Waking up with the birds - a Gambian adventure

Apart from its slave trade history the other thing The Gambia is famous for is the richness of its bird life. Indeed, just sitting by the pool I am spoiled with Black Kites swooping around and hooded vultures are commonplace and today I have even seen a peregrine falcon (my favourite bird) make an appearance too. Outside our room there are a group of village egrets ( note: that is not a typo for village idiots!), a type of wading bird and there is a tree packed full of weaver bird nests too! And so I resolved to go on a "wake up with the birds" tour.

I must be some sort of sadist to force myself out of bed on holidays at 5:30am, but birds are at their most active at dawn and dusk so it was a necessary evil. Sarah decided that sleep was more preferable than wandering around mangroves looking at flappy things.

The bus was actually about 15 minutes late, which brings me on to a facet of life here. Being on the same degree of longitude as the UK, there is no time difference as such, but whereas GMT for us means one thing, to the locals it stand for Gambian Maybe Time. Never expect anything to be at the time they quote, they are too laid back for such conventions, it will just happen when it happens and you are best off just going with the flow. We eventually got on the bus, and I saw similar faces on this as I did on the Roots tour.

The tour guide we had for this trip was a man called Charlie, and it is safe to say he had a wonderful turn of phrase, which warmed the coach party up nicely. I was surprised that not many of the people on the trip were dedicated twitchers but just people either doing "Gambia by numbers" or because they were bored of just lounging by the pool.

We arrived at Lamin lodge - the first part of our trip. It was a fishing lodge and we were going to head out into the mangroves to spot some waders. It was about five minutes prior to departure when a case of Banjul belly struck me!! The toilets in the lodge were functional but not too dissimilar to the toilet used by Renton in Trainspotting. Also there was no male/female segregation, and the doors only just about covered your modesty, but at this point I cared not. 

 

Lamin Lodge - A nice location, but toilet facilities were basic to say the least!
 

Thankfully,  my seasoned traveller experience came to my rescue as I brought my own loo roll on the trip knowing that sometimes out of the way places don't have such luxuries. Judging by the sound coming from the cubicle next to me I was not the only one suffering today,  as some poor woman was in the same boat (forgive the pun!) as me. I didn't want to offer her my loo roll a) because I didn't want her to know my ears had witnessed the foulness that she had just deposited in the toilet pan next to me, and b) I was in self preservation mode and wanted to keep the toilet roll for myself. 

I also packed some Imodium tablets, and I had a couple of these before my boat ride. It took a long time to kick in and there were certain points on my journey into the mangroves when I thought I was in real trouble, I was sweating profusely hoping I wouldn't need to abandon ship at short notice!! Thankfully for me (and the rest of the party) this never happened, but it did mean I didn't enjoy the mangrove trip quite as much as I might have!!

 

Sunrise over the mangroves

 

That said, I did see a fair few birds on the way, most exciting of which are the raptors. We spotted a marsh harrier, peregrine falcon, many hooded vultures and black kites. The tour guide gave me book which allowed me to tick off which birds we had seen and appealing to my slightly obsessive nature, I set about ticking as many as I could spot. 

There were quite a few wintering birds here, which are common in huge UK so I was comfortable enough with spotting those, but I needed the tour guides help with the more African birds. Gambian birds have so much more colour than the birds in the UK, so armed with a pair of binoculars I was scouting out the trees and the skies.

Alas this is where the lack of a good camera was sorely missed, as I didn't manage to get any decent shots of birds on this trip, it is not that I don't have a good camera, but just that I decided to save the luggage allowance for things like fridge magnets and novelty Gambian instruments....

 

We moved away from the mangroves and back into the lodge for some breakfast which I politely declined. In The Gambia it is almost an insult to them if you refuse food, and several people came over to me with worried expressions checking to make sure I was OK. I would have like breakfast, but I just don't think my stomach would have liked that and rebelled in the most violent of fashion!

I did enjoy the others eating breakfast though, as next to the lodge there are a band of monkeys that live in the tree and have clearly learnt when breakfast time was because they were hanging around pestering the humans. Indeed, I was chatting to a group on my table when suddenly a cheeky monkey head popped up at the window, surveyed the table and then bobbed back down again out of sight. Moments later, when we had resumed talking, a long hand reached up and into the lodge grabbed the poor girls doughnut and the successful imp ran off over the roof being chased by a group of other monkeys trying to steal his prize!!

Following on from breakfast, we moved onto land and continued our bird watching on foot. From here we saw lots of different types of birds all very colourful, there were hornbills, hoopoes, rollers, which led Charlie the tour guide to tell us his Roller joke - there is one type of Roller in the UK, does anyone know what it is? Clearly this was designed for real twitchers, as the answers we were coming up with ranged from the Bay City Rollers to Keith Richards - both of whom Charlie had never heard of. The answer was Motorola, which brought a few groans.

In total I spotted 58 different bird types, which for 3 hours work was not bad at all. Don't worry I won't post a complete list of them, which would bore most people to tears (Sarah included!) but suffice it to say I have them ticked off in my book. :D 

 

Like with the Roots tour there was a man who followed us around videoing us looking at birds (as well as the birds themselves. At the end of the day he tried to hawk this to us for a reasonable price (500 Delasi - about nine pounds), but I just cant see myself looking back at this DVD in my dotage and trying to recall what that black speck in the sky is. Similarly, watching a video of me with a pair of binoculars looking at black specks in the sky is hardly the most riveting way for people to spend an evening, so I politely declined.

The afternoon has just been at rest, sitting by the pool and drinking lager with a bit of sleeping trying not to upset my tummy too much - the Imodium must have worked as by then end of the night I was back eating again without too much issue!