Ngong Forest

Early Saturday morning found us piling into the pick-up truck and making the drive to the Sabaki River, north of Malindi. There, we met the local bird enthusiast group, the ‘Sabaki Skimmers’ – Dixon, Michael, Joseph, Patrick and Sammy all guys from the village who are excited by conservation. A long walk through muddy mangroves and dunes to the river mouth followed and from there, we were ready to start counting the multitude of birds that were hanging out there.

Colin gives the Sabaki Skimmers a pep talk

Armed with a plethora of binoculars, telescopes, notepads, tally counters and the ubiquitous suncream (for the mzungus at least!), we split into two teams and started purposely pointing our lenses towards the fields of flamingos, Sanderlings and Crab-plovers and scribbling frantic notes.

As the morning wore on, we gradually made away up the delta, crossing hippo tracks and checking out the fish the local kids had caught, which amounted to a small handful of tiny baby fish. Disappointingly, there were several groups of kids out in the river fishing with mosquito nets. Not only is fishing illegal by national law in the river, fishing with a net with such small net sizes means that no fish can escape. Estuaries such as the Sabaki River Delta are vital habitats for juvenile fish, offering them protection amongst the mangroves from predators and other threats in the open ocean. Such non-discriminating fishing methods sweep up young fish and allow only the very very lucky ones to reach maturity and thus threaten the long-term viability of local fisheries. And yet, these kids need to eat. One of the challenges of conservation is ensuring the long term sustainability of habitats, as well as the livelihoods of the local people.

Local fisher-kids

Nearly 3 and a half hours later, with the mzungu skin truly beginning to crisp, we made our final counts. A successful morning indeed – we counted 42 species  and a total of 7,305 individual birds. Of these, it was particularly interesting to  large numbers of White-cheeked Terns and surprisingly, a major lack of Little Stints, a reason for which still baffles!

Counting flamingos

Rosemary and Njeri are two women from the slum of Kibera who are trying out an experiment to make fuel briqettes out of forest wastes from the  Ngong Road forest.

To learn all about the briquettes making process, they visited Kitengela Glass – a glass recycling plant just outside of Nairobi and very near the wilderness of Nairobi National Park. A number of alternative energy innovations are being tried at Kitengela including biogas.

Art is made at Kitegela  from all maner of recycled materials – this is a beer can bull

Rosemary and Njeri had a first hand lesson on how to make briquettes from the staff there, and were able to experiment with leaves and seeds collected from Ngong Road Forest.

Seeds and leaves usually go to waste, Rosemary and Njeri intend to convert these into eco-energy briquettes. The seeds collected are from the common and otherwise rather useless peppery smelling tree, the croton. These seeds are said to be about 30% oil and are being pressed elsewere to produce biodiesel!   Eucalyptus leaves are also everywhere as 20% of the forest is eucalyptus. The leaves burn very easily

Lesson 1. Everything has to be soaked and then mashed.

At Kitengela it is done in a traditional pestle and mortar. Soaked croton seeds did break up quite readily but the eucalyptus leaves are very resistant.

It looks like hard work but is actually quite easy as the materials have all been soaking for a week.

Lesson 2. The mush is pushed into a tube and then pressed to extract as much water as possible.

It takes at least three people at this stage- one to press the lever, one to hold the briquettes, and one to hold the press down!

Lesson 3. The briquettes have to be removed carefully and laid out to dry.

Our briquettes made of forest waste looked very promising. They are now drying and we will try them out in a few days.

Findings

1. Croton will work
2. Eucalyptus leaves need to be mashed. Soaking and pounding do not work
3. To make the mush stick together we needed about 50% paper mixture. Next we’d like to try fresh cowdung
4. It’s labour intensive – this outfit took 4 people to operate one briquette press and produced 10 briquettes every 10 minutes

The big question

Everything seems to work but before we produce tons of briquettes we need the answer to one important question. Will the community want to use briquettes instead of charcoal and wood?

To test this Rosemary and Njeri went home with briquettes made before and we are anxiously waiting for thier report  – would they be willing to exchange fuel wood for briquettes?

GLOWRY!! This is AWESOME news… I just received this email from the ringing office in Nairobi:

“You’ll be glad to know, Colin, that your Terek Sandpiper, Ring no. “Nairobi A71968″ was controlled, breeding, by Veli-Matti Pakanen at Kemi, Lappi, Finland (65 45′N, 24 32′E) on 21.06.08 (no biometrics supplied). Kemi is a small coastal town at the top end of the Gulf of Bothnia, just over 20 km from the Swedish border at Haparanda.

Apart from the intrinsic worth of this super control, the report also raises some important points. It is the first recovery/control of a Terek Sand affecting eastern Africa and is also only the second recov/control from all the Kenya coastal ringing.”

This was indeed one of “my” birds but was in fact ringed by none other than my “kid sister” Beth Harris (I lived with the Harris family when she was growing up) when she volunteered with us on 20th November 2003 in Mida Creek. The distance in a straight line from Mida to Kemi is c.7,781km and it was 4 1/2 years later that it was found! It was a first year bird when it was ringed (so it hatched in 2003) and so would now be in its 5th year and apparently going strong! If you have google earth access, copy and paste the lat/long into the search field and it’ll take you right there!

This is also more exciting for me / A Rocha Kenya in that it is the FIRST recovery of ANY of my / A Rocha Kenya birds since I started ringing in Kenya in 1994 other than c.2 kms away! Very cool indeed and I’m very stoked about it!!

This is the scene on the night before the Terek Sand A71968 was caught and ringed… Beth is in fact holding another Terek Sand – she’s sitting in the back of the trusty old Suzuki Jeep we called ‘Spinetail’.

Measuring the head length of a Terek Sandpiper – taking these biometrics help identify populations and can differentiate the sexes in some species.

This could be the very net that caught the Terek Sandpiper A71968… Beth is helping put it up the evening before we caught it – 19th November 2003… Little did we know!!

It’s a shame to have to start off this blog with such an urgent and potentially discouraging message, but we have come on line at just the right time to add our voice to the outcry to try and stop what would be probably The most tragic of environmental disasters Kenya will have experienced in recent times… read on.

A Rocha Kenya is based in Watamu on the Kenyan coast about 150km south of one of the top three of Kenya’s richest and most diverse freshwater wetlands – the Tana River Delta. In another WildlifeDirect blog, “The Water Hole”, Samuel Maina has been posting some information already regarding the fight to save this awesome and incredibly special site. We are working together as part of a wider group of conservation organisations fighting a huge sugarcane project (covering an area of over 110,000ha / 270,000 acres – nearly three times the size of Amboseli National Park, x18 the size of Lake Nakuru National Park and almost 1.5 times the area of Shenandoah National Park in the USA!) that would eradicate the delta – and I’m hoping to raise further concern to encourage the Kenya government to save the Delta.

The Tana River Delta is the most amazing wetland and a visit particularly during the time when the migrant birds are packed in there feasting on the vast resources together with flooding when herons and storks are nesting… it is a mind-blowing experience. Roni has visited the Okavango Delta and even she said that doing our waterfowl count in January was a far more radical birding experience than the Okavango. This year during the counts we were walking across open mud flats and saw recent lion spoor and a waterbuck which had obviously been walking happily along only to scent or see the lion and to change direction and leap off in the opposite way! There are also elephant and buffalo and certainly over 800 hippo in the delta – we saw a pod (herd) of what we estimated at 400 in just one spot!

Our waterbird counts for the past two years reached 15,000 water birds of 72 species counted on just one day in January 2007 and a similar number of 71 species again in 2008. Highlights included:

• 1,600 herons and egrets

• a flock of 1,400 African Open-billed Stork,
• 58 Allen’s Gallinules,
• a single flock of 3,500 Ruff,
• 3,200 terns
• flock of 76 African Skimmers…
• and the largest recorded number of Pacific Golden Plover for East Africa – 180 birds (normally seen in ones and two!)

…and that was only covering a small proportion (c.15-20% max) of the whole delta on a random day! There is a major heronry in the delta, where herons and storks come to from all over East Africa to breed and it is a highly important breeding site for fish (and therefore extremely important source of income and nitrition for a large human population). Also, as well as the elephant and lion, there are a lot of buffalo and antelope including an endemic race of Topi found only on a few remaining sites of the East African coast. Late last year some Wild Dog were also seen in the Delta.

River deltas are known for being fragile, dynamic and extremely rich and important wetland systems, flooding in times of good rain and later drying out again. Any small amount of playing with the hydrological systems will upset the delicate natural balance and wreak havoc on the ecosystem. To put sugar plantations right into the heart of the Tana Delta will spell the end of the delta. Sugar is widely known as an ecological desert in itself and the effluent and pollution from the processing plants in Africa is highly damaging as will be the impact of the many 1,000s of workers and others who will be attracted to the area and who will need food, water and somwhere to rid their sewage and rubbish.

It will be a regional natural disaster if this development is allowed to go ahead the way it is currently planned. A strong section of the local community living in the delta, represented by the Lower Tana River Delta Conservation Trust, are fighting it hard as can be read in The Water Hold blog. Several conservation organisations have come together to form a lobby group to seek to stop this project from destroying the delta. The next blog will give further updates on what’s happened and how you can assist.