From Edward To George

Our trip to Uganda earlier this year was the third safari trip we have been on in the last eight years. If I'm predicting the future here, this will not be the last one. There are at least one or two more out there in next few years, I'm thinking. Yeah, I know I said that in my last post also.

This trip was a little bit different from the last two times we've set foot on Africa. Many of our days this year involved seeking out a single species in a specific location, rather than venturing out into a landscape inhabited by a variety of animals to see what we could find. That resulted in three days devoted almost exclusively to chimpanzees, gorillas and shoebills. All good stuff, but at some point we wanted some real variety and the opportunity to see multiple species co-existing next to each other. We hoped we would have that opportunity on two safari drives in Queen Elizabeth National Park scheduled in the middle of our itinerary.

Sometimes nature cooperates spectacularly and sometimes it doesn't. And quite honestly, it didn't at Queen Elizabeth. Yes, we saw lots of Ugandan kobs and buffalo and waterbucks and some hippos and a few lions from a distance doing not much at all, but we also spent time driving through a scorched earth part of the park on our second drive with no wildlife to speak of. In defense of QENP here, our first drive did feature some excellent looks at a family of elephants, but by and large, we didn't get what I expected out of two trips into the park.

I realize I am spoiled here. Excellent looks at a family of elephants is considered a sort of failure. Hey, I wanted more.

After our morning drive on our second day at Queen Elizabeth, our schedule had us taking a boat trip on the Kazinga Channel, which I honestly knew nothing about. It was an optional activity which I read as not essential (I mean I know that is what optional means...) because the quality and quantity of what one would see on such a trip would not measure up to what was in the Park. Of course, we went anyway. Why would we not? It's not like we are going to skip some experience in a place we will likely never visit again.

Good thing we did. THIS was the safari experience we needed on this trip. 

A pod of hippos (including one albino) and an hadada ibis.

On Uganda's western border, the one it shares with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there sit two lakes: Lake Albert (named in 1864 after Queen Victoria of Britain's deceased husband, Albert) and Lake Edward (named in 1888 after Queen Victoria's son, who later became King Edward VII). Neither of these names, of course, are the original names of the lakes. They were given those monikers after being "discovered" by British explorers in the nineteenth century. 

Just east of Lake Edward, there is a smaller lake located entirely within the borders of Uganda called Lake George. This one too is named after a British monarch, Queen Victoria's grandson, who later became King George V. Lake George is also not the original name of this lake. Like Lake Edward, Lake George got its current name in 1888. In fact, it was the same person, Henry Morton Stanley, who named both lakes.

I know that's altogether too many royals. For the record, the original names of these lakes, which are still used by some, are Mwitanzige (Albert), Rwitanzigye or Rweru (Edward) and Katunguru (George). I always think it's important to recognize the names given to places by the people who were there first. It should also be noted here that Idi Amin Dada, who served as the third president of Uganda, re-named Lake Edward after himself in the 1970s but, well, he didn't last very long after that and when he was deposed, I believe his name was erased from pretty much everything. That tends to happen with deposed dictators. But that's a whole other story and one that won't be told on this particular blog.

Queen Elizabeth National Park, the one that produced less excitement than hoped for us in terms of safari drive wildlife sightings, surrounds the entirety of the Uganda side of Lake Edward and extends eastward all the way to Lake George. Between the two lakes and entirely within the park, there is a 40 kilometer (25 miles for those of us who don't speak metric) or so long waterway called the Kazinga Channel. The channel is about 500 to 600 meters wide (about a third of a mile) and isn't that deep at about nine to ten meters (30 feet) at its deepest point. It's a perfect habitat for a number of species of animals and birds, and particularly for two of Africa's largest mammals. 

Maybe that's where all the animals we didn't find in the Park were.

A totally different pod of hippos (with some African buffalo) and a Nile crocodile.

Our cruise vessel for our afternoon on the Kazinga Channel was a not-so-sleek looking green boat with a canvas canopy supported on some poles mounted to the outside of the port and starboard sides. Other than the fact that it pretty much perfectly seated our group of 12, there was nothing ideal or remarkable about this craft. We added a driver (Eddie) and a guide (Monday) and we set sail. We were not setting any speed records in this boat but then that was never the point to begin with. Let's go find some animals.

Before we do, though, let me say that I may have our guide's name wrong. I usually write down peoples' names when we meet them in the Notes app on my iPhone. I neglected to do so here. I know our guide was named after a day of the week and I know it wasn't Wednesday through Saturday, but there's a chance his name was Sunday or Tuesday.

He was amazing, by the way. As was Eddie. These guys worked very hard to get everyone on our boat some incredible looks at and pictures of wildlife. And the boat that I just mocked? It was awesome too. It took us close to some animals and brought us back and remained afloat. What else did we really need?

It may seem counterintuitive to be excited about a water safari. I mean, you might be thinking what happens if the animals move away from shore and onto the land? And while sure that's an issue, the same question is valid when you are in a vehicle on land. You can only drive in certain parts of the parks. It's not like you can follow a lion or a herd of elephants somewhere if they move away from where you are watching them from. If they decide to move away from the road, you cannot chase. 

There are a few advantages to a water safari. 

First, you can see animals in the water or along the shore that you can't see on land. You aren't likely to see crocodiles or wading birds like herons or storks or ibis in the middle of the savannah. There's no food there for any of those animals and they might themselves become just that for some other predator. Before you roll your eyes at crocodiles and birds, let me say you haven't seen true beauty in a reptile until you have laid eyes in person on the Nile crocodile and its gorgeous light green skin. Just beautiful.

Second, animals which venture down to the water often stay there for a while. There is little that is going to move some of them out voluntarily. Water is life, after all.

Finally, animals don't typically attack in the water. There are some exceptions but it's difficult for animals to move quickly in water and maintain speed. Quite simply, you can get closer most times that you ever would on land.

It didn't take long after we set off from the dock to find our first major wildlife sighting. Right along the edge of the channel was a very large pod of hippos cooling themselves off in the midday sun. Included in their number was an albino hippo, the first time I have ever seen such a thing. Sunburn is a problem for hippos in general in Africa. I can't imagine the peril if there is less pigment in the skin. 

When we first traveled to sub-Saharan Africa, one of the animals I wanted to see more than most was a hippo. These things are huge and I wanted to get up close and personal with one or more than one to the greatest extent possible. An adult male can weigh up to 3,500 kilograms. That's almost 8,000 pounds. And all they eat is vegetation. They are crazy big.

We definitely saw lots of hippos along the Chobe River in 2015. We also found out that they don't particularly do much. They just sort of cluster together in the water with their heads above the surface and float or stand there. They generally don't get out of the water, they don't interact with each other and they don't do much moving around, at least not until it's pitch black at night and you can't see them at all. The luster around hippos that I had before that first trip fast faded away.

We didn't spend a lot of time watching hippos on that first safari trip. We found a lot but we didn't linger for one reason and one reason alone: they are very territorial and can be very aggressive. So, yes, I know I wrote earlier about animals not attacking in the water. The hippopotamus is definitely an exception to that rule. If you are in a small boat, like we were on the Chobe seven plus years ago, the prospect of an adult male hippo moving deceptively quickly in the water in your direction is a scary thought. But in a larger boat that's clearly larger than the largest male? They are not so tough. In a larger vessel, you can linger and watch. 

That first group of hippos we saw in the Kazinga Channel wasn't the only pod we saw. That first group (and I'm going from memory and counting heads on pictures) was maybe 15 or 20. The next group we found was probably double that size. We did have one male from that second group charge our boat but he bailed out before he got close to us. He knew he wasn't going to overturn us and eventually, I guess, he figured we were probably not going to harm him or his pod. So he went back to being a hippo. Which is all we really wanted.

We encountered some incredible hippo things on the Kazinga Channel. We saw what was probably the smallest baby hippo that we will ever see. Monday told us it was born just two days earlier. It was so new, that the placenta was still clinging to its mother's body. TMI I am sure there but this baby was super, super small. Of course, it was already in the water. You can see its back and the back of its head next to its mother's head in the last picture above.

We also witnessed a bit of a hippo fight, although it appeared in the end to be a misunderstanding and not a fight between males for dominance or something like that. There is nothing like a hippo or two or three clashing in the water to draw your attention to them. These things are giant (I know I already said that) and they displace a ton of water when they move quickly.

The last thing I'll say here about hippos is about that baby. Just before we headed back to the dock, a crocodile slid into the water near the baby. The mother moved in between the croc and her newborn and essentially escorted the crocodile back to shore. The crocodile did not fight that escort.

So, hippos were obviously one of the two "Africa's largest mammals" in the Kazinga Channel that I referenced earlier in this post. The other was also equally obviously the elephant.

So here's the thing about elephants and water. They need a lot of it every day. An adult elephant needs about 180 to 220 liters of water per day (in addition to about 650 pounds of food per day) so when they get to a spot where they can drink, they are liable to stay there for a while. And when they do, they are completely exposed to view. Both those things are great for elephant watching. They also can't hide any members of their group (like babies) in quite the same way they can when they are traveling from place to place. Everyone drinks, so if you are elephant watching, you get to see all of the herd.

Hippos might charge a boat, even if they have no chance of toppling it, but elephants don't. They just aren't fast enough in water. So while they may perceive us tourists as some kind of threat, they don't see us as scary enough to move away and they don't have the ability to attack beyond some kind of on-land bluffing and blustering (we did get this behavior from one bull who shows us ears-out how tough he was going to be in the future but ultimately, he ran away). It's a perfect situation for watching and learning, particularly because the nervousness at being out in the open causes the herd to behave in unique ways, particularly as it relates to sheltering their young (see the picture below where the very tiny baby is drinking wholly underneath its mother).

Truth be told here on this boat cruise, we had a good idea that we'd see a lot of elephants because after we were done eating lunch that day, we saw about 30 or 40 elephants drinking at various times with a boat really close to them. We figured (correctly) that we would likely be on the same boat later that same day. When we watched from the shore, the elephants kept coming, more and more one after the other. There were an astonishing number there for us to see. The photographs below are from that viewing before we boarded the boat. 

There's one other advantage to watching elephants from the water: the viewing angle is better. I'm serious. You are generally closer to the ground sitting in a boat than you are standing in a vehicle. Add to that the fact that the boat is likely usually sitting lower than the shore and you pretty much have a perspective with these animals like you would have if you were standing next to them. But without actually standing next to them. So...longer looks, more open looks, better perspective. Being on the water is the way to go.

We had a couple of really intimate experiences that stand out on this boat ride. And yes, intimate applies to elephants like it does for gorillas and chimpanzees. There is some real high intelligence looking back at you. 

In addition to the young bull who tried to scare us off, we spent a good amount of time watching an older bull feed while standing in the water. Monday estimated his age at 25 years (the oldest recorded elephant age in the wild is 89) and we could definitely see some scars as a result of those years, mostly in the rips and tears in his ears which we were close enough to see without binoculars or zoom lenses. There is something incredible and peaceful about watching an elephant just eat. The way they use the tips of their trunks to pluck vegetation off the plant or out of the ground then spoon it into their mouths while looking around and showing enough size to make anything the size of a boat know how much power there is there. I could honestly just watch all day.

The one real drawback to a water safari is there are some species you just aren't going to see much at all if ever. Cats and other predators are probably not spending time at the river during the middle of the day. Too hot and too much work. Now, seven or eight years ago, I would have been thrilled with a whole host of hippos and elephants with a few crocodiles and buffalo thrown in for good measure. But to make a water safari truly special today, there has to be something other than hippos and elephants. Ours had birds.

I know, I know. I get it. It's always about the birds with me lately. But this trip was a true bonanza. I went to Africa this year with hopes that we would see some kingfishers and some bee-eaters. We saw three species of the former and two of the latter on this one cruise through the Kazinga Channel alone. But better than just seeing them, we saw them being active and we saw some species in pairs or groups rather than just one bird by itself.

So...bee-eaters. These birds, as their name suggests, exist on a diet of bees, wasps and hornets. They are brightly colored and have curved beaks which I can only imagine is specially shaped somehow to catch their favorite foods. We watched one blue-cheeked bee-eater dart back and forth from its perch on a thorny tree to dive over the channel and repeat and repeat. They are tiny and fast and about impossible to photograph because they are seemingly constantly on the move. We did manage to get a couple of good snaps of a pair of cinnamon-chested bee-eaters (behind some vines) before they flew off and we never saw them again. The blue-cheeked bee-eater also managed to stay still just long enough for me to get one or two good pictures. 

I should note here that taking pictures on a rocking boat is way more difficult than on a stationary vehicle on land. Also, Eddie, our driver, was instrumental in a lot of these bird sightings. Huge kudos to him there.

On the kingfisher side of things, we saw three different species of kingfisher in our week in Uganda in the Mabamba Swamp, the Queen Elizabeth National Park and at the Kazinga Channel. Those three would be the brightly colored malachite kingfisher, the black-and-white pied kingfisher and the woodland kingfisher. The malachite is incredibly difficult to get on film. Or it was the day we cruised the Channel. Explaining why there are no pics of that one on here.

There were far more pied kingfishers to see that afternoon than any other species. We managed to see them perched in ones, twos and threes and also fishing. Threesome of pieds seemed to be really common, with at least two of them fighting while the other watched. Males competing for females, maybe? 

We also managed to see a woodland kingfisher catch a fish that seemed to be about the size of its head, bash the fish on the tree that it was perched on (to kill it, I guess) and then down it in on smooth gulp. I love these sorts of looks at birds and animals because they don't happen every day on every trip. Observing behaviors is definitely a cumulative experience that requires a lot of luck and/or a lot of trips. I'm up for both. Now I just need a lot more time off.

In addition to the bee-eaters and the kingfishers on our Kazinga Channel cruise, we saw ibis and lapwings and Egyptian geese on the shores and red-billed oxpeckers picking at open wounds on the backs of one or two hippos (lovely stuff, I know...). We also found a pair of my most favorite birds of prey, the African fish eagle.

If there's a more perfectly put together bird of prey out there than the fish eagle, I don't know what it is. We first saw these birds along the Chobe River in 2015 and then again at Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania in 2018 (the same place we first saw our first bee-eater) and I fell in love both times. You might think they look very much like the bald eagles that you can see in the United States and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong. They both have dark bodies with white heads, they both build massive nests and they both have yellow beaks with striking eyes. Yes, I realize the massive nests doesn't describe either species of bird at all.

The difference for me (and where the fish eagle separates from the bald eagle) is in the details. The fish eagle is sleeker than the bald eagle; its shoulders are not so obvious as its American counterpart and its head tapers into the body in a much more elegant way. The coloring is also far more striking. The fish eagle's head is whiter and extends further down its torso; its beak is a much deeper yellow and tipped in black; and its eyes are dead black. The bald eagle is more muted, with almost blond eyes. Fish eagle wins hands down here. It is one of the most put together, while also being a vicious hunter, birds out there.

The best safari trips are those with amazing, unfettered views of amazing wildlife. By every measure, this cruise on the water between Lakes Edward and George fit into that category with flying colors. Put me on a boat surrounded by elephants with some Nile crocodiles, some kingfishers and a pair of African fish eagles thrown in and I'll be a happy man every day. And that's not even considering the bee-eaters and the hippos. I could spend all day on the water just watching the birdlife. Africa is chock full of incredible-looking birds. I need to spend a lot more time than we have just being there and watching. There's a lot of time left to do that, I'm sure.

I know better to say this but I'm going to say it anyway. I've been on a lot of wildlife watching trips in my life. Sometimes nature cooperates spectacularly and sometimes it doesn't. I can't imagine any way that our trip on the Kazinga Channel was atypical. I have to believe that hippos and elephants bob in the water or visit the shores every day and I believe there are incredible bird sightings along with them. I know the odds of me ever visiting this part of the world is super remote, but I am sure to tell anyone that has any option to take this cruise to say yes and never look back. No cats? Who cares? This was the best safari we took on this trip and it was totally unexpected. I'll treasure this forever.

Young elephant. Tough guy. So very cute. 

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How We Did It

Like our day visiting gorillas in Mgahinga National Park and finding chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, our afternoon on a boat on the Kazinga Channel was one stop on our Gorilla Treks & Safari Drives tour package through Uganda and into Rwanda with G Adventures. There are many places on this world we want to travel and while we wouldn't necessarily rule out other travel companies, I believe G Adventures will always be our first stop.

This tour was an optional activity on our itinerary. If I'm remembering right, it was an extra $30. I can't imagine skipping it. It was (in case it wasn't obvious) one of the most spectacular experiences on our entire tour. For what it's worth, I have provided feedback to G Adventures about making this just a part of the standard itinerary.

This is my last post about Uganda on this blog. Possibly forever. Who knows? There are so many places on my list and the list seems to get bigger every year. I'm not saying I'm never going to go back to the same place ever again but there are a whole lot of places easier to get to than Uganda. I'll say two things in wrapping up our Uganda experience: (1) everyone we met in Uganda was awesome and the country is just gorgeous; and (2) our guides Arthur and Nixon both said their favorite place in Uganda was Murchison Falls National Park. If there's ever a return trip to the Pearl of Africa, it has to include a stop at Murchison Falls.

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Top 10 Species List

When we embarked on our first sub-Saharan African safari trip in 2015, we didn't know what exactly to expect. I mean, sure, we knew we'd see some animals. Elephants, hopefully. Giraffes and lions, maybe. I don't know what else. Buffalo? Leopards? Hippos? We didn't really think too much about what we'd see in specific because at that point we hadn't seen anything ever outside of some sort of zoo. The first elephant we'd see would be the first wild elephant we'd ever seen. Same for giraffes, lions, buffalo, leopards, hippos and everything else on the entire continent of Africa. In essence, we were ready to take what we could get and we'd be perfectly happy with whatever we saw.

That changed with our second safari trip. On our 2018 vacation to Kenya and Tanzania, we had a top ten list of animals we'd never seen in the wild. I'm not sure of the exact order but (and I'm going from memory here), I believe we had leopard, rhino, zebra, painted dog, ostrich, secretary bird, cheetah, gerenuk, hyena and pangolin on the list. We saw seven of the ten and went home extremely happy, missing only the painted dog (extremely rare in Kenya and Tanzania), the gerenuk (not where we went in 2018) and the pangolin (nocturnal). Seven out of ten ain't bad as far as I'm concerned.

So fast forward to 2023 and our trip to Uganda, a trip we had scheduled for October 2020 before the world and viruses had other ideas. And OF COURSE, we had another top ten list. After all, doing it one time in 2018 meant we couldn't back off and not do it this time, right? 

Here's how we fared against this year's top ten list. Spoiler alert: we didn't do quite as well as we did in 2018.

1. Mountain Gorillas

OK, OK, so this is a complete softball of sorts. I mean gorillas were the main attraction on this trip. We couldn't NOT see these primates up close and personal, could we? That's like going to see Taylor Swift and having the show end after beabadoobee and Gracie Abrams are done with their sets. 

And yes, I had to look at who was opening for Taylor Swift and no, we didn't get tickets. 

So of course, we did see gorillas in Uganda from feet away on foot with nothing between us and them and it was amazing. The intimacy was just all around. There was real creature to creature connection here, and by that I mean connection between human creatures and some of the nine gorillas we trekked to see. The trip delivered what it promised to deliver. Nature sometimes throws you a curveball and you don't get to see what you came to see. Fortunately, that wasn't the story on this trip. Number one checked off!

2. Chimpanzees

Yep, also a bit of a softball, here. Our chimpanzee trek in the Kibale National Park was incredible and totally unexpected in its awesomeness. No, it didn't beat seeing the gorillas in the wild from feet away but that day, I wondered how seeing gorillas could possibly be better than seeing chimpanzees.

Before we left home for Uganda, I actually didn't consider seeing chimps in the wild a slam dunk. I did actually think we could strike out (to continue the mixed sports allusions) on this walk and see absolutely nothing whatsoever. I loved this day. The intelligence and human-ness of the chimpanzees we got close to really shone through in a way watching few other species could possibly have done.

I love the picture of the chimpanzee above by the way. I see it as very Planet of the Apes like. The smarts absolutely come through loud and clear.

3. Shoebills

OK, so three for my first three. This one was not a gimme and we only saw one but we did lay eyes on one of these giant birds in person in the Mabamba Swamp. While there was absolutely a very high chance we could venture out on our shoebill day and not see a single one of these creatures, the shoebill was third on my list because we made a specific trip to see this bird. That was sort of a theme on this trip; we took three species-specific safari days, one each for gorillas, chimpanzees and shoebills. These were the top three things we targeted on this trip that we had never seen before. We got lucky and got all three.

Considering we saw maybe about seven or eight gorillas, thirty or so chimpanzees and just one shoebill, I know we had some luck on our side this day. Never feel like you are entitled to a show when nature is involved.

4. Painted Dogs

No picture on this one because quite simply, we didn't see any. No encounter, no picture. That's how this post is going to roll. Yes, this is a repeat (and a miss) from 2018.

When we first visited sub-Saharan Africa, we had no idea there was such a thing as a painted dog (sometimes called African wild dog). We saw one of those yellow, diamond-shaped road signs warning of the presence of painted dogs on our way from the Victoria Falls airport to our hotel on the first day we ever spent in sub-Saharan Africa and we actually mocked it (like...who wants to see a painted dog?). How stupid and ignorant were we back then? But legitimately, we didn't understand what these things were. Never heard of them.

Painted dogs are for sure an apex predator in Africa. They are not the same as hyenas, which sort of fill a role somewhere between hunter and scavenger on the savannah. These things are fast, intelligent, coordinated, aggressive pack hunters who relentlessly pursue their prey until they kill it. They are impressively scary. But they weren't where we went in Uganda. Nowhere close really.

That sign that we saw in Zimbabwe in 2015 was maybe not the closest we got to seeing these animals live. We actually went on two off-road wild goose chases looking for painted dogs on our way to and from Chobe National Park on that trip with neither yielding a sighting for me (although our guide claimed he'd seen some in the headlights on the night off-roading adventure). 

5. Gerenuks

No gerenuk picture either on this post. A gerenuk (also on my 2018 top 10 list) is often called a giraffe-gazelle, so named because it's a gazelle with a long neck (duh...). Its neck length allows it to reach medium-hanging leaves that animals like impalas and kudus can't reach because their mouths never get to that height off the ground. If its neck weren't enough of an advantage, the gerenuk can also stand on its hind legs to get even more elevation.

Because these lists of species that I make are often emotional, I didn't check out if all the animals that made the list actually live in the places we were traveling. There are no gerenuks in Uganda. Their range is further east in eastern Kenya, eastern Ethiopia, Somalia and northeastern Tanzania. I'm definitely not putting them on any future list (if there ever is one) unless I'm in one of those spots in the future. 

FYI, Somalia is not on any sort of travel list for me at all. 

6. Great Blue Turacos

So from what I just wrote about gerenuks not being anywhere close to where we were headed, I may have given the impression that I pulled together this list without any research whatsoever. Not exactly true. Some of my wish list was emotional and impulsive (hence, the gerenuk and yes, rare for me, I know) but I did do a little homework ahead of time, although much of that didn't extend beyond studying the East African Birds pamphlet shown in the cover picture of this post. But that is how I found the great blue turaco.

There are not a ton of super-colorful medium to large birds in Africa, so when I saw the great blue turaco in our wildlife guides and the noticed they live in forests where we'd be heading for the first time in Africa ever, I thought there might be a chance. The great blue turaco is a bit more than two feet from head to tail when fully grown so we are not talking about a small bird here. It's brightly colored from the tip of its beak to the tip of its tail so this seemed like a bird worth looking out for.

We didn't really have to do much looking out. While we were wrapping up lunch after our chimpanzee trek, we saw five or six or these birds fly into a tree right next to the gazebo where we were eating. The lighting wasn't great. It was about high noon and the sun being almost directly overhead didn't allow me to take any pictures that weren't significantly backlit. Still...great blue turaco sighting in the books.

We did actually see a few more of these birds right after lunch when we took a stroll around the Bigodi Swamp but the lighting on that spotting was even worse than at lunch.

7. Kingfishers

I've been a little kingfisher fixated lately. We saw three different species down in Costa Rica last October and it whetted my appetite for some more sightings on this trip to Africa. I put kingfishers on the list here because I knew we'd be taking two boat rides on this vacation that might get us a look or two. It worked. We found these birds on both of those boat rides and on safari in the middle of Queen Elizabeth National Park. No shortage of kingfisher sightings on this trip. We even saw one at our hotel on Zanzibar one afternoon.

We managed to lay eyes on three different types of kingfisher in Uganda. On our trip to find shoebills in the Mabamba Swamp, we came across the black and white pied kingfishers both in the Swamp and over Lake Victoria along with the multi-colored malachite kingfishers when we arrived at the Swamp. The bird above is a woodland kingfisher that we found in the middle of Queen Elizabeth National Park nowhere near water. These birds eat fish to survive. No idea what it was doing in the middle of landscape populated almost exclusively by candelabra cacti. 

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there are about 90 species of kingfishers distributed throughout the world. I have a lot of work to do. That also means there's a lot of places where I can find these things in the future.

8. Bee-Eaters

The place where I really fell in love with small birds, and which made me into an avid birdwatcher wherever we've been since, was Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania. Among the many birds we saw in that Park was a carmine bee-eater. I managed to capture one sitting on a thorny branch of a tree and it's one of my favorite photographs from that trip. I thought since we saw one in Tanzania, maybe we'd be able to see some in Uganda also. We did.

Bee-eaters are little, brightly colored birds with curved beaks and a stripe that extends from their beaks to the back of their heads. They are quick and acrobatic flyers which eat (perhaps quite obviously here) bees, wasps and hornets. We only saw bee-eaters on one day on our trip but we did see two different species. The one above is (I believe) a blue-cheeked bee-eater which is generally found in northern Africa and the Middle East but which sometimes winters further south between the tropics.

Appropriately, the bee-eater above is sitting in a thorny tree. Always with the thorny trees these birds in Africa. 

9. Pangolins / 10. Aardvarks

Pangolins (like painted dogs and gerenuks) were on my 2018 list so I had to carry it forward, right? I knew there was basically no chance of seeing this nocturnal anteater so I thought I'd double down and add another nocturnal anteater, the aardvark, to round out the list in the number 10 spot. Yeah...didn't see either. I mean not even close.

So...10 species. Six seen, including multiple species of kingfishers and bee-eaters. I don't think that's too bad considering this was our third safari and we've pretty much seen every animal and bird that's an obvious and well-known African species. Sure we are missing some from the list above and there are some species of some animals (notably hyenas and zebras) that we haven't yet seen, but we've covered all the big and famous stuff by now.

I see a few more safaris in our future. I'd say at least two more on mainland Africa. Maybe more. Who knows. At least something that touches South Africa in some way and maybe a trip through the Namib Desert. Those would be my top two.

When and if either of those two (or a different one) happens, I'm not sure I'm going with a top ten list of species we want to see. I think going forward I'd prefer to take a trip to find a specific species that is missing off our list and we'll take whatever else we can see while we are on that trip. So I think the next one of these we take has to target the painted dog in a serious way. That's the one species we long to see more than any other. Sure there are some experiences we'd like to see like lions finishing a hunt or a leopard carrying a dead impala or something like that up a tree but we can't guarantee those things happening even if we see those animals. Next safari trip to Africa: painted dog has to the be target.

But that's the future. For 2023...six of ten on our list seen. I'll take that.

Malachite kingfisher, Kazinga Channel, Uganda.

Swamp Music

Handsome head, right? It's a shoebill. It's a bird. They are big. Like sometimes up to five feet tall big. And yes, that's pretty tall for a bird. If it wasn't obvious, the shoebill was named after its massive beak, which resembles (are you ready for this...) a shoe. It looks like some kind of prehistoric throwback but it's actually a close relative of herons and pelicans (although it's sometimes erroneously called a stork). And as soon as we finalized our decision to go to Uganda for a week this past winter, I knew I had to go find one of these things in the wild.

There are some places in the world that are easy to get to and then there are some that require a little more work. Kampala, Uganda would fall into the latter category, particularly if you are flying there. By requiring a little more work here, I mean there's no direct flight to Kampala from anywhere in the United States and there are very few commercial airlines that fly out of Dulles airport (near where we live) which also serve Kampala. There are just not a lot of regularly scheduled flights there.

After some searching, we ultimately settled on Emirates as our airline of choice to both take us to Uganda and bring us back from Zanzibar two weeks later. They were the only option where we could fly one stop each way. We'd have a generous 12-hour stopover in Dubai on the way home but would have less than two hours to connect on the way there. The big risk with this schedule was that if we missed our connection in Dubai, the next flight to Uganda was a full 24 hours later and our tour group would leave Kampala without us. We couldn't have that happen, so we decided to fly (and arrive) a day early. 

This is not unusual behavior for us. When we have booked packaged tours in the past for our holidays where we'd miss the start of the tour by missing a connection, we have inevitably decided to arrive a day early so there was no (or maybe a greatly reduced) chance of our missing the start of the tour. 

Arriving early to a place means one thing, of course. We need something to do. Sure, we could relax around the hotel and just hang out but that's not really our style, particularly if the destination we are traveling to is someplace we are not likely to ever return to. We see the day early arrival as an opportunity to find something we are interested in which is not on our tour. 

An extra day in Kampala meant one thing: time to go find a shoebill.

On our way to Mabamba Swamp: egrets and fisherman.

I can't quite remember when I became aware of the existence of shoebills. I remember watching some nature show about them at some point years ago and being fascinated by (1) their appearance and (2) the fact that they typically lay two eggs so that one chick survives. They for sure are a striking-looking bird, but why the second of these facts stuck in my head I have no idea. The intent of laying two eggs is to give one chick a really good chance of survival to adulthood. But in what is surely a grisly twist on the situation, the first chick that hatches inevitably kills its younger (and therefore weaker) brother or sister either to eat it or to get all the food from the parent shoebills with no competition. Little did I know at the time, but this type of survival strategy is common with larger birds. 

When we started looking for activities around Kampala on Viator.com (which we regularly use to find things to do in new destinations) and some shoebill tours showed up, those got moved to the top of the list along with maybe one or two others. Eventually, the others dropped away and we stuck (not got stuck with...) with the shoebills. 

So where do you find shoebills? Well, as it turns out, in freshwater swamps in central Africa. Its range on the continent covers from southern Sudan in the north down to northern Zambia in the south with a relatively thin east-west range. Pretty much right in the middle of their entire geographic footprint is Kampala. And right next to Kampala sits freshwater Lake Victoria, which is the largest lake in Africa. Part of the Lake's perimeter is defined by papyrus swamps, which are perfect homes for shoebills. Shoebill-wise, a swamp next to Kampala is pretty much the sweet spot on the planet. The stars are aligned here, right?

Our target for our first full day on the continent of Africa in almost five full years (a.k.a. too long) was a place called Mabamba Swamp, a wetland just to the west of Kampala and Entebbe Airport, about maybe a couple of miles from where we landed the previous day. The Swamp is not that easy to get to. While it's pretty much right next to Kampala where we were staying, getting there is no easy feat. It's over an hour drive through the city and its roads of questionable quality to get on a boat which takes you from the shore of Lake Victoria to the Swamp itself. From there, you need to get on a separate boat to go find a shoebill or two. 

The second boat, by the way, looks pretty much identical to the first boat, even down to the color. The only difference is it's driven by a different dude. Different skill set to traverse a part of Lake Victoria vs. navigating a swamp looking for a large bird, I guess. No pooh-poohing the folks taking us over water on this day. They both did an outstanding job. And they both got us exactly what we needed.

The trip on Lake Victoria was a signature African moment for me. This lake is so large that it's visible on most globes and small-scale maps of the world. We spent so long on this portion of the journey that it seemed like we were crossing the entirety of the Lake. In reality, we probably traveled along like 1% of the Lake's perimeter. This is a very large body of water.

So we are looking for a big bird with a big beak whose offspring are prone to siblicide (it's a word; look it up). What else do we need to know. Random facts about birds time...

Yes, this bird is sizeable. A bird that can stand taller than an adult human is tall (yes, I'm talking about some humans on the smaller side, but still...). Its wingspan can get up to 2-1/2 feet larger than its height so not impossible to find these things with 7-1/2 between the tips of their two wings. I'm telling you, these creatures are large. On the weight side of things, though, they are actually pretty light, with a large male shoebill topping out at about 15 or 16 pounds. If that sounds like a lot for a bird which can fly, it is and it is not. There are species of albatross, swan and vulture that routinely weigh over 30 and even 40 pounds and still manage to get aloft. 

Behavior-wise, shoebills are solitary beings. They don't gather together in flocks or nest in giant colonies like some other species of birds. They are slow and deliberate movers and hunters, using patience as their method of snatching fish from oxygen poor water when their prey strays too close to the surface of the water. They will also go after frogs and snakes and lizards. And they don't particularly like being visited by humans, which sometimes tends to make them flee when folks like me approach in a boat with an outboard motor making all sorts of noise.

My fascination with pretty much all species of birds only goes back a few years now, but I've long been a fan of large birds. I'm fascinated with their size is the only way to put it. And the shoebill has more than just a tall frame going for it: it's got that giant, almost comically oversized bill dominating its head. This thing is a lethal hunting instrument which it uses to scoop up prey from just below the water's surface. It's also equipped with a pretty sharp hook on the end for breaking out its shell when it's a baby. You know, before it either gets eaten by its brother or sister or does that act before its sibling can get its wits about it. I had to add the shoebill to my large birds seen in person in the wild list. 

Oh, and on the prior paragraph, I do mean "pretty much all species of birds" and not all. I can't get into ducks and geese. They just don't do it for me. And also, I don't really have a formal, written large birds seen in person in the wild list.

Once we crossed through Kampala and across what turned out to be an insignificant portion of Lake Victoria, we were handed over to the capable hands of Emmanuel, who was our guide for the next hour plus. Time to venture into the papyrus.

This was the first time I had ever been to a papyrus swamp. I've been on boats in swamps and on rivers before, including in Africa, but I can't remember ever staring any papyrus plants in the face. Yes, this is the stuff the Egyptians used to make pretty much everything from, including some of the first writing paper for recording history and stuff like that on scrolls. The whole swamp here is basically a big mat of papyrus and other plants floating on top of the lake in loose but very large clumps or clusters. Birds and some other species of animals are light enough to walk around on these mats without sinking into the water. Rest assured, if we tried that, we'd sink down to the bottom right away.

Moving through a papyrus swamp really involves a good amount of finding your own way. At times, it appeared there was no way we could move any further into a particular portion of the swamp, only for Emmanuel to take us into some sliver or crack between mats of vegetation and keep going. Watch your head on the papyrus plants by the way. Some of their seedpods or whatever they are pretty much right at eye level. Make sure you keep an eye out for weaver nests, also. Although the weavers seem to be smart enough as birds to locate their homes above human-head-in-a-boat height.

If I've made it seem like we went to a pretty remote part of Uganda to find shoebills, I guess we did. But we were also by no means alone in our quest that date. We seemed at times to be surrounded by other people just like us, with each party in their own boats with their own version of Emmanuel. Some boats were pretty packed, with five or six passengers in addition to a guide or two. Ours, at an occupancy of three, was one of the lightest boats. We never saw any with fewer than that number of folks riding and guiding the boats through the papyrus.

So obviously we saw a shoebill. Either that or I'm posting some photographs from a source other than my own camera on this blog (I'm not; I took all these pics). But we did just see one and one alone. And just in one spot. The first couple of forays we took into the swamp proper were fruitless. When we got there either first or trailing a half dozen other boats, we were told either by Emmanuel or by one of the guides on another boat that the bird and flown. And no, we didn't see them on the wing.

Eventually, after those first failed attempts, it was our guide Emmanuel who declared he had spotted one and took us right to it. He was right. That's the one that appears in this post. Mission accomplished. We saw what we came to see.

Sometimes nature doesn't cooperate at all when we go looking for wildlife. There have been many days we have spent out in the wild somewhere in the world when we didn't really see anything much at all (I'm looking at you, whales, pretty much everywhere). This situation becomes even more dicey when you are searching for a specific species and the success of the day really hinges on seeing that animal, even if there are tons of other creatures around. We got what we came for here and I am grateful for that. So grateful.

But I am telling you, these shoebills are slow and deliberate and can be pretty un-exciting. The one we kept our eyes on for a while that day and which we left and came back to later in the same day in the exact same spot really didn't do much at all. No hunting, no eating, not really much walking, no feeding, no caring for chicks (or chick) and no interacting with other shoebills. It didn't even make any noise and these birds can apparently make quite a clattering sound with those big beaks. We got some preening. And that was really it.

Still...we wanted to see a shoebill and see a shoebill we did. I'm happy we made it and that we got what we came to see.

One shoebill was not all that this day had to offer us. I think it's worth saying a few words about some of the other species of birds we bumped into, if for no other reason than to show off some of our other pictures from our swamp tour.

Our trip to the Mabamba Swamp was for sure all about our feathered friends. But it was not all about the shoebill. From pretty much the minute we stepped into our first boat, we were looking for birds. We saw tons of egrets standing on tiny clumps of vegetation floating on Lake Victoria. We saw a pair of crowned cranes (the national bird of Uganda for what it's worth) flying overhead. We saw tern-like birds traversing over the Lake (I have no idea if they were actually terns but they LOOKED like terns) going from one point to another.

We also saw an abundance of pied kingfishers hovering over the water and then diving down to catch fish, or at least try. I love kingfishers. We saw some along the banks of the Chobe River in Botswana and Namibia on our first sub-Saharan African trip in 2015. We also found at least three different species of these birds down in Costa Rica last October. For all my enthusiasm about kingfishers, I had no idea that they fished on the wing. I assumed they waited on plants by the side of the water and watched and dived when they saw a fish. Clearly the pied kingfishers over Lake Victoria proved me wrong. Who knew?

We didn't stop seeing kingfishers when we got to the papyrus swamp itself. There we saw more pied kingfishers hanging out on the papyrus reeds along with a few malachite kingfishers, the smaller but eminently more colorful version of this bird type. Same huge bill in proportion to its body and head but just way prettier. Not knocking the black and white pieds but its difficult to overcome the vivid colors on the malachite. 

This would not be the last time we'd find kingfishers on this vacation, which was perfectly fine with me.

Pied kingfisher (top) and malachite kingfisher (bottom).

We found a couple of more birds inside the swamp that were unexpected treats. We found a ton of African jacanas, birds that are so light that they can walk on the lily pads floating on the edge of the papyrus plants, in search of food. The jacana is also known as the Jesus bird because it appears to walk on water. We'd seen these birds (like the kingfishers) down along the banks of the Chobe River in 2015 but I didn't remember the light blue coloration on top of their heads. That blue patch really makes these birds stand out.

Maybe the ones on the Chobe are slightly different. Or maybe my memory from 7-1/2 years ago is faulty. There was a lot to take in on that trip after all.

We also managed to spot a purple heron. Now, we can see herons near us at home if we go to the right spots around us. Heck, we saw a great blue heron a few years ago in Vermont, so it's not like you need to travel to the tropics to see herons. But if you want a lot of variety, you need to travel down south (from where we live) and get tropical. We saw five different species of heron on a single boat ride along the Tarcoles River in Costa Rica last fall which was an incredible heron day for us. But we didn't find any purple herons on that trip. In fact, I think this is the first purple heron I've seen anywhere, ever.

There were also plenty of blue swallows swooping around as we moved through the papyrus. There are no pictures of the swallows on this post. If you have ever tried to photograph a swallow, you'll know why.

This day was NOT all about the shoebills, although it was clearly all about the shoebills. It's not all we saw, but if we hadn't seen one, we'd have been disappointed with a few kingfishers, a heron and a couple of Jesus birds.

This tour started early (before seven in the morning which was fine considering how jetlagged we were that first day) and didn't take the whole day, which was great as a half or three quarters day excursion to get us an introduction to Uganda. The fact that we came nowhere close to any sort of shoebill habitat on the entire rest of this trip meant that our day in the Mabamba Swamp was a good use of our time. Plus, the early finish allowed us to get back to the hotel and get a bit more R and R before the start of our group tour in earnest.

I don't like to ever say that I'm never going to repeat anything we've done on our trips throughout the world but legitimately, what are the odds that I'll ever see a shoebill in the wild ever again? I'm thinking it's about nil. This was our shot. We took it and it worked. Shoebill seen.

African jacana, purple heron and one last look from (and at) the shoebill.

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How We Did It

We found our day trip to the Mabamba Swamp to search for shoebills on Viator.com, a website owned by the same group that owns TripAdvisor which features tours of various types from airport transfers to half day tours to multi-day adventures all over the world. It's a great clearinghouse for ideas of what might be available to do in any location pretty much anywhere on the planet. Even if we don't end up booking a trip through Viator, we often look on there for ideas when planning a vacation.

The specific tour that we took that day was the One Day Mabamba Swamp Bird Watching Trip, which is operated by East African Jungle Safaris Ltd. You can book this tour either through Viator or directly through the tour operator. The tour was fantastic. We got picked up and dropped off at our hotel, got a case of water thrown in for free and lunch at a local restaurant with plenty of Ugandan starches was included. This is not a cheap trip. We ended up shelling out $520 for this day and that doesn't include tips for our driver or either of the guys operating the two boats were ferried around in. Our logic here was when are we ever going to look for shoebills ever again. It would have been an expensive test of our travel insurance policy if we'd have missed our connection and paid $520 for a missed trip. 

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