m not a tree expert, but it’s a distinctive, common tree in this area and shows in Nik Borrow’s photo of Chapin’s Flycatcher online (at www.arkive.org) as well as more that I can provide on request– tall, with very large, bullet-ridden (tasty for caterpillars?), roundish or oval leaves.
After a few kilometers, near the high point of the trail, we took a more narrow forest path up a beautiful stream to a series of three luxuriant forest waterfalls. An amazing hike, but quiet bird-wise inside the forest, with the exception of greenbuls and a couple of rare sunbird species. A number of Purple-breasted Sunbird were flitting around a tree with clusters of white flowers—Fred says this sunbird (a brilliant, long-tailed, Albertine Rift endemic) is tough to see when this particular tree isn’t in flower. On the way down, Fred heard a pair of Gray-headed Sunbirds up near the canopy and we managed to get reasonable views with a bit of patience, with another Chapin’s Flycatcher nearby. Gray-headed Sunbird is a very strange, drab, forest sunbird with a long, straight pink bill. They don’t seem to be recorded much, but it could be because they seem to be a forest interior bird, often in tangles of vines or invisible up in the subcanopy like our pair.
We then retraced our steps back towards the ranger station, back through primary forest with some damp gullies near the trail. At two points during the walk, Fred heard White-bellied Robin-Chat and Equatorial Akalat calling, respectively. I couldn’t hear a thing… since he knows the area so well, perhaps he can hear them even when they’re not singing! We also encountered a beautiful flock with several Red-headed Malimbe, a pair of Velvet-mantled Drongo, Black-tailed Oriole, and a pair of Shelley’s Greenbul (the “Kakamega” race that climbs tree trunks like woodpeckers, according to legend, although ours were performing only on smaller branches). A number of other greenbul species in the area, and always hard to get a good look at them—Fred has also found Ansorge’s in this area and pointed some out (based mainly on call I think), but I never managed to get a good look. In the evening—a bit misty and damp, Narrow-tailed Starlings were decorating some of the trees around the resort, and tame Dusky-blue Flycatchers perching on stems of grass.
The long drive back to Kampala on Monday didn’t give us time to enter the deep forest again, but we thought it would be a pity not to spend a couple more hours in the secondary forest around the lodge. Again, we found a few additional things only because Fred knew the calls – one a Gray-throated Tit-Flycatcher that came in to his whistle and perched on a branch above our heads, and the other a Green-backed Twinspot, a beautiful speck of a bird that Fred very rarely sees because of its tiny size and shy habits—ours obligingly perched on a branch on a hedge bordering one of the lodges, and even permitted a few photos.
With the fun over, Jude and I started the long drive back to the capital, uneventful apart from one slight detour after finding a bus on fire in the middle of the road; fortunately, nobody seemed to be hurt. Final, unexpected, bird activity came only about 80km west of Kampala while crossing one of the numerous papyrus swamp (this one called Burumbo Swamp and bordered by some swampy forest) – a couple of groups of the scarce, canary-like Weyns’s Weaver flying across the road near dusk.
• Black-headed Heron—1
• Hadada Ibis—1
• Cassin’s Hawk-Eagle—1
• Red-eyed Dove—5
• Blue-spotted Wood-Dove—1
• Tambourine Dove—4+many heard
• Black-billed Turaco—2 heard
• Great Blue Turaco—1 heard
• Red-chested Cuckoo—2 heard
• Black Cuckoo—1 heard
• African Emerald Cuckoo—2 + several heard
• Dideric Cuckoo—1 heard
• Yellowbill—1
• Speckled Mousebird—about 15
• Bar-tailed Trogon—1
• White-throated Bee-eater—about 12
• Black-and-white-casqued Hornbill—3 heard
• Gray-throated Barbet—1
• Speckled Tinkerbird—2
• Yellow-rumped Tinkerbird—about 5
• Yellow-spotted Barbet—3 heard
• Buff-spotted Woodpecker—2
• Elliot’s Woodpecker—3
• African Broadbill—1 heard
• African Shrike-flycatcher—2
• Black-and-white Shrike-flycatcher—4
• Brown-throated Wattle-eye—about 10
• Chestnut Wattle-eye—2
• Pink-footed Puffback—2
• Brown-crowned Tchagra—1
• Luehder’s Bushshrike—about 15
• Gray-green Bushshrike—2
• Petit’s Cuckoo-Shrike—about 10
• Mackinnon’s Shrike—2
• Black-tailed Oriole—1 + several heard
• Velvet-mantled Drongo—1
• African Paradise-Flycatcher—2
• Pied Crow—2
• Lesser Striped-Swallow—about 25
• White-headed Sawwing—2
• Black Sawwing—about 20
• White-tailed Blue-Flycatcher—3
• Common Bulbul—about 15
• Shelley’s Greenbul—3
• Little Greenbul—4
• Plain Greenbul—7
• Slender-billed Greenbul—6
• Yellow-whiskered Greenbul—2
• Honeyguide Greenbul—2
• Yellow-throated Greenbul—2++ (1 group)
• Cabanis’s Greenbul—4
• Toro Olive-Greenbul—3
• Common Bristlebill—1 + several heard
• Red-faced Woodland-Warbler—1
• Black-throated Apalis—1
• Buff-throated Apalis—2
• Gray Apalis—2
• Green-backed Camaroptera—3+3 heard
• White-chinned Prinia—2
• Chubb’s Cisticola—2
• Gray-capped Warbler—1
• Black-faced Rufous-Warbler—2
• Neumann’s Warbler—1
• Green Hylia—2
• White-eyed Slaty-Flycatcher—8
• Chapin’s Flycatcher—6
• African Dusky Flycatcher—2
• Gray-throated Tit-Flycatcher—1
• Equatorial Akalat—1
• White-bellied Robin-Chat—1
• Gray-winged Robin-Chat—1 + 2 heard
• White-browed Robin-Chat—1
• Blue-shouldered Robin-Chat—1 heard
• Snowy-crowned Robin-Chat—1 + a few heard
• Rufous Flycatcher-Thrush—1 heard
• African Thrush—4
• Red-throated Alethe—1 heard
• Scaly-breasted Illadopsis—1
• Mountain Illadopsis—3 heard
• African Yellow White-eye—about 15
• Stuhlmann’s Starling—2
• Narrow-tailed Starling—about 10
• Gray-headed Sunbird—3
• Green Sunbird—2
• Collared Sunbird—about 10
• Green-headed Sunbird—3
• Blue-headed Sunbird—3
• Western Olive Sunbird—4
• Green-throated Sunbird—4
• Purple-breasted Sunbird—7
• Bronze Sunbird—about 10
• Northern Double-collared Sunbird—about 15
• African Pied Wagtail—5
• Western Citril—1
• Thick-billed Seedeater—2
• Gray-headed Sparrow—2
• Red-headed Malimbe—8
• Baglafecht Weaver—about 10
• Black-necked Weaver—12
• Black-billed Weaver—1
• Viellot’s Weaver—7
• Village Weaver—1
• Brown-capped Weaver—3
• Gray-headed Negrofinch—5
• Green-backed Twinspot—1
• Red-billed Firefinch—2
• Black-and-white Mannikin—1
• Pin-tailed Whydah—1
• L’Hoest’s Monkey—about 15
• Red-tailed Guenon—1
• Gorilla—1
• Ruwenzori Duiker—1
• White-eared Fruit-Bat—about 8 (best guess: Franquet’s or Wahlberg’s Epauletted Bat… I have photos if anyone could have a view)
+ Weyns’s Weaver—12 (Burumbo Swamp, west of Kampala)