Hello! Lev here. I’ve taken another week off from my mid-week wanging on about birds – fortunately there’s a replacement, in the form of top wanger David Durose, who has recently returned from Kenya having seen oodles of birds. David will be familiar with users of the-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter and, more recently, the-site-currently-known-as-Bluesky, where his sharp wit and simply atrocious inventive puns have elicited comments such as “brilliant!” (Nigella Lawson), “gosh, really?” (me) and “David” (pretty much everybody).
Anyway, here’s David to tell you about Kenyan birds. Jealous? ME?
INTRO
I’m not much of a birder. Before 2020, I struggled to tell a moorhen from a coot and if asked about geese, I’d have given the wrong anser. I did fall briefly in love with the Lilac-breasted Roller when on holiday in Botswana in 2018, but that was a one-off. Or so I thought.
During the first COVID lockdown, I lived in central London near St. James’s Park and would go there most days for an early morning walk, meeting a strange variety of unfamiliar feathered creatures. There must be some secret bird network for escaped exotic species that tells them to go to St. James’s Park. It’s probably run by the pelicans who’ve been there in similar circumstances since 1664, a somewhat suspicious date given the disasters that befell the capital in the next two years. Sometimes I’d send photos of these unusual (or, let’s face it, often merely unrecognised usual) fellows to this bloke called Lev who I knew vaguely from Twitter, and sometimes he’d even tell me what they were.
I soon moved to Wimbledon and made a daily pilgrimage to the Common, where the birds were generally less colourful but slowly became more familiar. With the help of the wonderfully clever Merlin app, it felt like a whole new world was now available.
From mid-July last year (not entirely coincidentally with a trip to Costa Rica) I started to count species I was sure I’d seen. Entry to this club usually required at least two forms of identification, or at least a level of certainty much closer to beyond reasonable doubt than a mere balance of probabilities. Nearly 100 were added in Costa Rica, another 20-25 on my first morning back on Wimbledon Common, but only about another 50 up to July 2025.
But then I got the chance to go to Kenya on safari this summer. I was as excited by the new birds I might see as I was about the big cats, the stripey horses and the enormous grey guys with the curly teeth.
Kenya has a phenomenal number of bird species – about 1,100 – and probably the second most in Africa after the very much larger DRC. I bought a book (it seemed unfair and insensitive to keep sending messages to Lev) and read about all sorts of birds I’d never heard of before – like fiscals, chats and the innumerable cisticolas. So many cisticolas, each with their own adjectival prefix (Coastal, Ashy, Stout, Foxy, Rattling, Whistling, Winding and, remarkably, Zitting – the last ironically harder to spot).
The only things outnumbering the cisticolas are the hyphens. They’re everywhere. Most birds seem to have one. Some have many, like the White-bellied Go-away-bird or the Black-and-white-casqued Hornbill. Whoever named these guys loved a hyphen. There are gorgeous kingfishers and the astonishing Grey-crowned (see? hyphen!) Crane, which features on the flag of neighbouring Uganda. Thanks to the placement of the author’s name on the front cover of his excellent book, the Grey-crowned Crane was known throughout the trip simply as ‘Dave Richards’.
There were also a few familiar faces. Seeing Wimbledon Common regulars like the Grey Heron and the Egyptian Goose was like bumping into that couple from across the road when you’re 6,000 miles from home. While in Kenya, I met over 150 new species of bird in less than 10 days, but I’ve picked three that really made an impression.
STARLINGS
All right. I lied. Or at least cheated. The first one isn’t one bird, but a whole heap of birds. The starlings. The starlings of Kenya are the avian impalas. They’re the creatures you see first as you arrive on safari, the ones that tell you you’re somewhere special, who delight with their strangeness and the ones that a mere couple of hours later cannot be mentioned without the prefix ‘Oh it’s just a…’ When you spot a bird after the first day you check it’s not a starling, then you check again, and again, and then unless it’s a Ring-necked Dove you mention to your guide that you think you’ve seen something interesting. This is more than a bit unfair on the starlings.
In the UK we have the imaginatively named Common Starling, ostensibly a medium-sized darkish bird but one which suddenly gives you a burst of iridescence when you least expect it and does incredible things in huge numbers. But that’s it for the UK starlings. Being known for impressive murmurations sounds more like a goal for an aged sage than a lively bird.
There are about two dozen different kinds of starling in Kenya, although I can only claim to have seen five or six. We had multiple sightings of the Wattled, the Red-winged and (in a glorious flash of colour caught by the setting sun) the Violet-backed. The most familiar, however, were the (Greater) Blue-eared Starling and the Superb Starling.
The Blue-eared Starling is at first glance peculiarly named, as it’s sort of Blue-everywhere-with-a-very-slightly-different-sort-of-blue-on-its-ear Starling. That’s a lot to hyphenate, even for a committed Kenyan avian nomenclaturist. Blue-eared Starling it is, then, and a lovely bird: largely bluish green (if you ignore the not-very-obvious-after-all ear) but with a startling yellow eye.
The Superb Starling is obviously rather going for it, just from the name. It must have bunged a few shillings at the right person for that level of publicity. But you have to say it carries it off. These things are darn pretty, especially in numbers, and they’re everywhere.
Of course, the ubiquity of these lovely birds is then their downfall. Oh, it’s a starling. Oh look. Another starling. The glory of the individual is lost. And I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned in that. I’ve been back home a few days now and what I wouldn’t give for one more glimpse of the Blue-eared or the Superb. Or an impala, for that matter.
HAMERKOP
The Hamerkop (Scopus umbretta) is a curious looking bird. It’s pronounced with a short initial ‘a’ sound (allowing spotters of a certain age to cry “Stop! …. Hamerkop!” to the guide whenever one is seen in a happy evocation of 80s hip-hop and enormous trousers).
The bird gets its name from the Afrikaans meaning ‘hammerhead’ and although this tends to indicate that those guys had pretty wonky hammers, you can see where they were coming from.
The Hamerkop is the only species in its genus and the only genus in its family. Its closest relatives are distant pelican (yep, them again) cousins, so it probably doesn’t have anywhere to go at Christmas, poor thing. But then it doesn’t have to go anywhere at Christmas, lucky thing. However, it makes up for its lack of close relations by seeming to try its damnedest to get on with unrelated fauna. We’ll come to that in a moment.
The Hamerkop is an aquatic bird, and it sort of hunts with its feet. They kick up mud at the bottom of a shallow pool to disturb small creatures for their lunch, which means mud-packed lunches, but they don’t seem unduly bothered by that.
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the Hamerkops build huge, and I mean huge, nests. These nests can weigh up to 50kg, not bad for a bird weighing about half a kilo themselves. That’s like an average human building a house weighing 7 ½ tonnes. And yes, I’m sure your house weighs much more than that, but you didn’t build it out of sticks and mud using only your mouth, did you? (If you did, I apologise. Send me a photo. I’d love to see it.)
So admired are the Hamerkop nests within the wider community of birdlife that they get pinched. Or squatted in. Or whatever the terminology is for when you build a nest and then some other sodding bird uses it instead of you. These are not old, disused Hamerkop nests, you understand, this is what happens when the poor birds have just spent ages making them, and before they’ve properly moved in. Prime offenders here are the Egyptian Geese (who aren’t making themselves popular in Kenya, to be fair), but the nests are also snaffled by various birds of prey, and even tree-bound leopards like to use them for leaning on.
This must be extraordinarily annoying for the Hamerkop – you’ve just been all the way to the local County Court and got a forthwith eviction order against the Egyptian Geese, but then you get back home to find Panthera pardus lying on your roof and about to put their foot through the ceiling of the nursery.
There’s a lot going on with the Hamerkop. But they’re remarkably unpretentious birds, for all their weird heads and impressive architecture.
They’re also sociable outside their narrow family.
On the same evening, I saw one hanging out with a few warthogs
and another getting up close and personal with a hippo.
These are the sort of ill-matched combinations beloved of 80s detective series. And surely it cannot be a coincidence that both ‘Hog & Hamer’ and ‘Hamer & Hippo’ have such convenient alliterative allure.
LILAC-BREASTED ROLLER
I cheated with my first bird. I suppose I’m sort of cheating with the third too. The Lilac-breasted Roller wasn’t entirely new to me. But I’d seen it only in Botswana. In my bird pre-history. Before records began. Ante-Merlin.
According to Wikipedia, the L-BR was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1766. Prior to that it had been informally described by a lot of people pointing at it and shouting “Bloody hell! Look at that! Wow!”
It’s visually stunning. Even the name sounds like it should be perched on the executive tree next to the Golden-crowned Bentley and the Diamond-winged Daimler. It is frankly an unrealistic bird, as though it’s been drawn by a gaudy child with an over-active set of crayons.
Rollers are part of a larger bird family that includes the bee-eaters and kingfishers, both of whom have their job titles clearly set out in their names. Rollers do, in fact, roll, but it’s more of a hobby – their English name comes from the aerial acrobatics they perform during courtship.
At heart, the L-BR is a massive show-off. The only thing brasher than an L-BR perching is an L-BR in flight.
This all may sound as if I’m a bit snooty about the roller. A bit down on its antics. That couldn’t be further from the truth. When I initially saw one in Botswana, it was one of the first times a bird had really grabbed my attention. They appeared with ideal frequency – I’d see one most days, but it wasn’t a given and they weren’t overly familiar (starlings, take note). Seeing the Lilac-breasted Roller was always a treat. On leaving the Kalahari at the end of the Botswana trip, there was an L-BR perched on a sign at the end of the runway as the plane took off to take us to a bigger plane and back home. It really felt that it was saying goodbye. The end of a holiday romance.
When I learned that the L-BR would not only be waiting for me in Kenya, but was the Kenyan National Bird, I was delighted. And it didn’t disappoint. The first one popped up on day two, and they sorted the rota out carefully so that I saw them at appropriate intervals. Remarkably, one even turned up at the runway in the Masai Mara to see us off. This is a level of trans-continental efficiency that you just don’t expect from someone with such chromatic braggadocio.
I can’t wait to go back and see one again.
Such a great read. Thank you. I, too, found my love of birds increased dramatically in 2020. The topic keeps growing and growing.
Kenya was our first African birding trip many years ago, and we saw about 700 species in three weeks. It's truly a marvellous place for birds (not to mention other wildlife!) This brought back many good memories.