Finally Some Birding! @ The Rondo Plateau – Southern Tanzania

It was dark by the time we arrived, but we set up camp in the forest and immediately went for a little walk. In case you missed it, getting to the forests inside of the Rondo Plateau was no easy task and in the process we nearly flipped our Hilux, but thankfully we made it to the forest! This was the last stop on our “southern Tanzania” loop. After setting up our tent we set off on a little walk to search for our main target, a subspecies of a batis. Yes, a SUB-species was the impetus for our entire Southern Tanzania loop!

Ross and I had been searching for birds at night since the beginning of our Africa trip thanks to a heat-detecting, military-grade piece of equipment Ross brought along for the sole purpose of bird detection. While very little is known about roosting behaviors, we had been going out at night so often in search of birds that by now we knew one of the easiest species to find at night is a batis. If you’re wondering about the preferred position birds like to sleep, or how high off the ground, or how far off a branch, I have been logging behavior patterns in an Excel spreadsheet just in case someone wants to undertake this as a research project! Any PhD candidates looking for something to study can feel free to send me a message!

Fortunately for us, a batis is likely to roost in a young sapling less than 7ft (2m) off the ground. When looking for their heat signature, a batis typically does not have many leaves obscuring it and thus is in an incredibly obvious location. Reichenow’s Batis being our number one target had us feeling confident that we could find it at night to get the pressure off. Fortunately on our night walk we found three roosting birds, two of which happened to be a batis. I don’t want to bore my non-birder readers so I won’t go into detail about this subspecies sometimes being lumped with Dark Batis (which is lumped with Short-tailed Batis) and sometimes being lumped with Cape Batis. The two bird books we had brought along had conflicting information between the illustration and the text so we weren’t exactly sure if we had found our target bird or not! We were comparing the two bird guides with our photos and both guides were contradicting each other! What we determined is that very little is known about this bird and batis taxonomy is a mess.

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It can be difficult to get to the forest of the Rondo Plateau, but once you are there it is a special place. The forest is thick with trees and bustling with life. Walking on the road is easy and there are birds everywhere! (It’s just unfortunate that it is SO EXPENSIVE and for no amenities.) The next morning was exhilarating as we started off down the same sandy road that we had walked through in the night and noticed Spotted Hyena tracks inside of our footprints! After walking for a bit we actually spotted the hyena as he stopped on the road before heading back into the thick vegetation.

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For once in southern Tanzania, things started going our way. We had a whole bunch of targets with “green” in the name, all of which can be quite tricky to see, and don’t you know we walked up to a “green bird” party and had Green-headed Oriole, Green Tinkerbird, and Green Barbet all hanging out in the same tree! What luck! Excellent views of East Coast Akalat, Black-and-white Shrike Flycatcher, Lowland Tiny Greenbul, Kretschmer’s Longbill, and Uluguru Violet-backed Sunbird, rounded out our morning. Truthfully the birding was fantastic and very enjoyable.

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This darn batis had us shaking our heads though. We weren’t 100% sure we’d seen it. We had seen about 6-7 batis’s that morning, but we had our hesitation because the female didn’t look like the illustration at all! The female is the bird you’d want to see as she is supposed to look different from the female Dark Batis. The bird we had seen had a gray breast and while the text mentions a grey wash, the illustration shows a narrow chestnut breast band. The birds we found also sounded similar to Dark Batis and we weren’t 100% sure if Dark Batis could be seen here or not. There’s not a lot of information to go on and we didn’t have cell phone reception to check anything online. Unfortunately we couldn’t stick around any longer. We had to be back in Dar to catch a flight to Ghana. We decided to just hit the road!

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We knew we didn’t want to go out the same road we had come in on (seriously, go read about how we almost flipped our truck getting here.) Luckily there was another way out of town and Samson, the forestry manager, recommended we go that way saying “the road is better.” Well as we go to leave suddenly the sandy track we were driving out of the village on became a paved road! Almost the whole way into the Rondo Plateau was paved!!! Let me repeat, PAVED! Google and Maps.me had taken us on road that was part stream, part cliff, part nightmare just because it was shorter. But if you go the long way you get a highway?! This is the kind of information that you’d like to know before you nearly flip your vehicle taking the most dangerous road ever!!

It was another three hour drive, a quick stop over to rooftop camp on the beach, and then another five hour drive before we made it to Dar Es Salaam and checked in to the Marriott (a free stay thanks to Ross’s points from work!) Now we just had a whole checklist of things to get done before we flew to Ghana, the most important of which being that the back doors to our Hilux stopped working. (Legit they stopped opening for no apparent reason.) We just couldn’t get away from these car issues! It was go, go, go while we were in the city crossing things off the list and although the swimming pool was enticing, we were simply too busy to do any relaxing! Luckily, when we were finally able to do some research, it appears that only Reichenow’s Batis should be at the Rondo Plateau and that the female should have a greyish washed breast as our photos show, not a clean rufous breast band as pictured in the book. At least we had seen the #1 target! Now it was time to head to Ghana! Stay tuned!