Ngong Forest

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Jan 19 2009 | By: ngongforest

Visit to the African crowned eagle nest

This is a rare bird of prey .Currently a breeding pair of this bird has been found nesting in Ngong forest sanctuary, Mr. Munir, an ornithologist from National National Museums of Kenya is studying the behavior of this bird.

On Saturday, we took a walk to the nest - Munir, his team and rangers. Due to the heavy rains, the roads were impassible via a vehicle so we took a 30 minutes walk to the site. On our way we saw footmarks of a leopard heading towards the rangers post. We also encountered tree loggers who in spite of our efforts, managed to escape!

With the help of Mr. Munirs powerful binoculars, we surveyed the nest which we found that it was empty, the birds could have been out to feed! Mr. Munir who is an expert tried calling the bird (by imitating their call) and after one hour, still no success, may be it was wrong timing, we then decided to take a break to the vultures nest, 300m from the eagles Nest, again the nest was empty. By then everybody was tired, heavy mud on our shoes contributed most. We decide to walk back to the rangers post and try our luck a different day.

The presence of plenty of butterflies in the forest entertained us together with some horses that too had come to the forest

Nice walk, and we will be back soon, they all commented as they waved bye-bye.

By Akach Nicholas.

Tags: crowned eagle, endangered species, Ngong Road Forest, wildlifedirect

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Category: Fire, Ngong Forest | Date: Jan 16 2009 | By: admin

I stayed the whole day manning the main camp gate.  Everybody was out to celebrate Christmas.  At 3: 00 pm, my colleague, Joseph and Ranger Senkenkei attached to Kenya Forest Service arrived; we sat there chatting about how people were celebrating Christmas.

Some minutes to six in the evening, we got an emergency call from the project co-coordinator alerting us about a fire out break in the forest.  It was strange but we needed to act fast before the fire spread to other parts of the forest.  We organized ourselves and left Joseph manning the gate and I and Ranger Senkenkei left for the site which was not very far from the camp, we had to take a shorter route through the Ngong Racecourse golf course since it was busy that day as many people seemed to have left for Christmas

On our way, we saw two warthogs, grazing on the grass on the horse track.  This drew our attention as it had been long since we had seen warthogs.  But since we had an emergency we had to proceed to the site.  

Warthogs grazing at Ngong Racecourse 

By good luck we found that the fire had already been contained and only some tree stumps were smoldering.  We borrowed jerricans from the people leaving next to the forest; they were supportive and gave us the jerricans filled with water, which we poured on to the tree stumps and all the places that were still producing smoke.

Putting off the fire 

It took us about one hour to finish all the areas that had caught fire.  We kept vigil for some minutes to see if the fire would start again.  On seeing that things were alright we proceeded back to the camp.

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