Back from Gambia

This is a male Senegal Batis (Batis senegalensis), a most exotic and interesting little bird and getting photos of both male and female of this species was one of the highlights of my trip.

I am in the car at the moment travelling back from the Gambia via Manchester Airport. All in all, a great birding trip with numerous and constant photographic opportunities.

Having travelled the world, not only in my career but now as a bird watcher, photographer and holidaymaker, I wasn't expecting such a cultural shock. Gambia is a crazy place! The dirty rubbish strewn roads are dusty and busy, and that's not to mention the sandy tracks that you find yourself negotiating on every birding outing. It's a poor country with a fractured infrastructure, even the airport is like an imitation of the real thing. For example the main terrace cafe is serviced from what can only be described as a lean to shack!

Away from the airport there are shops and supermarkets….. in name only…..these are frugally stocked, perhaps a portent of the way it will be, should we ever survive any serious world conflict. Drinking the local water would be an act of folly verging on stupidity, you would be certain to get Banjul belly as the locals are happy to describe it. I ate lettuce at the airport which had been rinsed in water and yes I did suffer.

Not yet fully in the dry season, mangrove trees apart, the absence of greenery was striking. Dust is thick on every solid surface and is blown around in the breeze. Beach areas are clean in front of the hotels but out of the jurisdiction of these areas, who knows what's floating, or what the sand conceals. Hooded Vultures and Black Kites do a sterling job, removing and consuming the endless offensive rot. Am I painting an enticing picture?

Kotu Creek Bridge, famous at least in the UK for it's birding is an eyesore with plastic bags littering the vista and old tyres floating in the mud beneath the bridge. Just a few yards away there is a a track between mangrove to your left and rice paddy to the right which is almost solid with plastic waste and I have to confess that this did detract from my experience.

The smal, famous birding location of Tanjay Village had a stench so powerful that it would have been inconceivable to linger there for more than a few minutes yet further on and in the bush you had a real feeling of being truly in Africa and even without the numerous and exotic bird species, it would have been memorable.

My hotel was a veritable oasis, a sanctuary of peace and security. Well policed and well manicured with richly flowering exotics such as Hibuscus, and bougainvilleas in abundance.

I did expect there to be more species in the hotel garden but for reasons that I can't explain, this wasn't the case. There was an area where water was put out and this seemed to serve as more of an attractant than food.

Aside from the hotel, I found the people to be, in the main, friendly, perhaps even too friendly. Their constant need to live up to their own perception of themselves, as Africa's smiling coast started to wear a bit thin very quickly. Without exception, every smiling, gushing interaction was the overture to a less welcoming symphony. This happy tune quickly turning to discord when the inevitable sponging started. Be it, do you want my taxi, my guiding services etc etc, or as I experienced, do you want that lady, she likes you, yes, a pretty woman but not the type of bird I had gone to see!

Kotu Bridge is a famous place for the Association of Bird Guides. One would think that choosing a bird guide from the many, or perhaps even choosing not to have one would be easy , well it wasn't. There is good and there is bad wherever you go but sorting the wheat from the chaff is either luck of the draw or trial and error. Don't think that you will go it alone, you will be pestered unmercifully if you choose that as an option. On my first day I had planned a quiet walk, just to find my feet so to speak, that wasn't going to happen! Word quickly spread that there was a new boy in town and I was like a small defenceless fawn amongst a pack of hunting dogs. Or perhaps more realistically, here was a fat Englishman with a fat wallet and they want some of it. My first choice was a bad one. I had devised a few questions to ascertain the veracity of credentials. The first one being, how many kingfisher species are there in The Gambia? (9 by the way). The first guy to accost me, just 2 feet from the main gate of the hotel answered me correctly…….I was suckered in to letting him walk with me and then impressed when he started to point out a few species which I hadn't realised are abundant and I could have found myself with ease. So when he told me that he had a 4 x4 and that he would take me to the famous Abuko reserve, well, how could I refuse. We negotiated a price which was around the price I had been expecting to pay, so I thought, why not. To be fair we didn't do too badly and I did see good stuff, but he hurried me on constantly, not allowing me the time to photograph which is why I had come. For example, I will spend 3 hours here in the UK just to get one picture but here I was rushing behind someone to be shown the distant speck of this Bee-eater or that Chat……. No…. That's not what I enjoy, nor what I had come to do. But he didnt really listen.

On top of that, he had the most intense and unpleasant body odour problem which, in the heat of an un-air conditioned car in 30 degrees, was unbearable and like a heinous torture. It couldn't go on, or rather I couldn't. The next day I returned to the bridge where the pestering continued, one guide actually flushing the small group of waxbills and weavers that I was photographing in his efforts to convince me that he was my man. It wasnt a good start from the guides. Their desperation for business appears to be the norm.

In the end I finished up using the services of a young guide called Sainey Barry who was a very nice, quiet and gentle young man with a fair knowledge and an understanding of what I had come to the Gambia to achieve. What I liked about him was his excitement and obvious pleasure that he derived from finding something good for us. Back in the UK, I like to think of myself as a loner when I am birding. But with Saineys help, I managed a total of 140 species, photographed 116 and saw more than 100 bird species for the first time.

Would I go back? Probably, but I would be wiser and probably feel a bit more relaxed about everything……. he bird below is a Senegal Parrot, a very popular bird in aviculture and a great bird to see. I am going to include a new post regularly featuring the Gambian birds from my trip as and when I sort through them.