Kenya – Don't hold your breath

Egyptian goose + Birds of the Week Invitation CLXXIII

Spotting a gaggle of Egyptian geese (Alopochen aegyptiaca) in a park in Darmstadt surprised me. I was sure of the identification: the brown mask is a giveaway, and is supported by the colour of the beak, the pink legs, and a brown patch on the breast. I’d previously only seen them in Kenya, and I’d put them down as a species from sub-Saharan Africa. I found later that my memory was not wrong. It was introduced into UK in the 17th century, but in the Netherlands only in the 1980s, and expanded from there into the rest of Europe. The expansion had just begun when I lived in Germany, so I’d missed them earlier. Breeding populations are now also found in the US. The featured photo is evidence of it breeding in Germany. The two below show it in its native habitats in Africa.

The chicks made me curious about its breeding and mating behaviour. Like most birds, there is pair bonding. Since the young develop in eggs, nests have to be defended, and brooding adults have to be nourished. This is the evolutionary pressure behind pair bonding in birds, at least for a season. But pairs of Egyptian geese bond over several seasons, often for life. In the past behaviour such as this was taken to be a moral example. But behaviour is driven by biology and its imperatives. So it is interesting to try to figure out driver behind such long-term pair-bonding.

The question has exercised several generations of evolutionary biologists. Field studies with several species show that long-term pair bonding improves fertility in long-lived species of birds. The reasons are not yet totally clear. In some species birds begin to play mating games for a year or two before they are mature enough to breed, and it is believed that long-term pairs are formed in this process. If so, it would seem to require effort and time to form new pairs, so reducing the time in each spring during which successful breeding can occur. With our very detailed knowledge of the complexity of long-term pair-bonding in one species, we can imagine that there is much more to this story. There is also interesting speculation about how long-term pair-bonding may lead to the evolution of cooperation.

This is an invitation to share your post about birds, their photos, or their behaviour. If you post about birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to have a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine. Do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post, and remember to visit other people’s posts. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.

Birds of the Week CLXXII

Herd

African elephants are larger than Indian elephants. That’s all that I knew about these creatures until a few years ago. Then I realized that they come from separate branches of the same family, and are actually different genus. On comparing fossils and current day elephants, it seems possible that were many migrations out of Africa into Asia and back before the current split. The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) may have diverged from African elephants (genus Loxodonta) 4 to 6 million years ago. I haven’t seen the African forest elephant (L. cyclotis), a critically endangered species. The photo that you see above is of a herd of African bush elephants (L. africana), an endangered species like E. maximus. If any of these species dies out then something majestic would have passed from the world.

Little bee-eater + Birds of the Week Invitation LVI

Africa is the home of bee-eaters. Of the almost thirty bee-eaters known, twenty are found only in this continent. In my brief visit to Kenya I saw the Little bee-eater (Merops pusillus) sitting on a thorn bush in Amboseli national park. I was completely new to birding in Africa, and I hadn’t even got myself a field guide when I took this photo. Now I know it is found in all of sub-Saharan Africa. It has a green back, and its identification is the dark cravat that separates the bright yellow throat from the buff underparts. The band of blue above the beak that you see in this photo is special to the east African subspecies M. pusillus meridionalis.

There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine, but do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.

Birds of the Week LV

I’m travelling in a really odd place where no network reaches. I will take a look at your posts and telegrams as soon as I’m able to.

Left to right, bottom to top

Sometimes you are just lucky. We stood watching four lionesses dozing. They weren’t moving. There wasn’t time to look for anything else before the light went. So I just took a few photos for practice, when one got up, shook herself a bit and then did a lazy stretch. She looked like she could do with a cup of coffee. If it is a promise of action that you want, that diagonal is exactly it.

Intrigued, I looked through the photos I took that day in Masai Mara. In that absolutely flat landscape how many diagonals did I manage to include in my photos? A zebra’s haunches not only provide bold diagonals, they are also the biggest contrast in that dusty tan landscape. The occasional Acacia provides the only vertical in the landscape, and the necks of giraffes are another angle. An elephant’s trunk and a lioness’ neck provide more gentle slopes to keep your eye from getting bored. Interesting how much your hand does unconsciously when you train it.

Crowds

Do you remember 2019? People used to hang around in crowds, and look happy.

In retrospect the featured photo is specially poignant. It was taken in Wuhan, at a time when the virus had already begun to circulate, but no one recognized it for what it would go on to do.

On that note I take a blogging break of around two weeks.

Sunrise

Sunrise in Masai Mara shows the seemingly unending plains, with thousands of blue wildebeest and plains zebras grazing together. I want to be traveling again. A series of place names run through my head as I see these old photos. This image should do nicely for the announcement that I will take a blogging break for a couple of weeks. Things that I postponed for a year need to be done. In the last five days I have not been able to connect to around a third of the blogs that I tried to visit. I hope this glitch is fixed by the time I am back.

The past is a foreign country

The famous opening phrase of L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between, came to mind when my photos app reminded me of where I was a year ago: Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. The phrase was apparently first used by Hartley’s friend, David Cecil, in a lecture in 1949. We all plagiarize our past, and I am nostalgic enough about having lived in that foreign planet where travel was easy, to post this video today.

Tourism made up approximately 10% of Kenya’s GDP in the past decade, with some year-to-year variation. The shock that COVID-19 has had on travel however will have much wider impact than this number suggests. According to a study commissioned by the World Bank it’ll impact the net earning of the rural poor by almost 15%, of the government by about 10%, and of enterprises by a number more or less midway between these. These huge impacts are similar to what is happening across the world.

Zebra crossing

Today we take a day off from keeping house. We’ll eat what’s in the fridge. We’ll break out a bottle of Burgundy that had been saved for a day when we feel like resting. We will watch movies, and lose ourselves in the memories of trips we had made in the past.

Eritrean coffee

Since Kenya grows its own coffee, I would finish a meal with coffee without giving the order much thought. I should have paid more attention when I ordered one in an Eritrean place. After all Eritrea or Ethiopia are the place where coffee was first domesticated, and it stands to reason that serving coffee will be an elaborate tradition. It caught me by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. This being a restaurant, the initial process of roasting and grinding was done before the coffee came to the table. My first inkling that this would be different when a procession of three people approached the table. One put the cup and sugar bowl in front of me, and another arranged a serving table. The woman then spooned the coffee ground into a little earthen pot, filled it with water and heated it on a flame.

As she poured the coffee into the cup I could get the aroma of good Eritrean coffee wafting from the stream of brown liquid. I admired the elegant earthenware pot, the ebena, from which the coffee was being served. The service ended with an incense holder being placed on the table. My saucer had a little biscuit on it; I later realized that the traditional accompaniment, the himbasha, is not very different. I tasted the coffee, very aromatic and not as bitter as an espresso roast would make it. No sugar was needed, although adding sugar is said to be traditional. I declined a refill, although tradition would have demanded two refills. A nice ceremonial coffee can really round off a trip to Kenya.

Moving art

I saw very little street art in Nairobi, but there was a lot of art on the streets. It was on the private buses and matatus which you can see everywhere on the roads. Here is a small gallery of this art, collected as I was driven around the streets of the city. I was told that some of the artists charge a lot for the paintings. It is clear why. Enjoy paging through the gallery; just click on any thumbnail to open it.