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Today was a most excellent day for birding. Also there was a partial solar eclipse which isn’t something you see every day! I looked at it through sheets of microfiche so I’ll probably go blind. Or blinder. In the morning I took a taxi to the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum, about 3km out of town. On the way I passed the hotel a friend had recently stayed at, Le Manumea. Looked a bit upmarket for me!! Especially given that the room at the place I was staying had a naked bed, a desk, a fan, and linoleum on the floor, and that was it. The Museum is set in a very nice tropical garden, but of more interest is the forest-covered Mt. Vaea Nature Reserve behind it, on the summit of which is Stevenson’s now graffiti-covered tomb. He was a writer; perhaps he wouldn’t mind the graffiti.
Most of Samoa’s surviving bird species can be found in the forest of Mt. Vaea. I’d always wanted to visit Samoa to see one of the most unusual pigeons in the world, the tooth-billed pigeon or manumea, dubbed the “dodlet” by early European naturalists because it was like a little Samoan
version of the dodo. Unfortunately the dodlet is now almost extinct, probably down to just a few dozen birds scattered across Upolu and Savaii. There are no dodlets on Mt. Vaea any more, and I was also too late for the Samoan moorhen (almost certainly now extinct), and even for the Polynesian sheath-tailed bat (critically-endangered). But most of the other species are found here still, so it was a good first stop.
The habitat had been severely trashed by the big cyclones in December but the park staff had managed to clear all the trails up the mountain. I had a little wander around the Museum gardens first. Banded rails were everywhere: even from the taxi on the way here I had seen them walking through peoples’ yards like chickens. I still haven’t seen a banded rail in New Zealand. Polynesian starlings and the huge grimly-coloured Samoan starlings were abundant, both in the gardens and on the mountain itself, and I saw a few of the brilliant crimson-crowned fruit doves as well. Then it was on to the reserve.
There are two routes up to the top of the mountain, the half-hour steep one
and the 45-60 minute meandering not-as-steep one. I took the meandering trail, which took me three hours. A rather odd sight all along the way was groups of white terns drifting around above the trees like gossamer angels, accompanied here and there by the larger white-tailed tropicbirds which were even better in real life than I had imagined. There were also a few noddies passing by but they remained unidentified (too high up to tell). Loads of African land snails all along the trail as well. Lizards were abundant, with all the ones I saw being Pacific black skinks and Samoan skinks (the latter being endemic tree-dwellers which I had been hoping to see). I even saw a Samoan fruit bat having a lazy glide between the trees.
The birding wasn’t too easy, and the photographic opportunities virtually non-existent because they just didn’t want to come close enough or stay still long enough. Wattled honeyeaters were common, the smaller and more brightly-coloured cardinal honeyeaters less so. The bright yellow Samoan whistler was fairly common, as was the very dull Samoan fantail (its scientific name is
nebulosus), and I got poor photos of both. I saw Pacific robins
only twice, and I completely failed to find Samoan broadbill flycatcher, Samoan triller, many-coloured fruit dove or Samoan parrot-finch. Most birders’ trip reports on the internet gush about how
easy finding the birds on Samoa is, so I suspect the damaged habitat here has changed that, at least for now. I spent some time in the clearing around the tomb hoping for parrot-finches at least but no luck. I was also surprised by the lack of other visitors. I imagine weekends might be busier but even on a Friday I expected other tourists to be here, and yet I saw only one (doing the usual thing you see tourists do in the forest, just motoring along, head down, looking at nothing but the path in front of them as if the end of the world is coming and they need to get back to civilisation as fast as possible).
Back at the bottom I had an acceptable fly-by of the endemic flat-billed kingfisher and a completely unacceptable fly-by of blue-crowned lorikeet (I think!). I never did see another lorikeet while in Samoa, and that was my second most-wanted bird there after the manumea. I got a taxi
back to Apia where I added feral pigeon to the Samoa trip-list! Woot.
So a good day all up, with many nice new birds. Hoping for tomorrow to be as good....
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