Advertisement
Published: August 4th 2006
Edit Blog Post
As gay as a tree full of Marabous
These are my new breakfast companions. When you sit on the front patio area at Gately on the Nile - a comfortable guest house situated in a bird-watcher's paradise of a garden - you have a view of a narrow band of Lake Victoria in the middle distance - en route to what used to be the Owen Falls and generally acknowledged as the Source of the Nile. Between you and the lake view there is a gigantic tree - indigenous, and I don't know its name, but must find out.
During my first view visits a pair of African fish eagles nested at the top of that tree. Every morning at breakfast they were my companions (although I think I was irrelevant in their eyes, they were significant in mine). Then, during one visit a few years ago, they were gone. Replacing them was a group of about 15 marabou storks.
Now, anyone who has travelled in Uganda, particularly in Kampala, knows about the marabous. They are simply EVERYWHERE. They are scavengers of note. They are huge. They are semi-ugly, semi-pathetic- looking in the same way as very old men do - virutally bald reddish heads with the occasional spike of what looks like
Marabou imitating old man
This guy just sits and waits. hair, a long scrawny neck, long skinny legs with knobbly knees. In Kampala they sit on (not in, ON) virtually all the trees; on the corners of buildings, on lampposts, in empty lots. They have a menacing feel about them, with their necks hunched into their wings like the boney shoulders of a creepy old guy, ready to pounce.
A bird that size generates a lot of guano (bird dung). It is extremely powerful stuff. Friends in Kampala allege that if a marabou white-washes your car you have to have it resprayed. I don't know about that. What I do know is that the trees that they frequent are dying - it's not just their weight on the branches, and goodness knows, I've never seen them eat the leaves or anything like that - it is the guano droppings on the soil around the tree trunk that does it. Night after night, year after year, the tree gradually gets choked to death by the stinking stuff.
I'm somewhat of an avid walker, so I do some walking around Jinja after work and on weekends (I'm doing a project here for a month). I find the evening walks too
At dawn
Outside my window... I can hear the marabou blow.... creepy - the marabous are usually getting ready for their evening roost, so there's a lot of jockeying for position on key branches, with flapping of those great heavy wings, a clap-clapping noise that they make with their beaks as they threaten each other, along with the white-wash evidence in the dirt on the road of their presence immediately above your head.
I imagine in a city like Halifax, Nova Scotia, full of my bunny-hugging friends, bird-watchers, tree-huggers, the lot of them, that a situation like this could create a flurry of letters to the editor of the Chronicle-Herald - the tree people would advocate that the birds be got rid of, the bunny-huggers would plead for humane treatment and the bird people would say that these birds are indigenous to the region and therefore should remain undisturbed, and probably would get going on having them declared a protected species.
I can't imagine them being endangered. Ive seen them across Africa. They seem to me to be doing as much, if not more, harm as the Indian house crows that have taken over Dar Es Salaam. However, I've never heard a debate on the issue - when I
Gately on the Nile with Lake Vic
The song birds are by far the greatest attraction in the Gately garden, even though they won't keep still enough to be photographed talk about it to people who live here, it's like they haven't even noticed - 'oh, yes, the marabou storks...yes, there are a lot of them, aren't there?'.
If one considers the other issues in Uganda then my interest in the marabous is somewhat esoteric - poverty continues to be a very serious problem. The low-grade civil war that's been ongoing for 18 years is still on. There's talk of getting together, with both sides imposing the usual conditions, e.g. 'we won't start talking until you stop fighting' versus 'we won't stop fighting until you start talking'. The environment - what I've seen of it, is in a sorry state. The amount of exotic trees and weeds from Entebbe through Kampala to Jinja seems to be growing. The streets of Jinja are speedily returning to the state of dirt roads rather than paved city streets as one pothole joins the next. Garbage doesn't seem to get collected too often, if ever.
Yet, every morning as we drive to work, there are people sweeping their doorsteps, driveways and sidewalks with little grass brooms, while right next door there's a rusted out garbage container spilling over with rotting stinking smouldering garbage. And, the people walking to work and the school kidsd going to school, are all neatly dressed and chipper - ready for a new day.
Would I come to Jinja on vacation? Well, the guest house is constantly full of pale-faced guests, with UK and North American accents and last week a group of Italian birdwatchers joined us for a few days. There ARE tourist attractions in Jinja - river rafting down the Nile is not only an adventure, but has this exotic thing about it - THE NILE evokes such wonderful dreams and images of ancient Egyptians, Queen of Sheba, lost gold mines, Stanley and Speke, that it must add to the adventure. Have I done it? no, not yet. It is a possibility for this coming weekend though.
But back to the question - no, I wouldn't come here on vacation, because I've been here too often and I associate it more with work. However, its a great jumping off point for side trips - bird watching is particularly special here with a combination of water and forest birds. And marabou storks.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.059s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0363s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb