An African Pygmy Kingfisher, rufous and violet, on a branch against soft green forest light

— A FIELD LIST, KEPT BY HAND

Birds I have met.

24 birds, photographed across East Africa between game drives, garden mornings, and the long stops nobody else wanted to make. A running list, and the stories that come with it.

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On the list: 24 species
Range: East Africa
Status: Still counting

The list

An African Wood Owl watching from a forest branch, its dark eyes wide

THE ONE THAT
— TIPPED THE BALANCE

— WHY I LOOK UP

Birding is the quietest reason I know to pay attention. You stand still, you go silent, and slowly the bush fills back in around you.

It started the way it starts for most people who run safaris. I spent years pointing at the big animals and missing the small miracles in the trees above them. Then one slow afternoon in the Aberdares, an African Wood Owl held my eye for a full minute, and the balance tipped.

Now the birds are half the reason I go anywhere. They are the part of a place you cannot fake or fence: every garden, every forest edge, every soda lake arrives with its own cast. This page is my running list of the ones that stood still long enough.

— THE LIST, SO FAR

Twenty-four birds, in the order I met them.

Sorted not by taxonomy but by the kind of company they keep. Numbered the way a life-list ought to be: one through twenty-four, and room at the bottom for more.

— 01° RAPTORS & HUNTERS

Hooked bills, and the patience to use them.

The hunters. I find most of them the same way: by looking for the one still shape in a moving landscape.

Long-crested Eagle

Lophaetus occipitalis

Impossible to mistake, with that ragged crest lifting in the wind like it forgot to comb it. I find this one perched on roadside poles all through the highlands, hunting rats and mole-rats with enormous, unhurried patience. It is the eagle that first taught me to slow the car down. Once you have your eye in you begin to see them everywhere, which is the quiet gift of the whole hobby: the world was always this full, you were simply driving past it.

Met · Aberdares foothills

Martial Eagle

Polemaetus bellicosus

The largest eagle in Africa, heavy enough to take a young antelope. It picks the highest dead branch on the plain and simply watches, which is exactly what I was doing back.

Met · Masai Mara

Bateleur

Terathopius ecaudatus

Named for the tightrope-walker's tilt it does in flight, wings rocking to hold balance. On the branch it is all red face and no tail, as if the tail feathers were left behind.

Met · Samburu

African Wood Owl

Strix woodfordii

A forest owl with no ear tufts and eyes like dark water. It answered when I whistled its hooting duet back into the trees, which I have never quite gotten over.

Met · Karura Forest, Nairobi

Black-winged Kite

Elanus caeruleus

A small pale raptor that hangs in the wind on shivering wings before dropping on a mouse. The ruby eye gives it away even at a distance.

Met · Rift Valley floor

Palm-nut Vulture

Gypohierax angolensis

The vulture that changed its mind about meat and mostly eats the fruit of oil palms. White and black, and oddly elegant for the family it belongs to.

Met · Lake Victoria shore

— 02° THE JEWELS

Small birds wearing impossible colour.

Proof that evolution has a sense of occasion. Not one of these is larger than a teacup.

Lilac-breasted Roller

Coracias caudatus

Eight colours on one bird, and somehow not one of them argues with the next. The name comes from the barrel-roll it throws in display flight, tumbling through the air to show every shade at once. It hunts from an exposed perch, dropping onto grasshoppers and lizards in the grass below. If there is a single bird that turns people into people who look up, it is usually this one. It certainly worked on me.

Met · Masai Mara

Northern Carmine Bee-eater

Merops nubicus

Carmine from shoulder to tail, with a cap of sea-green. They shadow grass fires and grazing herds, snapping up whatever the disturbance flushes into the air.

Met · Samburu

Little Bee-eater

Merops pusillus

The smallest bee-eater I have met, green with a throat the colour of a yolk. It beats each bee against the perch to knock the sting out before swallowing.

Met · Lake Naivasha

African Pygmy Kingfisher

Ispidina picta

Barely longer than my thumb, and it does not need a river. It hunts insects in the shade of coastal woodland, a struck match of rufous and violet.

Met · Arabuko-Sokoke, the coast

Hartlaub's Turaco

Tauraco hartlaubi

A highland-forest bird that prefers to bound from branch to branch rather than fly. When it finally does fly, the wings open into a shock of crimson.

Met · The Aberdares

African Paradise Flycatcher

Terpsiphone viridis

The male carries two tail streamers far longer than the rest of him. He hawks insects through the garden in a long ribbon of rust.

Met · My garden, Nairobi

Eastern Double-collared Sunbird

Cinnyris mediocris

A highland sunbird with a green metallic hood and a scarlet band across the chest. It guards a single flowering shrub like a very small, very bright landlord.

Met · My garden, Nairobi

— 03° OUT IN THE OPEN

The long-legged, the loud, the unmissable.

Birds you do not need binoculars to find. They stand in the open and dare you to look away.

Grey Crowned Crane

Balearica regulorum

Kenya's national bird, and it carries itself like it knows. The golden crown, the painted red-and-white cheek, the slow deliberate walk through wet grassland: nothing about this bird is ever hurried. They pair for life and dance for one another, bowing and leaping with their wings held half open. Watching a pair move through the morning mist at Naivasha is one of those sights that quietly rearranges what you thought a bird could be.

Met · Lake Naivasha

Saddle-billed Stork

Ephippiorhynchus senegalensis

Almost five feet tall, with a bill painted in three colours and a small yellow saddle at the base. It steps through shallow water as if it owns the lease.

Met · Masai Mara

Lesser Flamingo

Phoeniconaias minor

Deep-pink and gregarious, sieving blue-green algae from soda lakes with that strange downturned bill. In numbers they turn the shoreline a colour the eye does not quite trust.

Met · Lake Nakuru

Vulturine Guineafowl

Acryllium vulturinum

A guineafowl dressed for an opera: bare blue head, a cape of long striped hackles, a cobalt breast. It runs rather than flies, in long disciplined files across dry country.

Met · Samburu

African Wattled Lapwing

Vanellus senegallus

A tall plover of damp grassland with yellow facial wattles and matching legs. It will scold you loudly and follow you off the territory, just to be sure.

Met · Nairobi National Park

Great Spotted Cuckoo

Clamator glandarius

A crested cuckoo that lays its eggs in the nests of starlings and crows, and lets them do the raising. The white-spotted wings and long tail make it look half-magpie.

Met · Samburu

— 04° CLOSE COMPANY

The birds that came to me.

The garden, the camp, the back of a zebra. Some birds you travel for; these ones found me.

Superb Starling

Lamprotornis superbus

The bird that meets you at every roadside picnic in Kenya, and somehow never once stops being beautiful. Iridescent blue above, bright chestnut below, with a crisp white band drawn neatly between the two. They are bold, social, and entirely unbothered by people, which makes them the first bird most visitors actually look at properly. Common, it turns out, is not at all the same thing as ordinary.

Met · Amboseli

Yellow-billed Oxpecker

Buphagus africanus

It earns its living on the backs of buffalo and zebra, picking off ticks and worse. I met this pair commuting along the spine of a very patient zebra.

Met · Masai Mara

Wattled Starling

Creatophora cinerea

A starling that grows and reabsorbs bare yellow skin and black wattles depending on the breeding season. This one was very much dressed for the occasion.

Met · Amboseli

Common Waxbill

Estrilda astrild

A tiny finch finely barred like a fingerprint, with a bill the red of sealing wax. It works the grass heads in small, busy parties.

Met · My garden, Nairobi

Black-collared Apalis

Apalis pulchra

A neat highland-forest warbler with a white throat, a black collar, and rust along the flanks. It never holds still, which is the warbler's whole personality.

Met · The Aberdares

— WHERE I'VE BEEN LOOKING

Every bird is also a place.

You cannot separate the bird from the morning you met it. These are the places that gave up the 24, from a forest inside the city to the dry country eight hours north.

The Masai Mara
Four of this list in two mornings. The Mara does not do anything by halves.
4 birds
Samburu
The dry north. Everything here is built for heat, and shows it with style.
4 birds
The Aberdares
Cold, wet montane forest. You hear ten birds for every one you manage to see.
3 birds
My garden, Nairobi
Three of these were met from a kitchen window. The hobby starts at home.
3 birds
Lakes Naivasha & Nakuru
Freshwater and soda water, an hour apart, with entirely different guest lists.
3 birds
Karura Forest
A forest standing inside the city. Proof you do not have to travel far at all.
1 bird

— STILL ON THE LIST

Six birds I have not yet met.

A list is only honest if it admits what it is missing. These are the ones I have travelled for and not found, heard and not seen, or simply not yet had the nerve and the hours to chase.

ShoebillBalaeniceps rex
A prehistoric grey giant of the western swamps. The bird I most want to simply stand quietly in front of.
African Crowned EagleStephanoaetus coronatus
The leopard of the forest canopy. I have heard one calling over the Aberdares and never once laid eyes on it.
Narina TrogonApaloderma narina
A green-and-crimson ghost of the forest interior that sits dead still and dares you to find it.
Southern Ground HornbillBucorvus leadbeateri
A turkey-sized hornbill that walks the grassland in family parties, booming long before dawn.
Pel's Fishing OwlScotopelia peli
A huge ginger owl that hunts fish along forested rivers by night. Mostly a rumour to me, so far.
Schalow's TuracoTauraco schalowi
A turaco of the western forests with a crest absurdly long even for the family. Worth the trip on its own.

— WHAT I CARRY

A short kit, mostly worn in.

Binoculars

A pair of 8×42s, rubber armour worn smooth at the focus wheel. Eight years old, and not for sale.

Camera and lens

A weather-sealed body and a 100–400mm lens. Heavy enough to be a commitment, light enough to actually carry.

III

The field guide

Birds of Kenya and Northern Tanzania, by Zimmerman, Turner and Pearson. The spine gave up somewhere around the bee-eaters.

A pocket notebook

For the date, the place, the weather, and what the bird was doing. The photograph remembers the rest.

And one thing you cannot buy

Patience. The one piece of kit you cannot buy. Most of birding is standing still long enough to be forgotten.

Most of this list was met on the quests we run, on the long unhurried stops that are rather the whole point of them.

See where we go →

— TRAVEL WITH US

We run birding safaris.

Small groups, local guides, and the unhurried mornings the birds reward. We build each trip around the species you want and the country you have time for, from the Rift Valley lakes to the dry north. Tell us what you are after and we will send a quote.

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