Feathers in the Cloud
A resident Congo peripheral Africa's Crowned Eagle with prey!
She is the Pump of Eden - delivering clouds, delicate flowers, our meagre foodstuffs and millions and millions of migrant birds - flying out of central Africa; flying by day and especially by night, even to the most far-flung frigid lands "up north".
She's become my primary source of hope for a living Gaia future.
And she's the mother of our western old world lists - the Congo *.
It's her weather systems and your migrating birds - most of whom stream almost unseen beneath the stars.
Feathers in the cloud pulsating out of this great green evergreen heart of Africa.
Weather, Birds and Bird Migration: Both In and Out of Africa
A note regarding cuckoos.
I visit the same areas [in northern 'Tz'] frequently; for example the Serengeti, Ndutu, the Rift Valley just north of Mto a Mbu, Mount Meru's slopes - both north and south, Same in the South Pare mountains, both the West and East Usambaras and Tanga's tranquil Indian Ocean coastline. Visit with my birding customers and we either see "quite a few" big cuckoos on these bird tours or we do not.
Sometimes, particularly in the depths of the dry season, we see none or almost none.
So are the bigger cuckoos invisible in the leafless acacias of the savanna woodlands? Or are they moving-in to the caterpillar-filled leafing acacias (principally I believe from 'dangerous' birder-less areas to the west and south-west) with the onset of the 'rains'?
In fact, for some "bird species groups" these afrotropical movements are indeed akin to the famous and economically enormous wildebeest migration of the Serengeti - i.e. they travel in an essentially circular, climate-driven movement - but over a truly vast area, taking-in the Congo heartlands (in the widest sense) of our dear and increasingly despoiled Africa.
The Congo basin system forms in essence a vast and, as yet, relatively undamaged pump around which huge volumes of streaming migrant birds pulse and flow. They are tracking seasonal changes in soil moisture right across the semi-arid or semi-wet peripheries of our dear continent's heart.
Sitting quietly - Watching weather, birds and wild lives - migrating.
Really?
Is there anything to better that?
A male Pallid Harrier, with half a mouthful of quelea, quartering the Rift Valley just north of the Serengeti highway Mto wa Mbu, Tanzania.
* even the lists of those that restrict themselves, and their size-able finances, to birding the "Western Pathetic" [my thanks to a neotropical R.J.Schofield for that wee gem!]
