261 : Namaqua Dove

Namaqua Dove - Oena capensis

The Daily Bird has been a bit quiet for the last month or two  whether as a result of fatigue or simply  lack of birds. All the promises I made to myself at the beginning of the year or publicly on my site about plunging on toward 500 have gone by the wayside.

One thing that is bound to fill you with  a renewed sense of purpose though is a jolly good holiday and I am just back from the holiday of a lifetime - although as I have said before holidays like that deserve to be repeated ! This year we went to Ruaha National Park. The largest park in Tanzania and possibly the continent dependant on how you look at it. It consists of an area the size of Wales, 23,000 square kilometres and gets less than 5,000 visitors a year. It takes an investment to get there and is off the normal circuit for the big draw parks such as the Serengetti. The lack of visitors belies its importance, beauty and well just staggering depth and amount of game. It is home to 12,000 Elephant, large numbers of all the great cats which we can cover in my posts, Impala, Zebra, Giraffe, Roan and Sable Antelope, Greater and Lesser Kudu, Bushbuck, Waterbuck, Grants Gazelles and is also one of the last strongholds of the wild dog... the list goes on. It is known as the best kept secret in Africa to hardened safari goers. In the usual Daily Bird post safari style I will try and mix in a few animals with my birds and describe the park itself over the next couple of weeks.

We are now into the Summer season in Dubai so wives and children will soon be off to the UK to visit relatives and I will tough out the 40 + degree Summer here which will give me plenty of time to catch up with my posts. Who knows ? I may even wander out with my camera to see if I can find some Dubai birds cowering from the heat. So plenty of time to catch up on my posts and thanks to Ruaha I have a good stock of interesting birds, other wildlife and a few adventures to post about.

To get to Ruaha we flew down to Dar Es Salaam from Dubai on the daily scheduled Emirates flight - about 5 and a bit hours for us. The connection with Coastal, the little bunny hopping safari planes down  to Dar wasn't until the next morning so we stayed at the Serena Hotel, soon to the be the residence of Barak Obama during his trip to Africa. So it was an early start from the internal Dar airport - the first hurdle was getting weighed in as you are restricted to 15 kg of luggage per person on a small plane. Luckily I have a family and was able to lean on their allowance to pack in two camera bodies, 5 lenses, a tripod, bird books and the odd piece of clothing. The four of us weighed in at 59 kg (one kg to spare in case we purchased anything) and 28 kg of that was mine ! If I ever safari without children some hard equipment choices will be necessary.

As ever if you click on my photos they enlarge - I had a camera course for my birthday so by increments I am hoping that I can take a slightly better photo - certainly landscapes have improved now that I understand what "f" means.

An early start at Dar then for the 2 1/2 hour flight by Cessna Caravan down to Mesembe airstrip.

Ruaha itself is named after its river which holds water all year round. The park has a much different feel to it than the grasslands of the North, taking in riverine and Baobab forests, Miombi, uplands with rocky Kopjes and in particular sand rivers that concentrate the game during the dry season beginning in June. A real diverse patchwork of habitats.

I will never tire of the little safari planes that dot to dot around the country. We stopped at airstrips serving one other park (Selous) and another airstrip on the edge of Ruaha (Jongamera) before touching down at Mesembe.

We arrived then at 11 am - a real 24 hour investment at the beginning of the holiday to get us down into  the bottom left hand corner of Tanzania and hopefully in a Park where we were promised to have some peace and quiet and to avoid the scrum that we found in places like the Ngorogoro Crater last year whenever there is an animal sighting. I will pick up my description of our week in the Park next time - I guess I need to say something about Namaqua Doves and then post a picture of an animal to keep up the safari tradition. 

Namaqua Doves are tiny, sparrow sized Doves that sit in their own genus, Oena. Only the long tail does anything to make them appear bigger. They spend their time foraging on the ground for tiny seeds from grasses, and can be seen on the road. They were not the most plentiful Dove in the Park and consequently I didn't get bored of seeing them explode from under the wheels (at least it felt like that) of our big Toyota Safari truck showing off their chestnut primary wing feathers. The males (photo at top and below) have a smart black face mask to set off their grey and brown business atire. 

They are not endangered and have a large range extending across sub-saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East (although I have never seen one locally). They are a bird of dry areas.

Finally then an animal shot - I think my animal of the holiday even if it wasn't the rarest or most dangerous. It certainly has the wow factor for me. Greater Kudu.

This is a great big hunk of an Ungulate ! Despite its size it can melt away into the dry forest with its clever camouflage. The males with their fantastic spiral horns stand taller than a man and can easily jump over a safari truck if push comes to shove. We saw Kudu in small numbers each day - they were a new animal for us and like the Namaqua Dove a part of the beautiful flora and fauna that now sets Ruaha apart for us as a very special corner of Tanzania. I'll come back and post more about Kudu when I have learned about them. They are the epitomy of a stately deer.

Namaqua Dove, Oenis Capensis

Ruaha National Park, Tanzania 

June 29-July 5 2013