Text by Ian Riddell and pictures by Celesta Von Chamier
At 280km
per hour we flash past eagles and vultures soaring over the rugged and
verdant Whambira Hills, too fast to identify anything but a few White-backed
Vultures. These tantalising glimpses
awaken our interest and as we slip over the Zambezi escarpment the magnificent
blue expanse of Lake
Kariba draws our gaze,
the mountains abruptly giving way to the flat spread of the Kariba basin. As we drop down over the Gachegache River
details start to appear; brown lozenges resolve into hippos snoozing in the
turbid water, a big elephant bull strolls along the river side, great ears
flapping, and wheeling white flashes can be recognised as Great and Cattle Egrets.
But this is
only a brief interlude in our flight from Harare. We pick up passengers and wing our way over
the eastern basin of the lake; below I recognise Bed
Island and the much bigger Spurwing Island
as the sinuous eastern foreshore of Matusadona
National Park
approaches. It’s a magnificent view as
we fly over the park, roads I haven’t travelled in decades loop around bays
dotted with elephant and hippo with specks of birds flighting over the
waters. In vain I hope to spot the Grey Crowned Cranes that sometimes
habituate the Mukadzapela bays while off the left wing a big thunderstorm
debouches its load over the Ume River and west edge of the park and suddenly we
have arrived; scooting below Nongo Hill we flash down the airstrip to chase off
the impala, a tight turn over Bumi Lagoon and a smooth landing.
Celesta and
I have arrived at Bumi Hills on a mission; she is armed with a camera to do
lots of clicking and me with a pen to do lots of ticking as we work up a bird
list of the area. We are met by Student,
one of the guides of the Safari Lodge and quickly pick up one of the specials, Meves’s Starling, a bird restricted to
this part of Africa, along with a few other
typical bush birds like the African Golden Oriole that proves to be very
common over our stay. The plane departs
for Harare, the
impala flood back onto the airstrip and we wend our way up the hill, a
prominence that sticks out into Kariba like a hitchhiker’s thumb. But not to be outdone by mere birds the first
of the Big Five, in the form of three lionesses, put in an appearance – they
are lolling on the very edge of the road a mere 150m from the lodge gate and we
gently squeeze passed them! We are soon
settled into luxurious rooms 100m above the lake with a magnificent view over
the blue immensity of Lake
Kariba and after a brief
rest and refreshments we are off on an afternoon game drive with Student. We take in Bumi harbour bay, picking up
waterbirds like Glossy Ibis, Black Heron, Great Egret and various waders like Blacksmith Lapwing and of course the ubiquitous and noisy White-crowned Lapwing – he may be
common but he’s another special nonetheless.
We cut around the bottom of the bay and pass Kalundukakubi Hill into the
mopane-Combretum-Terminalia
bushland to cut across the peninsular, and the purpose of the tall odd looking Diospyros ‘aerial’ attached to the front
bumper becomes apparent. It’s another
bumper year for Golden orb-web spiders and the large and somewhat ominous
looking females, harmless though they may be with their enormous webs spanning
the roads, are better knocked down there than in our laps! Open areas of scrub mopane look just right for Three-banded and Bronze-winged Coursers though we
didn’t find them on this trip. We emerge
onto the Panicum foreshore of the
next bay and Celesta spies a Black-bellied Bustard, a bird I was hoping
to see. The Panicum is quite variable over the course of a year as the lake
level rises or falls and it produces all sorts of birds. At the moment it is lush and green and
feathery-topped from the rains are just right for the bustard and Secretarybirds. Monotonous Larks are somewhat sporadic
and I’ve seen them in this area before at this time of the year but they evaded
us today, whilst one of only two known spots for the very special Rosy-throated
Longclaw in the Zambezi valley is on the
foreshore around Bumi. When the lake is
high there can be no foreshore at all and in droughts or the end of the dry
season the only grass to be found is growing under water at the edge of the
lake. This can be a very interesting
time too and the dropping water level, when it coincides with the ‘wader
season’ of roughly September to April can bring in all sorts plus oddities such
as African Pygmy-goose, Lesser
Jacana and Long-toed Lapwing in shallow weed exposed areas
west of Bumi.
The next day we explored some of the
foreshore around the airstrip and the beach running in front of the hotel. Our luck was in with a nice herd of 130-odd
buffalo replete with both Red-billed and Yellow-billed Oxpeckers, a goodly total of 50-60 of the former and about 15 of the latter
clambering and flying about the herd was most entertaining. Ruffs were the commonest wader at
these little mud wallows… and everywhere else for that matter. We had fun trying to get shots of a Kittlitz’s
Plover and her two chicks, which eventually hid under dry elephant
droppings. A little further on was a Common
Ringed Plover but this individual was eclipsed on our last morning when we
walked the beach and flushed 12 birds, a very good number of this migrant on
northward migration. But the most
exciting wader was a Common Whimbrel we flushed from the same beach. This inland rarity is seldom recorded on
return migration so we had the double whammy of a good bird on a good date!
Waterbirds are naturally
one of the features of Kariba and one or more boat trips are essential. We did venture out of Bumi’s usual area and
down the Ume and Sibilobilo rivers. The African Darter breeding colony in
the Gubu had all sizes of chicks and we saw all the typical waders, herons,
egrets and storks. Marabou Stork
were flying across the Ume from the crocodile farm to their old breeding site
in the National Park and at least three White-backed Vulture nests sites
were in operation along the Shenga River shoreline (this is also a good area
for Arnot’s Chat!). We had the
good fortune to spot a leopard coming down to drink in the late morning, well
at least I did, but it jumped into the dense Combretum thickets before
Celesta could get a view or any shots and spots and a white tipped tail waving
in the gloom were mostly what she had to be satisfied with. The Musango River
near Bumi was very picturesque, full of hippos, Malachite Kingfishers
and fantastic rock-clinging fig trees full of invisible African
Green-pigeons. The Sibilobilo gave us a Green-backed Heron
on the nest with at least 2 eggs and a Senegal Coucal nearby with a
fledgling in a bush, plus a pair of Saddle-billed Storks on the
top of a baobab tree; I wonder if they are thinking of nesting up there? Further up we flushed Black-crowned Night-herons
from their roost and experienced the added excitement of an Ayres’s
Hawk-eagle overhead. We also cruised
around the front of Bumi, visiting Twin Sister’s Island
jam packed with a cacophony of about 400 screaming Grey-headed Gulls. March
should be too early for breeding but I did wonder about some of the birds
sitting… More Ruffs and waders and ibis on Starvation Island
were augmented by a lovely pair of Saddle-billed
Storks.
It was too
early for the large raptors to be breeding but the resident pair of African Hawk-eagles put in an
appearance on a number of occasions. Our
rooms and the dining deck were great for fly-bys; Bateleurs were regular and over lunch we once watched one tussle
with an African Fish-eagle. A
couple of Brown Snake-eagles became quite frequent and 4 Eurasian Hobby seemed to enjoy the
slopes and beach in front of the hotel for hunting. At the airstrip it was unusual to see a Black-chested Snake-eagle and even a Verreaux’s Eagle, not at all common
here, put in an appearance on our last morning.
The Martial Eagle is a
spectacular raptor and I had hoped to also see the more unusual African
Crowned Eagle that frequents the hills in the area.
The bush
around the hill is quite thick and green at this time of the year and must be
full of little secretive jobs. We did
find a few Broad-tailed Paradise-whydahs one afternoon and surely the Orange-winged Pytilia must be lurking
there too, as well as the Red-throated Twinspot. Bearded Scrub-robins and Eastern Nicator
sing their lovely songs from the thickets.
Both Black-crowned and Brown-crowned Tchagra are common and in
the bushes below the rooms we could watch a White-browed Coucal and fledgling foraging most days. Retz’s
Helmet-shrikes were daily visitors to the gardens and we spent an
entertaining half hour or so getting shots of a Red-billed Hornbill feeding his family walled up in an African
Wattle in the gardens before those little black ants gave us a serious case of
ants-in-the-pants!
Bumi is a great place to bird – so much to see and not
enough time is often the case with birders.
But we got a good list of 143 in their wildlife area with another 20
outside and lots of pics. There are probably
about 400 species in the area which is a good reason to come again in another
season!
A bit about Ian
A former National Parks ranger whose first posting was Matusadona National Park in 1979-1980. In those days his special interest was
reptiles and amphibians (did you know that the commonest snake in Tashinga
Camp, the headquarters for the Park, was the Boomslang) but gradually the
‘birding bug’ took hold. He left
National Parks in 1986 and joined Shearwater in 1987, worked as a canoe guide
on the Zambezi River
and Ruckomechi Camp in Mana Pools National Park,
and obtained his Professional Guides licence in 1989, eventually free-lancing
for safari companies throughout the Zambezi
Valley, Kariba, Chizarira
and Hwange areas.
