Kimemo farm, in the Valley of Ngare Ormotonyi, looking west toward Monduli on January 11.

On a beautiful ascendant afternoon, a week before Christmas, when days here in East Africa could still be warm and dry, I was birding at my local patch, near Ngara-mtoni in the Monduli gap. 'Gap' is my appended suffix - used to identify this vital transport and bird migration portal between two mountains. It's a valley, or a trench, at 1,300 metres elevation which separates the great grey volcanic cone of Mount Meru (reaching 4,565 m) from the lower, greener, four-headed eminence of Monduli (at about 2,300 m). That afternoon I was staring idly, yet attentively as any birder should, head in the clouds, up among the towering cumulus, top-heavy galleons of pure white, drifting slowly westwards across the great blue sky.

Suddenly, in a one adrenaline instant, some of the ubiquitous floaters that plague my eyes resolved themselves into an external worm-like trail of tiny black specks.
"Birds! birds! birds! VisMig! Gliding birds descending". High altitude migrants, that became big dark raptors, effortlessly dropping-in. They were coming from the north, from the direction of Lake Natron. Perhaps they were coming straight out of the northern hemisphere, and all that way today, maybe.

They came closer and closer; quickly materialising into Black Kites. Black Kites - a common raptor in the far Palearctic - my first big migrant flock of this species in the southbound season of bird movement. In all some 270 birds descended to truck leisurely eastwards at a height of fifty feet. Lumbering brown birds with long notched rudder tails. They ambled along in crawl-stroke, "wrists pressed forward level with the head". Travelling with effort now, and purposefully, passing just above the dark rounded crowns of the shade trees in Kimemo coffee farm. Indigenous trees, pure african shade trees these, trees for which the twin coffee estates, of Mringa and Burka, should be both justly proud and famous. For several minutes the great brown 'shaggy' birds filed past me, at a range of about two hundred metres, heading east into the sour and bilious haze of progress which is Arusha's air today.

An hour later that same afternoon Zsuzsa and Zsolt Zadori watched a great flock of Black Kites, 250-270 birds, circling above their home at Themi, 7 km distant, over a hill on the south eastern edge of Arusha town. Almost certainly they were the same birds.

Yesterday (January 10) I was at the local patch again. Now in these excruciatingly interesting times; this being labeled a 'moderate El Niño year'; every day in Tanzania is, at best, unsettled. The weather, and hence any outside activity, has become less and less predictable since Christmas. Equatorial downpours; torrential knitting needle rains which can seriously puncture one's plans, often accompanied by thunder, arrive seemingly out of nowhere. They carry-off all earthly human considerations before them. We live on a hillside, atop a network of open earthen roads, in heavy rain these tracks turn into a slithery black mess, a puddled pot-holed quagmire, which even a SWB Land rover 'on-diff' has great difficulty negotiating. Yesterday it poured heavily around noon, and then, after only an hour or so of heat and sun and butterflies, the rain started to come-on again at three.

From the notebook:

"At 1515 I took-up a 'sniper's position' to wait out the worst of this next, and hopefully brief, thunderstorm. Tucked myself under a leafy hedgerow Cordia, in a fairly dry vantage point, with a clear view north. Soon I was settled-down nicely amongst the sticky-headed love grass, at the edge of a luxuriant lucerne field, on the eastern perimeter of Kimemo (Mringa Estate). Since today's brief sunny slot, either side of 1300, a cool and ruffling breeze had strengthened, most unusually, out of the north west. Could this be some kind of 'new wind' - a trans-equatorial wind? A wind for the new Pliocene? Whatever it is, it's been causing cumulonimbus to quickly reassemble over any higher ground. By 1530 these have gathered into towering and somewhat disconcerting monster clouds, hue-less, the tones of lead or pewter. Growling werewolf clouds these, rearing-up, snarling and spitting their lightening, they look as if they've been summoned by El Niño to guard the remaining Gaian forests, native woodland on Meru, to the east, and Monduli to the west. Now these super clouds begin to howl and bay, chilling tripod-rattling howls of stoked-up thunder; they blast at each other across the 5 km of simian (dis)order down here in the Ngara-mtoni trench.

Looking north up to Lengi-jave, at the north end of the Ngara-mtoni gap, a wall of misty grey rain is approaching sucked-in on this trans-equatorial breeze. While to the southeast, against Meru's eastern flank, the sky is darker still, black and thick and even. Comfort is at hand: to my right a black-hooded and rufous-chested African Hobby, a cheery comrade, makes dashing zig-zag sorties from a dead snag, her stag's head look-out. She strikes silence into the four kinds of cisticola hitherto wrapped-tight, snapping their displays, out across the moist ultra-conductive air. And six polymorph Steppe Buzzards - who, from 2 until 3pm, have been contentedly snaffling sausage-like caterpillars of the Convolvulus Hawk-moth caught-out wandering across a harrowed field - rise one after another and flew away northwards to settle in some distant feathery eucalyptus.

At 1540, some 150m to my right, I notice a couple of raggedy kites, at first I assume they are local 'Yellow-billeds', passing behind the stag's head hobby tree. As I watch they become three, then seven birds tree-topping, heading north west. Interesting? Then within seconds there are 17 of these big brown birds in a line snaking between the Cordias. After 30 seconds or so, I estimate 40 birds are strung-along there, then 90, then 200 - a pincer movement is taking place as another line of birds descend, from the massive wall of blue black thunder above and behind me, to join those already streaming-out across the coffee farm. Soon there is a mass of at least 270 kites assembling in a vortex, on the warmer rising air, over the concrete aprons and cattle shippens of Mringa farm. By now of course I have twigged that they are probably all Black Kites, kites caught out. Perhaps a little earlier in the day than is comfortable, caught by this rain of mid-afternoon, while heading back north."

Eventually the kites must have decided upon a suitable roosting site. A grove in which they could roost and, most likely, pass the night in relative safety. And so they descended toward some lofty farm-avenue trees on the southern edge of the sprawling west Arusha satellite, a 'township' also named Ngara-mtoni.

I just sat and savoured these moments, whilst the pack of mighty thunder-dogs gathered all round. Indeed what power have I compared to these elemental forces? And then, before the network signal went completely, three hasty mobile calls were exchanged (with Elsie, the boys and the blue Land rover) to ensure my rapid extrication. At that time I noticed some other bird species were moving. Three small flocks of White-fronted Bee-eater (totaling about 60 birds), in their characteristic yo-yoing long-distance flight, were heading north on the western edge of Kimemo along the ngare, the korongo; here it's just a very narrow wadi. Higher, in the ever gathering gloom, a few hundred unattached Pied Crows evidently had decided to 'return home' a little early to their ancestral roost, well out of harm's way, on the green hills westward, below Monduli mountain; incidentally a site now entirely owned and perhaps to be 'protected' by the agency of the Agha Khan.

Before retreating to my rendezvous with normal time; in the cool and, by now, very damp conditions; nearby Common Quails called insistently from deep within the blue-flowering lucerne: "wet-my-lips .. wet-my-lips"; while two Red-chested Cuckoos, two zealots, insisted without need: "it will rain .. it will rain". As I broke cover seven more Black Kites appeared a couple of hundred feet over my head; together with an adult male Marsh Harrier (on Friday evening there had been six adult males harriers, yet only two females, at the roost here); they drifted north into the as yet light rain. Once these kites had espied their relatives they swung around and descended in a slalom, down to the Ngara-mtoni.
And then, at last, it clicked.

This area is almost certainly an ancestral stopping point, a traditional and preferred night-time roost for migrant kites. Coming southwards it lies immediately after the drylands east of Lake Natron. The stunted thorn-bush, lacking tall and leafy trees, surrounding Kitumbeine, Namanga and Longido; whilst going back north it's after the almost boundless steppe of the Simanjiro plateau. Lengi-jave and Ngara-mtoni are at a watershed; west to the Rift, east to the Ocean. A point where large raptors like buzzards, kites and eagles can leave (or join) the Rift Valley flyway; heading north as now - in a corridor - via an increasingly over-crowded Kenya to the, as yet, still green and open Sudd.

Maybe these rivers of birds have passed this way since humanity first began to look. To the 'freedom-loving' Maasai, at least, long handled lion spear in hand, this place has always been Ngare Ormotonyi - and hence nowadays it's become abbreviated, by the domesticated Warusha people, to Ngara-mtoni.
Kiwarusha: Ngaramtoni
from Maasai: Ngare Ormotonyi : The River of Raptors.

Swifts at the Gap - January 11, 2010

A Mottled Swift above Ngara-mtoni by MPGoodey January 2009

January 11: After a midday shower this afternoon was large sunny warm and sultry in the Monduli gap, despite the occasional and very welcome refreshment of a gentle easterly breeze. Evidently rain was falling, on and off, over the massif of Monduli, whilst Mount Meru (at anywhere above 2000 m) was wreathed in cloud throughout. I birded, more or less the same area as yesterday, starting at 1530 and continuing until the aerial action calmed at about 1800hrs. From the outset it was obvious that there was a huge number of swifts over the valley. Easily in excess of 5,000 and most of those were Common Swifts, although a definite call from this species was only heard on one occasion. There were a few burly Mottled Swifts scything about among them. The swifts were foraging from about 100 feet above ground level to well over two thousand feet. Weaving about in the warm updraughts welling-up out of the ripening grass and maize fields that extend right across the valley floor. Vast numbers of little orange grass beetles were drifting on the breeze. These packs of feeding swifts probably extended from well to the south of Arusha airport (3 km distant) to at least the watershed of Lengajave. That was not all, together with the swifts, were many thousand House Martins (and a very few Plain Sand Martins) - in fact probably the most House Martins I have ever seen in one day in one place, certainly so in Tanzania.

At ca 1630 the first few tens of Black Kite, and a couple of Yellow-billed Kites, started appearing high above me, all were coming from a southeasterly direction. During the next hour and a bit some 700 kites dropped-in to the roost area, in tall trees near to the TPRI track at Ngara-mtoni. Among them a few Steppe Buzzards and a single Lanner. And above all a group of 40 White Storks was tightly wheeling. At some points there were so many different birds; silhouettes of different shapes and sizes, careering about in all directions and at different speeds in the sky above; that it felt like those images seen on TV. You know, looking along the drop-off wall beside a coral reef, except of course, that these fish were all birds. Birds filling the sky.